Re: [piecepack] Re: Dice and tile backs

[Eric Wald <groups@...>]

On Thu, May 19, daniel_ajoy wrote:
> --- In piecepack@yahoogroups.com, "Eric Wald" <groups@...> wrote:
>>
>> However, at least one game, Chariots by Mark A. Biggar, arranges the
>> tiles such that some of the small squares are offset from each other,
>> which would work better with the plain grid.  The checkered pattern also
>> gives away information about tile orientation, which may be relevant for
>> some games.
>
> Are there such games, though. Games in which tile orientation of
> face-down times is relevant.

I was originally thinking about Piece Packing Pirates, but it explicitly
allows you to choose the orientation when you flip up the tile.  So does
Black Thursday, the only other game I've found that has both face-down
and face-up tiles where the orientation of the latter matters.

Alien City's setup requests that you flip tiles over in a way that
preserves orientation, but they really could be laid out face-up in the
first place.  The only real requirement there is that the orientation be
sufficiently random.

There could conceivably be a game that has some special effect when a
token (coin, pawn, or die) had been on the tile's symbol corner when the
tile is revealed, but the physical logistics and memory issues involved
would probably make such a mechanic fail to survive playtesting.  Only
slightly better would be a case where coins are pointing at various
quadrants of the flipped tile; there's a way to flip the tile such that
its symbol stays in the same place, but it's fiddly.

On the other hand, that particular flip is *less* fiddly with checkered
tile backs, because you already know which diagonal has the symbol.
Then again, the reveal is less likely to be fun at 50/50.

If anyone else knows of such a game, please speak up.  I've done a few
searches on "flip" and "turn over" that failed to find anything more
interesting, and scanned several dozen rulesets without finding any
examples, but that doesn't mean that one doesn't exist.

> I ask because it seems that the new designers are adopting the
> checkered pattern for the backs of tiles.

>From a graphic design perspective, it certainly looks nicer.  For the
many games where tiles are simply a rectangular grid, it also makes game
play slightly easier.

The only other type of game likely to be negatively impacted involves
sliding tiles on a half-tile grid.  San Andreas, for example, could be
laid out with a nice checkerboard pattern (with six tiles having a
different orientation than the other seventeen), but that pattern would
be quickly destroyed unless the players rotate tiles to restore it.
Granted, such a pattern breakdown would probably contribute to the
game's theme in that case.

- Eric