We've said that Tile Laying can help invoke the feeling of building something or exploring something (in some cases both). How can we as designers use this information in our designs? When should we think to ourselves "hmm, this might be a good place to use a tile laying mechanism"? Is there a building/exploration feeling that would be negatively impacted by tile laying- a situation where tile laying might not work well, even in a type of game that seems to led itself to tile laying?
It seems fairly evident to me that it has a lot to do with the role the "board" plays in the game. For instance, imagine Carcassonne had a fixed board, with a bunch of roads, cities, farms and monastries. You could still play the game a few times as you attempted to discover the optimal placement positions, but essentially it is a puzzle with a fixed solution. So you make the board mutable, thus ensurng that it can't be completely solved during play.
Compare this to a game such as Elfenland in which the structure of the board is fixed, and the tile-laying component doesn't change the routes themselves, but the methods used to pass them.
And at the other end of the scale you get to something like Power Grid, in which the board is crucial to the progress of the game and there can be no random elements involved there at all, in case the carefully balanced system breaks down.
IOW a game with a mutable board is generally one in which the relative values of the board components are functionally similar (albeit different when the interactions are explored.) A game in which you know that location X and location Y should not be adjacent is inevitably not going to lend itself to a tile-laying format.
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It seems fairly evident to me that it has a lot to do with the role the "board" plays in the game. For instance, imagine Carcassonne had a fixed board, with a bunch of roads, cities, farms and monastries. You could still play the game a few times as you attempted to discover the optimal placement positions, but essentially it is a puzzle with a fixed solution. So you make the board mutable, thus ensurng that it can't be completely solved during play.
Compare this to a game such as Elfenland in which the structure of the board is fixed, and the tile-laying component doesn't change the routes themselves, but the methods used to pass them.
And at the other end of the scale you get to something like Power Grid, in which the board is crucial to the progress of the game and there can be no random elements involved there at all, in case the carefully balanced system breaks down.
IOW a game with a mutable board is generally one in which the relative values of the board components are functionally similar (albeit different when the interactions are explored.) A game in which you know that location X and location Y should not be adjacent is inevitably not going to lend itself to a tile-laying format.
An interesting analysis (from what sounds to me like a mathmo's perspective!).
If there are tile elements that cannot be placed together, I do find them annoying. I tend to be a one-track-minded player, and get easily confused. So, if elements X and Y cannot be legally placed adjacent to one another, I find it really annoying to need to remember that. Obviously road/cities/forests/rivers in Carc and its derivatives are easily remembered.
Cheers,
Richard.