You wouldn't necessarily guess it from the title or the very plain-looking box but Segongsa is an easy-to-play family-friendly tile placement game that's themed around jewellery-making. It's published by Magic Bean Game Studio.
Segongsa is played using equilateral triangular tiles that have a brightly coloured jewel fragment at each 60º vertex. There are six different jewel types, distinguished only by colour - so this is not a game for those suffering from colourblindness. The 2-4 players draw two tiles from a bag, choose one to place out in front of them to start their individual tableau and keep the other concealed in their hand. Each turn, players will draw a tile and play a tile. When you play a tile you have to lay it adjacent to one already in your tableau and your aim is to complete jewels (ie: have six identical fragments joined together). The completed jewels score a the end of the game but they give an immediate bonus of a 'skill' tile. There are eight of these: three let you draw and immediately place two extra jewel fragments tiles; three let you draw and place one extra jewel fragment tile; and two skill tiles let you steal a jewel fragment tile from another player - tho' not from one of their already completed jewels.
Tho' the game is super simple, the jewels all have different scoring values that correspond inversely to the frequency in which their jewel fragment appears on a tile. So, for example, Amethysts, with 90 fragments among the 112 tiles, are worth just 1 point, rising to Diamonds, with only 18 fragments in total, scoring 6 points. That means there are push-your-luck decisions to be taken over whether you go for quickly completed low-scoring jewels and seize the best of the skill tiles or whether you hold out to try to form higher scoring jewels. In our plays at Board's Eye View, we found players tended to go for Rubies - worth 5 points each, so almost as much as a Diamond but with much greater frequency (51, but there are several double Ruby tiles so there aren't 51 different tiles with Ruby fragments on them). Emeralds score 4 points; their fragments are all on separate tiles but there are only 39 of them - so fewer than the number of tiles with Rubies, even taking account of the harder-to-place double-Ruby tiles. You aren't allowed to collect more than one skill tile on a turn, so you can't benefit from cascading your gem completions.
Segongsa is a game where players can mostly focus on their own tableaus because there will just be two 'take that' (steal a tile) actions available for the entire duration of the game. Still, you'll need to keep an eye on what tiles are out on other players' tableaus so you can work out what may be diminishing odds of you drawing the specific fragments you need to complete your gems. The game plays quickly at all player counts (most of our plays clocked out at around 15 minutes) so Segongsa makes for a light filler as well as a family game.
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