Tabletop games are a unique combination of mechanics, components, and theme. The mechanics can range from the overly simplistic to the needlessly complicated. Components can be a simple deck of cards to a 20 pound box of miniatures, boards, cards, and dice. A game can have any theme imaginable, from science fiction to fantasy to super heroes to abstract with no theme at all.
Most game players will naturally gravitate toward a set of specific game aspects. Maybe you really like deck builders, or maybe you get into painting all your miniatures, or maybe you love playing out your favorite movie. There’s a reason Board Game Geek includes so many categories to help people find games similar to ones they already enjoy.
Take a look at your game shelf. I bet you have several of a certain type. Why do you enjoy that particular mechanic or theme? I did just that myself, and today I’ll share what I discovered.
Falling Blocks
One of my favorite video games of all time is Tetris. I grew up with this classic puzzle game on the original Game Boy. My college friends and I spent countless hours honing our skills in The New Tetris on Nintendo 64. In fact, I got so used to creating monosquares and multisquares that I play that way in every other Tetris game even without the added bonuses.
As anyone with a passing familiarity with Tetris knows, the game gets its hooks into you deep. If you play the game enough you will literally see tetrominoes in your dreams; I woke up one night and hurriedly turned on the console to test a new move that had come to me in my sleep. Just Google “i see tetris when i close my eyes” to learn about the very real “Tetris effect.”
So why am I talking about a video game in a tabletop game article? Well, Tetris has spawned a whole set of tabletop game components along with a related game mechanic.
Polyominoes
The tetrominoes in Tetris are an example of a polyomino. Most people know dominoes and probably even tetrominoes. Well, polyominoes are a generalization of those two shapes. A polyomino is any shape formed by placing squares edge to edge. The number of squares in the shape determines the name. So, a domino has two squares and a tetromino has four squares. There are names for polyominoes up through nine squares, but honestly I never hear anyone reference any besides domino and tetromino.
There’s just something fun about playing with polyominoes. Whether the game contains actual physical pieces or just uses the shapes on cards, it’s satisfying to mentally manipulate polyominoes into the configurations you need. I feel like it’s instinctual in humans to enjoy putting these shapes together. There’s a reason Tetris became such a huge phenomenon even with people who never played a video game before.
But polyomino pieces by themselves are just a toy. You need a mechanic to make them into a game. And there’s one mechanic that stands out from the crowd when combined with polyomino components.
Grid Coverage
The grid coverage mechanic requires players to cover all the squares on a grid. The grid can itself be a square or it can be any shape and configuration. Some games focus on this mechanic while other games include it as part of a mixture with other mechanics.
Covering a grid of squares with polyominoes is very closely related to Tetris. Technically, in Tetris you only need to cover one to four horizontal lines at a time, not the entire play area. Tetris rewards being very economic with your piece placement to avoid stacking them too high. Most tabletop games don’t have that type of incentive since the play area doesn’t get wiped out as you play. Instead, you need to place your polyominoes to fill as much space as possible while still leaving enough space for your remaining pieces. If you run out of space to place pieces, then you could wind up sacrificing something, being forced to make a simpler alternative, or even being knocked out.
Another reason I enjoy grid coverage games so much is they tend to use maps as the grid. And I love maps. I used to have fun looking up roads and points of interest in the index of a paper map book and locating it using the grid. I can while away hours panning and zooming on Google Maps. I’ve even gone to museum exhibits about the history of maps. So it’s a definite draw for me to the grids used in these games.
There are many examples of games featuring polyominoes as well as several games that utilize the grid coverage mechanic. There is, predictably, a lot of overlap. I’m going to present to you three shining examples from my own tabletop game collection that exemplify grid coverage with polyominoes.
Cartographers
Cartographers is an outstanding game. It was a 2020 Kennerspiel des Jahres nominee for good reason. The game is part of the Roll Player setting, but I’ve never played any of the other games under that umbrella. And there’s no need, this one is totally enjoyable on its own.
Obviously, as indicated by the name, you take on the role of a cartographer. There’s a little bit more story than that, but it’s all window dressing to the gameplay itself. The game plays out over the four seasons, spring through winter. Each season, two different goals will be scored, so some goals are important early and totally irrelevant later. For each season, you turn over cards until a certain amount of time points has been reached. And that’s when the polyominoes come into the picture.
Each card features a terrain type and a polyomino. The terrain type helps you complete the seasonal goals, such as having farms next to water, a village of a certain size, or having forest in as many rows and columns as possible. The terrain must be drawn on your map in the shape of the polyomino on the card. There are pentominoes, tetrominoes, triominoes, and even dominoes. Some cards offer you a choice of two different polyominoes, with the smaller one not covering as many squares but giving a bonus point.
Each turn, a card is flipped face up. Each player has to draw that polyomino on his or her individual map. This type of game is also called “roll and write,” or in this case “flip and write.” It’s fascinating how different each player’s map is when the game finishes, despite everyone playing with the exact same setup and sequence of cards. Each player will attempt to achieve the various goals in a unique fashion. Do you ignore the smaller alternative polyominoes to cover spaces quicker or do you take the bonus point going forward? Do you focus on the current goals or start working ahead to maximize the later goals?
For a game that has so few components, Cartographers never feels stale. There’s not many cards in the deck, but you draw so few cards each seasons that you can never rely on getting the exact shape or terrain you need even if you memorize the entire deck. The monster cards also throw a curveball, letting an opponent draw a polyomino on your map to screw up your well laid plans. The four goals are different each game as well, forcing you to use a different strategy each time. The maps are double sided, with the obverse side featuring a different initial state.
And, oh man, the maps. Remember I mentioned I love maps? After each game of Cartographers, you have your very own 11×11 map filled with forests, villages, farms, water, monsters, and mountains. Some people even use colored pencils to make the squares pop. You really feel like you accomplished something. There’s even space at the top of each map to write in your cartographer name and title, as well as draw a seal. That part ties into the Roll Player theme. It adds just that little bit of creativity to further invest you in your creation.
Thundeworks Games currently has a Kickstarter for a standalone expansion, Cartographers: Heroes. I won’t lie, I was more excited to back this project than any other game so far (except Automated Alice). The new monsters, new heroes, and new maps all look awesome and promise even more variety to a game that already had more than enough replay value.
Silver & Gold
A game somewhat similar to Cartographers is Silver & Gold, from Pandasaurus Games. The basic flip and write mechanic with polyominoes is the same, but Silver & Gold is definitely its own thing. The theme here is something about buried treasure, but that seems to be playing into the fact you draw a ton of X’s in this game. You don’t collect silver or gold. Instead, you’re filling in polyominoes to complete the shape on each card. Once you fill in all the squares on a card, you score that card and pick a new one.
The game has several unique elements. First, each player is filling in squares on two cards that only that player owns. So, unlike Cartographers and a lot of other roll and write games, the players are not working on identical setups. In fact, you get to choose your initial cards. So if you like to utilize the bonuses some cards provide, then you could try and focus on that. Or you could focus on getting lots of coins or bigger point values that require more squares.
The second unique aspect is how you fill in the polyominoes. Rather than using paper and a pencil or pen, you use a draw erase marker directly on the cards. I’ve never seen another game that has you writing on the cards like this. It’s really neat to mark off a bunch of X’s on each card. It also facilitates the card drafting mechanic, which just wouldn’t work any other way.
Like Cartographers, the deck of polyomino cards is surprisingly thin; there are only eight cards and you only reveal seven each round. That means rounds go by really quick and the whole game is only four rounds. So overall, Silver & Gold plays very fast, including little setup. It actually takes longer to clean up since you have to wipe off each individual card. The scoring at the end can also be a little laborious if you completed a ton of cards. But none of that detracts from the fun this game provides.
My City
I’ve written before that I am a Reiner Knizia fan. It’s actually somewhat hard to avoid playing several of his games once you’ve been into tabletop gaming for a little while. I was pumped to play his game, My City. Not only is it Knizia, not only was it a 2020 Spiel des Jahres nominee, not only is it grid coverage with polyominoes, but it’s a legacy game on top of all that. Now, to be honest, I had never played a legacy game. I was familiar with the notion but was always put off by the thought of a limited number of plays.
Then a friend pointed out that most legacy games include enough plays to equal the number of times you actually play many other non-legacy games. So, sure, you might only get 24 games of My City or Pandemic Legacy, but how many times have you played that super heavy Eurogame that takes four hours for a single play? Plus, My City includes an “infinite” version that you can play over and over after you finish the legacy campaign.
My City functions like a flip and write, but instead of writing on your grid you place a physical polyomino tile on your map. That tactile element really adds to the game. I don’t think I would have enjoyed My City nearly as much if it was just drawing. It also helps to be able to physically manipulate the polyomino to see how it fits. Cartographers, Silver & Gold, and other games let you rotate and flip the polyominoes, but you must do that mentally, which can be a real challenge for some people who aren’t as adept at spatial awareness exercises. Plus, it’s just satisfying to dump out a bunch of polyominoes before the game.
The theme of My City is that you are building a city throughout history. You start with little more than trees, rocks, a river, and open spaces. As you progress through the chapters you unlock all sorts of new items. I won’t delve into any specifics to avoid spoilers, but suffice to say you are playing a much different game in the final chapter than you started in the first chapter. The changes are introduced gradually, and there are even some warnings when things will score cumulatively.
Each chapter has three episodes. At the start of each episode you take off all your polyominoes from the map. Each turn in an episode, a card gets flipped and each player places that polyomino on his or her individual board. Each polyomino also has a color, which plays into some scoring rules. Basically, though, you try to cover as many open spaces and rocks as possible. If you can’t place a piece then you can sacrifice an episode point or just stop playing that episode. The game can get really intense as you run out of open space and need just the right polyomino to come up.
One nice thing with the pieces is you always know what pieces are remaining in the episode. Silver & Gold includes all the polyominoes on the central score card, but each player still has to keep track of which shapes have already come up. You can be a bit more strategic in My City with all the information always available to you.
The legacy aspect tries to even the playing field by helping the losers of each episode and punishing the winner. I only played the campaign two player, and I think it would be better with at least three players. In the two player campaign, the second player does not score any points, as opposed to scoring one point to the winner’s two with more players. That scoring difference means losing a couple games in a row puts you way behind in the overall score. I think it might also be nice to have some way to play a few games before jumping into the legacy game, so everyone can get a full grasp of the mechanics.
More Games
If the grid coverage mechanic or polyomino components sound like a good time to you, then you should check out some other highly rated games below.
Grid coverage mechanic:
- The Castles of Burgundy. This is one of the top rated games of all time. It even helped bring some people into the hobby.
- ClipCut Parks. A truly unique game that has you using scissors to cut off pieces of your board.
- Dollars to Donuts. This one is unique since you can play pieces over the edge of the board.
- Dinosaur Island: Rawr ‘n Write. This one is a roll and write version of Dinosaur Island and is currently offered as part of a Kickstarter with Dinosaur World.
Polyomino components:
- FITS. This one is pretty much a tabletop version of Tetris. It’s also from Reiner Knizia, and was a 2009 Spiel des Jahres Nominee.
- Second Chance. This is Uwe Rosenberg’s foray into polyomino games.
Both grid coverage and polyominoes:
- A Feast for Odin. This is a renowned game that I feel intimidated to try.
- Patchwork. Another renowned game, this one was a 2015 Spiel des Jahres Recommended and 2014 Golden Geek Best Abstract Board Game Winner.
- The Isle of Cats. I heard a lot about this game and it has cats.
- Tiny Towns. This one just recently won the 2020 Origins Awards Game of the Year Winner.
- Blokus. This modern classic was a 2002 Spiel des Jahres Recommended.
- Blokus Duo. And this it the two player version of Blokus.
- Alice’s Garden. This is not yet released, but I can’t wait! I’m a sucker for anything Wonderland.
This article is part of the 2020 Tabletop Writers Diversity Initiative. Use the tags “Tabletop Writers Guild” and “2020 Diversity Initiative” to find more.
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