Tiles and the stories they tell
“I’ve always wondered about the ‘Brighton’ Tiles design. It seems to be a clever seashore theme, with many symbolic images representing aspects of the beach — the sun, waves, turtle, shark fin, beach ball, etc. But there are a few that I can’t identify, such as striped squares and a couple with sort of faceted blobs of color. I’d love to know what those are and the inspiration for the tile set.” — Luther R., Chicago From Christina: For those of you who haven’t played Tiles, it’s a visual matching game designed to be relaxing. Each tile is made up of several components, and the goal of the game is to find tiles with matching components. That component will then disappear from those two tiles. In the example below, I started with the tile in the top-left corner (outlined in turquoise) and matched it with another tile that has a castle in it. The castles disappeared, and the next task was to find a tile that had either a blue flower shape, or the same green background as the newly selected tile.
The longer you play, the emptier the board gets. The third image is a board that has been mostly cleared, and you can see how the three elements are layered. Tiles is a peaceful game; there’s no timer, and you don’t lose if you make a mistake. The game does keep track of your matches, though, so you can still maintain a streak of correct tile selections. There are 14 tile sets, each named for a different location that inspired its design. Some locations are cities, and others are neighborhoods or regions. The tile set above is called Tangier, and is one of my personal favorites. I spoke with Robert Vinluan, our product designer who crafted all but two of our tile sets, to hear a little more about the process. Robert told me that some of the images in the Brighton tile set (below) are intentionally abstract, as he didn’t want every element to be representative of an object. Other images not mentioned in the reader’s question are a beach umbrella, flip-flops, T-shirts and a watermelon slice. As far as the “faceted blobs” that the reader mentions, he said that they were largely inspired by terrazzo floors, which was a big interest of his while designing this set. Robert speaks more about his design process for Tiles in this video.
If you’ve played Tiles, do you have a favorite tile set? Along with Tangier, I like to play with the Granada set, which has cute art for different fruits, and the Lisbon set, as I like the colors. Robert told me that Utrecht and Paris are considered hard by Tiles players, and are a bit polarizing. Try them all and see what you think!
Solve Friday’s Crossword on Easy Mode!
For expert hints on today’s puzzle, read the Wordplay column. Were you able to solve the Friday puzzle with Easy Mode? We want your input! Share your experience with us by email. Easy vs. HardIn today’s daily puzzle, 61-Across is clued [Totally missing the big picture]. This clue makes you think about someone who’s hyper-focused on details in the abstract. For Easy Mode, I spelled it out a little more: [Needing to wear glasses while driving, say]
How are we doing? Thanks for playing! Subscribe to New York Times Games. If you were forwarded this newsletter, you can sign up to receive it regularly here. P.S. The answer to Easy vs. Hard is NEARSIGHTED.
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