Color Guard

Color Guard is a tile placing game that is played on a 6x6 board. All 36 spaces are connected with lines of different values.

There are 42 tiles as playing pieces. They all have the same back, but the front shows one of 6 different colors.

Each turn, a player can place up to 3 tiles on the board and refills his hand to 3 tiles again. The tile placement starts in the center of the board and develops to the edges, where the most points can be collected.

There are 4 tile placement rules, which make this game very playable. But what makes this game brilliant is the fact, that it includes 6 tiles more than needed (42 tiles for a 36 space board!). Thus, hoarding tiles of a single color to make secure points in the edges is not a good winning strategy.

Color Guard, Stronghold, Tower 6, and Where To? are 4 games designed by Ronald Corn in the 1980s that never found a publisher. They all had interesting mechanics and/or inventive victory conditions - but they had no theme! Since they were not pure abstract games (they used dice, cards, or tiles as random elements), this lack of a good theme could have been the main reason why they were never published.