Adjacency bonus

It's time to finally put the deck of cards to one side: tiles are the foundation of a burgeoning new genre

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There's a new videogame genre emerging: the tile-synergy game. Think of 2022's Dorfromantik, in which your primary goal is to place tiles so that they synergise with the tiles surrounding them. As you line up matching edges correctly, spawning neighbourhoods, forests, rivers and fields, you're rewarded with points and more tiles. Blunted edges and incomplete quests will see you run out of tiles, and reach game over. This is the essence of the tile synergy game.

Positional bonuses are a familiar element of map-based strategy or management games such as Civilization, and they're a core mechanic in many boardgames, but in videogames this consideration hasn't typically been the central activity. So, what brought about the change?

We expect to see new genres branching off one archetypal game - the Soulslike, the Roguelike, whatever we're agreeing to call the titles riding in Vampire Survivors' slipstream - and it would be easy to imagine a similar origin point here, perhaps the aforementioned Dorfromantik. However, speaking to the developers of new and forthcoming tile-synergy games, we find their inspirations are vastly more varied.