Match Attach

Place a tile on the board and use maneuvers to make as many matches of the target symbol as you can. You have 5 maneuvers per turn, in which you can rotate, slide, or swap tiles that are Active, meaning ones that have the same color adjacent sides touching. Think carefully about each maneuver though, because any Active Tiles left at the end of your turn will be worth negative points! Play it too safe, and you won’t make enough matches to score big points. Play it too risky, and you might end up losing more points in the process! The player that can think outside the box and attach the most matches will sweep the competition and win this easy to learn, hard to master puzzle game.



How to Play

Skip the rulebook with this video of how to play Match Attach



How Match Attach Came To Be

The original inspiration for Match Attach came from using the magnetic behaviors of opposites-attract and likes-repel to shuttle tiles around the table in a tile placement game. The working title of the game for several months was Magnitis, the Latin word for magnets.

The first major challenge of designing Match Attach was figuring out the rules which would govern maneuvering tiles around the board. Initially, we tried a simple rule: a player may move any tiles with like-colored adjacent edges. That was not descriptive enough. Next we defined 3 Maneuvers: Slide, Swap and Rotate. We over corrected, and made these Maneuvers a bit too restrictive. This made it too hard to plan out your next move. After some months of playtesting, we smoothed out these 3 Maneuvers into what they are today.

The next major challenges were to figure out the end-game and to build a natural progression to the game, where each turn feels new and exciting. We wrestled with this over the months that followed. There were so many things we tried. We tried adding values to the edges, drawing lines to on the cards such that players could create paths for extra points, and adding symbols to some tiles that would give you additional Maneuvers.

Those attempts led to the Advent Tiles as they exist today. The mechanic of Advent Tiles that makes players remove tiles from the board not only added both a progression to the game, but also provided a satisfying end to the game.

Designing, developing, and producing Match Attach has been an adventure in game design! We designed a game that is made up of entirely icons, and even so, it still has a depth and complexity that draws players in for a 45 minute game that feels like only 15 minutes. We hope that players find Match Attach challenging, interesting, and engaging.