Square Valley

Absolutely adore this game. I love figuring out my strategies for each set of tiles and tiles, and can’t help but go back to try to improve my score in ever single level. Every single tile has little ways you can squeeze every last point out of it, and when you manage to get a high score with an aesthetically pleasing map, the feeling is wonderful. As frustrating as it was adjusting to plateaus and islands, it was even more satisfying when I finally got it down. Only possible complaints aside from wanting more levels are that the randomness of the tile options and spaces can sometimes just give you the finger. Part of it is not drawing out the levels for too long, sure. The more tiles you have placed the more likely you’ll be blocked. But sometimes the game just gives you a dozen occupied spaces, a singular open space, and a pair of tiles that will only penalize your points. But it’s part of the game, and I just kind of learned to roll with it. Sometimes your attempt just doesn’t play out. But seriously. More levels. They don’t even need to be new content. Just mix and match and cookie-cutter with the old tile sets you already have, and give me more levels to get high scores in. So many of the cool concepts are only used once, and both sandbox and the daily challenge feel so unsatisfying in comparison to seeing your high score recorded permanently.

Love this game, really thoughtfully done. Creative and satisfying puzzle. Initially I was going to suggest some type of real time scoring, with values going up or down with each placement, but after thinking it through that would just make each turn a boring round of trial and error. What would be nice for replay is a record of your personal stats on each level. I find myself wanting to try a level again to see if I can improve, but by the time my new score rolls around I forget what my last score was. Would be fun to have refer to personal stats for each level like: Attempt 1: score, highest value placement, lowest value placement, most used tile Attempt 2: score, etc… I’d also be interested in a board game version of this. Would need to be able to use your phone to calculate the scores (scoring Carcassonne is hard enough I can’t imagine this), but would be pretty great if you could figure it out. It’d be a fun programming challenge I think.

I love how every puzzle give the player a randomly generated map with a target score and it's own set of tiles. So every time you replay that same puzzle, the order the tiles show up and exactly where on the map you can place them will be different, the special parameters of that unique puzzle will feel somewhat familiar. I also like while it's easy to see it as something akin to Solo Carcassonne, that isn't quite accurate. Unlike Carcassonne there really is no equivalent to completing a road or a castle wall, it's more that every different tile in this game has its own scoring rules (like, "...it needs to connect to a road but no other tile of its same type can be in the same column...") and you're tasked with trying to place every tile so they all score as much as possible.