Components: Polyominoes

Not long from now, the world as we know it is an overgrown memory — and though the world has changed, we've changed with it, using anything we can find to build a new way of living.

Life in Reterra is a (re)building game, and it's up to each player to build a community of their own. To set up, choose one of three ready-to-play themed building sets, or put together a set of your own. Each set consists of five building cards, with associated building tiles for each card.

Each player starts with one square land tile in play. Each land tile is divided into a 2x2 grid, with one of five types of terrain in each grid space; a space might also hold a gear icon or one of four types of relics. Players also have three land tiles in hand, and five land tiles are displayed face up.

On a turn, choose a land tile from your hand or the display, then add it to your community, which can be at most four tiles on each side. When the tile has a gear, you can either place an inhabitant from the reserve on this gear or place a building tile in your community...but each part of the building must be supported by a gear and all of these gears must be on the same type of terrain.

After you have a building in play, you gain the power of the building card and can use it once on each of your subsequent turns. Maybe you can place relic tokens for additional points, place additional inhabitants, junk an opponent's relics, or score for building large sections of a terrain or having more of a building than anyone else.

Once everyone has sixteen tiles in their community, players score for what they've built, earning points for blocks of terrain of at least seven spaces, surrounded energy sources (which are a special type of tile), inhabitants, relics, and buildings.

Our planet has run out of resources, and we are forced to move. We have discovered a series of planets and sent our rovers to test their environment with the hope of colonization. Our rovers have confirmed 1-6 viable colonization options.

Planet Unknown is a competitive game for 1-6 players in which players attempt to develop the best planet. Each round, each player places one polyomino-shaped, dual-resource tile on their planet. Each resource represents the infrastructure needed to support life on the planet. Every tile placement is important to cover your planet efficiently and also to build up your planet's engine. After placing the tile, players do two actions associated with the two infrastructure types on the tile. Some tile placements trigger "meteors" that make all planets harder to develop and prevent them from scoring points in the meteor's row and column.

Planet Unknown innovates on the popular polyomino trend by allowing simultaneous, yet strategic turn-based play via the Lazy S.U.S.A.N. space station in the center of the table.

—description from the publisher

In the tile-laying family game Tipperary, players are challenged to create their perfect vision of an Irish county by placing polyominoes and thus collecting sheep, castles and whiskey. The linchpin is a 'magical stone circle", that decides which of the tiles you can choose from. After twelve rounds, one player will be named chief of Tipperary.

Lookout threw in some cute animeeples - sheep, sheep, hurra!

It's a wild frontier out there in Wild Tiled West, and only the canniest critters will have what it takes to claim it!

Draft tiles to build new towns across the prairie and help your settlement grow. Defend your citizens from no-good-rotten outlaws. Strike it rich in the mines, or risk it all at the card table!

The West is wilder than ever! And it'll take clever strategy and a bit of luck to come out on top! Saddle up and ride off into the Wild Tiled West!

You are the leader of a prehistoric tribe, deciding which members of your tribe go hunting and what prey they want to catch. To guide you, the Elders have created challenges that you can complete by painting on the wall of your cave.

Each round in Prehistories, you and your fellow tribe leaders bid simultaneously (and secretly) to decide who hunts where. The more hunters you have, the bigger the game you can catch, but the slower you are. The fastest player — that is, the one with the smallest sum of hunters — goes first, but they have few hunters with which to hunt. To hunt, you assign your hunters to one or more locations to catch the prey waiting there. Prey is represented by polyomino tiles, and the larger the tile, the higher the sum required. If you have just enough hunters to catch your prey, they might be wounded in the process, which means you'll draw fewer hunter cards at the end of the round to refill your hand. (They distrust your leadership when you get them injured!)

In the second phase of a round, you paint your cave with the animal tiles collected during the hunting phase. Your cave is represented by a 7x7 grid that starts with a few tiles already in place. The first tile you place goes in the left-hand column, and all subsequent tiles must touch tiles already placed, with all tiles being oriented so that the animals are viewed with their legs (or fins) down. (Cavemen have simple tastes and want everything to be representational.)

When you fulfill the wishes of the Elders by painting your cave in certain ways — such as completing a horizontal line or connecting opposing corners or surrounding a legendary animal on all sides — you place one or more totem tokens on that challenge. Whoever first discards their eight totem tokens wins.