Octopath

Octopath is a tile laying, road building and discovery game for two or more players. Players control crews of dwarves operating in an unexplored part of the country. The dwarves build roadways on the valley floors, and mine the mountains, following rumours of great wealth to be found: emeralds, sapphires, rubies and gold. But not all mountains have a source of wealth. Some have mines which initially look promising, but result in dead ends. Others are not suitable for mining at all, and the dwarves just build passes into the next valley.

You try to earn bags of gold by getting your crews to build looping roads that the farmers in the valleys use, and roads that run from one mine to another. But beware, other dwarven crews are also building roads and excavating in the mountains, and they can join their road up with one of your roads to capitalize on your finds, or make one of your roads join two dead ends, losing you money!

There are two types of tiles used in Octopath. Larger octagonal tiles are the valley floors, and are just used to construct roads. Each valley tile has four road sections each with entry/exit points on two of the 8 sides of the octagon. There are 72 tiles consisting of 4 copies of each of 18 different tiles. When placed edge to edge, the road segments join into meandering roads.

Octagonal tiles do not tessellate – when you place four octagonal tiles touching each other, there is a small square space between them. The square spaces represent the mountains, and when the mountains are explored, small mountain tiles are placed in the square spaces. Each mountain tile has four road entry/exit points, one on each side. These may join together to form passes through the mountains, or may lead to a terminus, which is either a mine of a specific type (red = ruby, green = emerald, blue = sapphire, yellow = gold), or a dead end.