Tile Placement

Kingdom Rush: Rift in Time

Welcome to Kingdom Rush: Rift in Time, where you and your allies must work together to fend off the furious onslaught of the mysterious Time Mage. Command Heroes and build Towers to defend the realm by placing polyomino pieces to attack your enemies and deploying soldiers to hold back the ever-advancing horde. Be careful, though! The Time Mage’s portals are wreaking havoc, causing all of the Towers to warp in and out of existence! Will you play your Towers to defend the Kingdom, or will you pass them to your compatriots so that the Towers can be upgraded? The decision is yours!

Play through a unique campaign to foil the Time Mage’s plan for total domination of the space-time continuum. Each new scenario in the campaign is more challenging than the one before it, introducing formidable foes, game-changing events, and epic bosses to battle! The only way to stop the Time Mage is to close all of their pesky portals but you’ll have to do so while combating wave after wave of their minions. Fight back with unique Heroes, special abilities, and an awesome arsenal of upgradable Towers. The Time Mage will stop at nothing as they try to take over the Kingdom and neither should you - archers ready!

Umbra Via

Just beyond the towering vines lies an ancient pathway into the unknown. Push back the thorn-riddled stocks to discover a clandestine garden, blooming with mysterious vigor. Vivid colors mark the way to intricate tiles zigging and zagging through the green. Within the flowers lies the key to greater meaning. An explanation for all things unknown...

In Umbra Via, players compete to control and complete the most cunning paths. Reach into your bag to select wooden flowers, then place them on your secret board in the order of the paths you want most. But when players reveal their choices, things get delightfully tricky. Experience the magic of Umbra Via and find out why this award-winning design belongs on any table.

In more detail, at the start of each round four tiles are revealed from the deck, with each tile showing part of a path, e.g., a straight line, a curve, or a T. Players secretly draw three cubes from their bag and place them on spaces on their personal board corresponding to these tiles. They all reveal their choices, move their cubes to the chosen tiles, then secretly place three more cubes, then move those cubes to the tiles. Whichever tile ends up with the fewest cubes on it is placed in the 4x4 grid first, maintaining the same orientation, by the player who bid the most cubes on that tile. (Some cubes in your bag are worth two cubes during the bidding phase, but are then removed from the tile and returned to your bag prior to placement.) Then the next tile is placed on the grid, and so on.

When you place a tile, if all the "open" ends of that path are cut off — whether by the edge of the board or other tiles — you count how many cubes each player has on the path. The player with the most placed cubes retrieves "double-bidding" cubes from the reserve equal to the number of tiles in the path, adding these cubes and all other cubes to their bag. The player with the secondmost cubes on the path retrieves half this many "double-bidding" cubes, and so on. After removing and returning all the cubes on this path, remove the tiles from the grid, placing them in a discard pile.

As soon as a player has retrieved all of their "double-bidding" cubes from the reserve, they win!

Bonfire

The bonfires are sources of light, energy and warmth created by the guardians of light in order to brighten the cities on the otherwise dark planet. The residents of the cities however, took the bonfires for granted and exploited them for their personal gain. Disappointed the guardians of light retreated and let the bonfires extinguish. The citizens could no longer live in the now dark cities and were forced to leave.

You are a group of gnomes living close to the cities and you also need and the light of the bonfires. Missing it now, you try yourself to visit the cities and learn how to ignite the bonfires once again: You must visit the guardians of light on their holy islands and ask for tasks to prove your good will. For each completed task, they will re-ignite one extinguished bonfire. Whoever manages to earn the greatest trust from the guardians and manages to brighten their city the most will win the game.

The engine for Bonfire are the three-coloured tiles you will be puzzling onto your player board. When you manage to place the same colours adjacent to one another, you will receive more action tiles of that specific kind. This will allow you to specialize in certain types of actions and pursue different strategies.
You can use the tiles to perform the following actions:
- Move your ship to an island
- Receive a task from an island by spending two resources
- Invite a guardian of light into your city
- Trigger a procession of guardians through your city and gain resources.
- Add a landscape tile to your city (this is where the processions take place)
- Recruit a gnome gaining a special ability or victory points
- Find support by the last bonfire, gaining portals, resources or action tiles

You will play in turn order until a fixed number of tasks has been solved, after which each player has 5 more turns. During final scoring, you will receive points for your completed tasks (the bonfires) and any improvements made there (portals, landscapes or guardians).

—description from publisher

The Castles of Tuscany

The beautiful Tuscany region, in the 15th century, is the home of the Italian Renaissance. As influential princes, the players make creative decisions to build their region into a flourishing domain.

By supporting towns, villages, and monasteries, or by extracting marble and delivering goods, players see their lands grow, earning them victory points. Each round, players use cards to place useful tiles to expand their regions and gain new opportunities.

The winner is the person who has the most victory points after three rounds of play.

NOTE: The English edition of the rules for the Castles of Tuscany have some translation and design issues, making it slightly harder than typical to learn how to play this introductory Feld game. Some smaller issues have been observed in other languages complicating a simple resolution of questions. A community FAQ is available here to provide some clarity and is highly recommended for first time players.

Seikatsu: A Pet's Life

In Seikatsu, players take turns placing tiles into a shared garden area, with each tile showing a colored flower and colored bird. Players score for groups of birds as they place them, but they score for rows of flowers only at the end of the game and only for the rows of flowers that exist from their perspective, i.e., that are viewable as lines from where they sit at the game board.

Seikatsu: A Pet's Life features the same gameplay as Seikatsu, but with players placing tiles that show pets sitting on pillows instead of birds resting on flowers.