acuity
a friend of mine makes board games. which seems like a way cool job. if you can make any money at it. his games tend to be way more creative than most. a recent one is called acuity. there is a pool of square tiles. each corner of a tile has one of four patterns. approximately half of the tiles are laid out in an NxN grid. the rest of the tiles are put in a stack face down. they are turned over one by one. the players try to find the pattern in the grid. each tile is unique. so the trick is to find the tile pattern by overlapping adjacent halves of two tiles. or adjacent corners of four tiles. pretty simple so far. here's the twist. literally. you can turn one of the tiles in the grid 90 degrees. the first player to find the pattern in the grid claims the tile. optionally, makes the rotation. and drops the tile on the grid to prove they found it. then they get to keep the tile. whoever has the most tiles at the end of the game wins. there's one more rule. you can claim the pattern isn't there. the other players have 30 seconds to find it. if they don't then you get the tile. if another player does find it they get the tile plus a penalty tile from your stack. it's kinda fun. the beautiful and talented alisa is pretty good at it. so is b. one of the things i really like about nick's games is there's often an interesting math puzzle. in this case, how big is the grid?