Boardgame mechanics: tile placement

Today, we're going to take a look at tile placement.While a lot of games use this for map building, there are also some that use it for territory control. The most popular tile shapes are hexagonal and square, as those are space filling shapes. There are a few games that use other shapes as well, though they are a minority.
 

This is one more chance to visit Keyflower. Each player ends up building their own village from the tiles.  Other players can use your buildings, but that grants an advantage in future turns. Tiles are auctioned in this game.The below shows a four player game underway.

Tigris and Euphrates uses tiles to represent rising and falling civilizations, as well as support for factional leaders. Tiles are randomly drawn here.

Suburbia has a market to purchase tiles, which represent a very SimCity type abstraction. Certain tiles will trigger effects in others inherently, others through adjacency. This player has a lot of industry. There's a semirandom set of stacks for each of the three phases of the game.

Galaxy Trucker uses randomly drawn(1 at a time) tiles to build ships that well, are going to fall apart. The real question is how badly. Can you get to the finish line with your ship? While the game has 3 heats officially, there's a good experience in one race.

Taluva uses tiles to build a single  volcanic island that players are vying for control of . The tiles even have volcanoes that enable the game to be built up, which allows more building types. Tiles are randomly drawn, and are also tri-hexes.

Escape: The Curse of the Temple uses tiles in real time(the game takes 10 minutes once setup) as exploration sites. The players have to work together to move, find jewels, and the way out. Tiles are drawn from a semirandom setup.

And in Between Two Cities, players are drafting tiles and build a city with each neighbor. The initial draw for two of the rounds is random, and the middle phase is  draw three, play one in each of your  cities. Yes, the players are sitting between the cities. This is a feature of the game, not a bug.

There are a lot of other games with tile laying out there, some simpler, and some certainly more popular. These are some of the more interesting ones I've come across. This is without going into the giant mess that would look too much alike for most of 4x games with hexes.

When you play Social Justice, the world loses.