Tiletum

For me, this is approaching top-tier; in the same league as Voyages of Marco Polo, Lorenzo il Magnifico, Grand Austria Hotel and Castles of Burgundy!

Tiletum is a very open, point salad, efficiency puzzle but with very satisfying game play. As long as you can look past the beige colour palette and 'theme', this is worth a try.

The primary design focus seemed to be, ‘how could we build a feel-good game. focused on combos?’ Well, these veteran designers very much pulled that off.

The in-game cost of this focus is the potential for AP. There are meaningful choices and extended turns can have opponents waiting for players to decide what to do and complete their turns. Considering that, this might be best at lower player counts.

Haven't won a single game yet, even though i learnt the rules and explained everything. Gonna have to play at least 10 times before changing the rating. Don't mind of losing as long as it's a fun experience. It's my fault because two powerhouse designers' product can't be bad. -update 04/2024: the king track or whatever it's called is annoying

IMO, the second best Board & Dice 'T' game after Tawantinsuyu. A solid action selection game with enough variable setup options to keep things fresh. A fairly simple teach, but enough room to make some interesting choices/planning. A few things hold this back for me after a handful of plays. One is the graphic design - I usually don't mind the sort of 'beige euro' style, but in this case it actually detracts from the gameplay. Certain icons on the map are too small, dice and resource colors are hard to tell apart at a glance in some cases, there's a lot of reaching across the table to check bonus/character tiles since they have lots of tiny iconography, etc. The second is that there's no real 'new' hook - it very much feels like a refinement of a bunch of games in the same series that came before, which is fine, but if you own something like Tekhenu or Tabbanusi I don't really see why you would need this too. As for player count / time, I thought it played equally well from 2-4. I'm not a solo player so I can't comment on that front. Timewise, I think 60-100 minutes that the publisher has suggested is on the high end - with two players, even with a teach, I think you can reasonably expect to finish the game in under 50 minutes.

It just felt... off. The king's action & related track felt very out of place. I feel like there is a really great game at the core, but it just feels like it didn't get that last bit of of development that would've made it great. I also don't really like the game arc - the game accelerates and then completely decelerates toward the end, which is a little anticlimactic. I like wheel action selection, I like dice drafting, I like point salads... but I just don't find this game has a 'finished' feel to me. The dry theming & art really necessitates excellent gameplay and I just don't feel this game has it.

1 play / 4 players

LIKE: It's a game of converting resources to points by completing "contracts" or using actions to capture bonuses and optimize turns. I like these types of games. I also liked how the warehouse limited what bonuses a player could pick up, even though these tiles could be moved at almost any time. I liked the map interaction a lot, to me this greatly adds some much needed interaction, along with the dice action selection.

DISLIKE: The lack of player aids was a terrible, terrible choice. Also, the blue dice did not match the anvil resource, so it added much confusion to a couple players. A couple players also felt the game went on for one round too long, especially felt at the 4 player count. I can feel that as well. The board was also too big, a smaller board could have been sufficient.

OVERALL: I like the game, it's solid. Not as "great" as other games, I felt some similarities with Voyages of Marco Polo and Lorenzo il Magnifico, both I still enjoy more than Tiletum. I felt this is due to long AP combinatory player turns. This is not a "take-one-action" type of game, it's a "take-a-big-combination-of-actions" type of game. We also felt, maybe, possibly, 3 rounds would have been enough to play the game, but this is untested and a possible personal bias (I do like shorter, streamlined games). I would highly recommend printing out a player aid.

Similar games: Praga Caput Regni, Voyages of Marco Polo, Lorenzo Il Magifico

The T series is really losing its magic, unfortunately. This isn't a bad game, just kinda bland and not too fun.

A delightful Euro that has all the hallmarks of that label: tight actions, a variety of ways to score, push around each other with plausible deniability intermediates, mechanical depth to explore, and a theme that is dull (and more kindly nonsensical). I loved it.

Tiletum has a lot of good things going on. A great duo of designers (Tascini and Luciani); multi-use dice (determining action strength, number and type of resources); moving around on a map of medieval Europe, where you build different types of constructions (houses and pillars for future cathedrals); variable scoring conditions. Last but not least, it offers so many possibilities of triggering combos that one cannot help but be reminded of Castles of Burgundy. Besides the main action, whose strength is higher the lower the value of the die you use for it is, you have no limit on the number of tasks you can do on your turn. Coupled with the fact that there are multiple ways of gaining bonus tiles - many of which offer in turn additional actions – and you can see why in Tiletum you can pull off some amazing turns.

There are lots of understated design touches that make Tiletum a great game. Take the map for instance. It has so many spaces that it would not be feasible for a player to travel around it, to the locations where they must be with their merchant or where they must have placed a house in order to take advantage of the scoring that occurs during the fair (those locations change from game to game). But the game offers ways of getting around that difficulty. Placing crests on your player board gives you several options, 2 of which are relevant here: being able to move your merchant anywhere on the map, and being able to construct a house anywhere you want, even if the merchant is not there (which is otherwise a necessary condition in order to do that task). It’s a great way of solving a potential issue that does not require giving up on having a lot of places that can be visited by the players.

Another great design choice was interlocking several actions. You need to take and subsequently fulfill contracts in order to gain access to pillars (which are placed with a separate action involving the architect). You need character tiles in order to unlock new houses (which are then placed with the merchant). This makes Tiletum feel cohesive.