Tangrams in a tile-laying game!

In 🌇Tangram City, your job is to construct a harmonic city, made up of equal parts of red buildings 🏠 and green parks 🌳. It is a tile-laying game for 1-5 players, but instead of the usual polyomino shapes, you get a tangram puzzle - using all kinds of weirdly shaped polygons made up of smaller and bigger triangles.

Tangram City is really easy to understand, so it's at a perfect gateway-level difficulty. Players all get a set of tiles that they'll place on their personal board during the game. Each turn, cards will dictate what tile has to be placed by everyone. The twist is that there might be face up and face down cards on the table, plus players also get a card each: 👉This means you have some information about what's coming, but there are also some unknown tiles you cannot really plan for. Regardless of player count, 4 cards will be played each round.

At the end of each round you will score your biggest rectangle made up of complete squares, so your primary focus is to effectively expand this rectangle area - 🧐 which is made hard by the highly irregular shapes. Each round you also get to place a small triangular fountain ⛲ that is essential to fill up some holes you might have in your city.

The other aspect you have to watch out for is the balance ⚖️ of red and green tiles. You see, each tile is double sided (red-green), so you decide which side to place. ☝️ But as shapes are mirrored on the other side, it's not always easy to build the colors you want. It's not too punishing though, as you only score this balance at the very end of the game, after the 5th round.

Tangram City doesn't reinvent the genre, but it's definitely a fun title to consider if you are looking for gateway games, or you like tile-laying in general. 🙂 The main change and essence in the game is using these weird shapes that you don't normally see in other games, so you need to recalibrate your brain a bit to play efficiently. I also like the cutesy art on all the tiles! 😊