Daniel Solis

Drew Hicks and I have been working on an isometric tile-laying game for the past couple of months in anticipation of the Greater Than Games metagame contest . The contest calls for games where the core mechanism is also the theme, for example Deck Building: the Deck Building Game, where you're actually building a deck for a house. That sort of thing. We're happy to announce that Tile-Laying: the Tile-Laying Game is now ready for public testing! Welcome to the brutal, high-stakes, life-and-death world of archeological restoration internship. Here, rival interns burn their brains reconstructing a tiled Ancient Greek plaza. Place tiles on the two walls and the floor in order to earn the most renown. Whoever earns the most renown wins! It's a two-player game played on a 4x4x3 isometric space with a floor and two walls. Players take turns placing their tile or a blank tile onto the plaza. When a line of eight tiles is complete, whoever has the most tiles on that ...

I just recently finished Monument Valley , the gorgeous and brain-boggling Escher-inspired puzzle game. It's been around for a little bit, but seems to have had a resurgence since it was a free download last week. Naturally, it got me thinking about how we might use rhombuses and isometric grids in a tabletop game. Looking at some existing examples, Rome: City of Marble makes some clever use of these grids and emergent patterns, but Monument Valley has that lovely interaction with implied perspective that I really wanted to capture on the table. The Rocca line of games from Japan is closer to what I wanted to see, but still feels relatively linear compared to Monument Valley's three-dimensional gameplay. All of this converged on two different games I've got on my docket: Tile-Laying: the Tile-Laying Game This is a co-design with Drew Hicks. We're both members of the Game Designers of North Carolina and we got to talking about an upcoming "meta" ...