A Game With Layers of Patterns, and Difficulty

The creator of Tiles explains a game that tests your eye for detail and lets you choose your challenge.

Many who play New York Times games like to push themselves and see how fast or how deep they can get into a puzzle. Tiles is meant to be a relaxing game or one to keep your hands busy while you listen to music or a podcast. This hasn’t stopped players from finding ways to challenge and enrich themselves.

A question we get a lot about Tiles is whether it’s better to have a small or a big combo? The short answer: It depends on what kind of fun you want to have. The long answer: the rest of this article.

A game of Tiles is played on a 5x6 board. Each tile is made of a series of shapes that are layered on top of one another. For any given layer in a tile set, or palette as we sometimes call them, there can be anywhere between six to 12 possible shapes. Each tile is typically composed of three layers, but some sets, like Utrecht and Brighton (sets are named after places), have more. The game generates tiles in pairs so that each shape is guaranteed to have a match.

Because each layer is rendered in order, it helps to get a sense of which shapes are the back layers and which are the front layers. Usually the front layers take up less visual space so they don’t cover up the back layers and make it hard to see what’s happening. When you can break down a tile set into its component shapes in your head and identify where each piece goes, you can scan the board a lot more effectively.

Each tile set is designed to challenge your visual perception in a different way. Some have shapes that overlap to create new ones (Lisbon, Austin). Some use only one color and test your ability to read silhouettes (Hong Kong) while others use only one shape and test your ability to differentiate colors (New Haven). Paris is particularly tricky because the only thing differentiating its shapes is their orientation. Utrecht is a difficult palette because its shapes are designed to blend together so it’s hard to tell what is foreground and what is background. Also, just because one tile set has more layers and shapes than another doesn’t necessarily mean it’s intended to be more difficult, even if it takes more moves to solve.

The standard challenge is to have an unbroken combo. You’ll know that this is the case if the word “perfect” appears on your screen. However, if you want to really push yourself, you can shoot for either the smallest or the biggest possible combo.

To have the smallest combo, you should prioritize getting double or triple matches whenever possible, meaning that you need to identify when two tiles share more than one element. The more of these big matches you can make, the fewer moves you will need to take to complete the puzzle. Tile sets with four layers can have quadruple matches, so look out for those, too. There’s no way to tell what the lower bound is on any given puzzle, because the random generation of the board means that different playthroughs may not always have the same number of double or triple matches.

On the other hand, to get the longest combo possible, you should aim for the fewest number of double or triple matches. Since you still need to identify those matches in order to avoid them, doing so can require as keen an eye as scoring the smallest combo. Unlike the smallest combo, there is an upper bound to the biggest a combo can be. This is achieved by multiplying the number of layers in the tile set by the number of tiles. For most tile sets, this is 90, or 3 times 30. Since you’re matching two tiles with each move, the highest possible combo on a three-layer set would be 45. Palettes that have more layers, like Brighton and Utrecht, have a higher possible maximum.

If you want to make the game even more challenging, you can play Tiles with your own rules. Try a mode I created that I like to call, “Tiles World Tour.” Here’s how it works: Pick five palettes and play through them in a row by using the settings menu to switch when you’ve completed one. The goal is to solve as quickly as possible. You’ll have to keep time, but it’s a fun way to have variety and maybe learn an unfamiliar tile set. You can even create a “course” of five tile sets and challenge your friends and family to see who can beat it the fastest. For added difficulty, try to limit yourself to a perfect combo each time. If you break your combo, you have to start over!

At the end of the day, you can play these games however you like. Whether you want to sharpen your eye, try to solve fast or just zone out while listening to a podcast, that’s cool with us. The most important thing is that you have fun. Happy solving!