August 31, 2025
Pair A Dice Games Corner
Fountains
A sprawling tile-laying game is fun. A tile-laying game that confines your building space is fun. However, what is rarely done is a tile-laying game with tiles that stack and flow together using thick foam tiles. That is what Fountains brings to the table.
In Fountains, your goal is to accumulate the most points from the features of your fountain. On a turn, move one of the tokens — green, blue, white — 1-3 spaces clockwise around the central board, skipping occupied spaces, to land on a space. You then take the top tile next to this token and add it to your board. You can expand out or up or both, but you want to ensure that you have a spout at your highest level and water flowing through all of your lower levels, or else you'll have dead zones that won't score.
Moving a token to the matching colored spot will cause the corresponding feature to score, green for lily pads, blue for pools, and white for fish. If you have most of the said features, you will want to score them more often to accumulate points. But if you don't, you will need to find a way to stop them from scoring while improving your fountain.
Do you take a tile that makes your fountain better, but risks someone scoring lily pads again? Or do you block the lily pad spot with a different token and take that tile instead? These choices of how and where to move a token on your turn, as well as how you will build your fountain, create a subtle strategy to the game that everyone can enjoy.
The game includes a solo mode, where you try to out-score the AI that doesn't care how it fountain looks and just cares about taking all of the tiles it can.
Fountains is a fun and light strategic game that is great for all ages. Will you care about making a balanced fountain with tons of features or focus on just one? Will you take your fountain to new levels or sprawl your pools out wide? Fountains is a must-add to everyone's collection.
