Heúreka
- Board's Eye View
- 2 hours ago
- 2 min read
Named for what Archimedes reputedly exclaimed when he realised that the rise in water when he sat in his bath was equal to the volume of his submerged body (tho' in English we conventionally drop the H), Heúreka is a two-player abstract strategy game (albeit with a solitaire option) where players are placing tiles in a shared 6 x 6 grid so that the colours and symbols on their corners match up domino-style with tiles already in the grid.
The game is designed by Kotori and published by Phantom Labs, and it's essentially an area control and puzzle optimsation game because players place one of their control markers on each tile they place and they add tokens to orthogonally adjacent tiles. The game ends when all 36 tiles have been played into the grid or until there are no more legal placements (the more likely option). Players then score for the tiles on which they have markers.
The additional twist in Heúreka is that not all tiles are of equal value... All the tiles have a number in their centre that represents 2 to powers 1 through 10, and players score the power of each tile; so that a tile with the number 1024 (2^10) is worth 10 times as much as a tile with the number 2 (2^1). It's the very different scoring of the tiles that forces competitive players to jockey for area control and which adds spice to what would otherwise be a very basic domino-style tile-laying game. And as a bonus, there's an educational element because you're bound to leave the table with increased fluency in base 2 exponents.