Tile Placement

Emberleaf

Emberleaf is a competitive card-dancing and tile-placement board game.

As a brave Emberling, your mission is to rebuild your home in the heart of an ancient forest. To succeed, you'll explore the wilderness, gather resources, clear dangerous areas, and construct new homes for your kin. Along the way, you'll recruit heroes into your fellowship, each bringing unique skills that will help empower your team. But beware - space in the forest is limited, and other Emberlings have their own plans.

The game features:

Card Dancing: Place hero cards within your moving grid to activate skills and enhance your fellowship. Slide cards to trigger powerful combinations and charge them at the perfect moment for even greater effects.
Tile Placement: Build vibrant villages to address the diverse needs of your villagers.
Engine Building: Recruit heroes to acquire new skills and empower your existing fellowship.
Resource Management: Navigate the forest, clear dangerous areas, and collect essential resources.

Every decision you make shapes the destiny of your people. Can you rise to the challenge, guide your village to prosperity, and win the heart of your fellow Emberlings?

—description from the publisher

Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game

Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game is a card-driven dice game in which players use special dice to develop their corporations and terraform Mars into a new home for humanity. The dice represent resources that players spend to play cards and perform other actions. During the game, you increase your production of dice, terraform, place cities and greenery tiles on the board, and gain various bonuses. Each turn, you either produce new dice (Production Turn) or perform actions (Action Turn).

Whenever you terraform Mars (raise oxygen or temperature, or place an ocean tile), you gain 2 Victory Points (VP). You can also gain VP for placing tiles and playing cards, as well as winning Awards and Milestones.

The game ends when two of the three global parameters — oxygen/temperature/ocean — have been completed. The player with most VP wins.

HUTAN: Life in the Rainforest

Step into a world of wonder and natural splendor with HUTAN: Life in the Rainforest, an immersive family game inspired by the Indonesian word for rainforest.

In HUTAN, all players have their own rainforest patch where they will plant sprouts and flowers that over time grow into towering trees. When a habitat is created, an iconic forest animal arrives: the orangutan, the sumatran tiger, the rhinoceros hornbill, the cassowary, or the sumatran rhino.

HUTAN plays over nine rounds, and all players have two turns each round. On your turn, you take a flower card from the shared market pool and place the flowers into your rainforest. If you place a flower on top of a matching flower, you grow a tree. When an area is completed with trees, the last tree is replaced by an animal.

At the end of the game, the player who grew the best rainforest and attracted the most animals will score the most points and win.

—description from the publisher

Undergrove

For over 300 million years, trees have traded nutrients with fungi in a vast underground network. Scientists continue to make new discoveries about this hidden world.

In Undergrove, you are a towering evergreen with an ancient symbiotic connection to the fungi in your forest. As new mushrooms appear, your options expand for converting nutrients and helping your seedlings. Using cube conversion, tile placement, area control, and a tiny bit of engine building, you’ll need to claim the most advantageous locations and optimize your actions to leave the best legacy in the forest. The player with the greatest number of successful seedlings, wins!

● Build a shared forest containing mushrooms with diverse abilities.
● Trade with the mushrooms to get resources based on the partnerships you’ve made.
● Place your seedings in the most advantageous positions to score the most points.

Inspired by real mycorrhizal trading networks. Shape the destiny of your forest with every decision!

-description from publisher

Harmonies

In Harmonies, build landscapes by placing colored tokens and create habitats for your animals. To earn the most points and win the game, incorporate the habitats in your landscapes wisely and have as many animals as you can settle there.

Starting with the first player and proceeding clockwise, each player will choose a set of 3 terrain tokens from the central area to place on their personal board. They may optionally choose an Animal card from the 5 displayed and/or place an Animal cube from their Animal card(s) on any completed patterns on their board that match their personal Animal cards. There is a 4-card limit per player. After their turn, refill with a new set of 3 tokens and a new Animal card if needed.

Placement of the terrain tokens will depend on the personal Animal card goals, and scoring rules for the various terrain types (mountain, field, forest, etc). For example, mountain tiles score based on how high they are (1 tile scores 1, while 3 tiles stacked score 7), but the mountain scores zero if it is not adjacent to at least one other mountain. If all the cubes on a given Animal card have been placed, the card is set aside and a new card can be drawn. The cards are scored at game end based on the highest number that isn't covered by a cube.

The games ends when there are no tokens left in the bag to refill the central area, or at least one players has 2 or fewer empty spaces on their player board. Play continues until all players have had an equal turn that round. The player with the highest points is the winner.

Optionally, you can use Nature's Spirit cards for richer gameplay. During setup, each player chooses 1 of 2 spirit cards and places a Spirit cube on the card. They follow the same placement rules as Animal cards, but tend to have an ongoing effect once completed. The spirit card does count towards the 4-card hand limit.