Day 13

I find tile-laying games inherently satisfying. You physically create and build something as if you were playing with wooden blocks - but somewhat more mature 😅. The spatial factor and adjacency rules of tiles open doors to so many possibilities. 🤩 There are an infinite number of things you can do with tile-laying! We celebrate this mechanic with door 13 of our MechanXmas calendar.

And the game we choose to cover is 🌍 Planet Unknown , a polyomino tile-laying game. Polyomino games really focus on the spatial aspect by using tetris-shaped tiles to fill up your board.

In Planet Unknown you have the usual rules of placing tiles into your grid, trying to fill it up completely as best as you can, because only full rows and columns are scored. There are a ton of wonderful additions though. Some tiles have meteors on them, which you have to collect with your rovers, else they block rows and columns from scoring. There are also a bunch of asymmetric planet boards with some fun unique rules that greatly impact your playstyle.

The most important addition are corporation boards. As you place tiles you get to go up tracks of the matching colors. These all give different bonuses like scoring cards, little forest patches to fill up empty spots, rover movement or passive upgrades. This makes the game so much more fun and filled to the brim with decisions, but at the same time not really slowing it down. I just love it so much. 😍 I think the sci-fi theme of colonizing planets is superb!

There are so many games to get honourable mentions here. Just to name a few: Carcassonne, one of the most well-known; Patchwork, another great polyomino game for 2p; Suburbia, in which you build a city by placing hex tiles - lots of adjacency bonuses and penalties; Feast for Odin, a worker placement game where tile-laying is absolutely crucial.

❓ What is your favorite tile-laying game?