Under the Leaves is what I like to call a “state function” game. What this means is that every time you make a move you need to reevaluate the overall equilibrium of your board or game state. Don’t get mad at me thermodynamics nerds, I don’t know what I’m talking about. It’s perfectly fine, and if you’re looking for a cozy, if familiar, tile laying experience, you’ll find a lot to like here.

Place the tiles

On your turn, you select a tile from a market of 3. You have to place it within your personal tile grid, and there are blissfully few rules for placement, other than preserving the overall grid-y-ness of the whole thing. There are five different terrain possibilities (ok, one of them is ponds, which aren’t technically terrains in game parlance), and you’re trying to make different configurations to score some points.

So, you place the tile, and then you check and see if your state function updates. The rulebook suggests that you follow this order: bees, hummingbirds, green card, blue card, brown card. Works for me.

Whenever you make a new contiguous group of three or more of the same terrain type, you get to add a bee meeple to it. On top of this, if you have other separate groups of tiles of the same terrain type, you get to add another bee meeple to those too. More meeples equals more points, so get as many as you can.

Hummingbirds show up if an individual tile’s terrains are filled by other meeples. They have another puzzle too, where you want to get them in lines of three, because they’ll multiply themselves if you do.

The cards are basically puzzle rules similar to Cascadia, where you get rewards for creating specific patterns and configurations.

Get the points

Once everyone has placed their thirteenth tile, the game is over. You get one point for every meeple you have on your tile puzzle, and there is a majority competition for each of the meeple types, which scores two points if you win or tie.

That’s pretty much it. The game is well-machined and engineered, as you would expect from this design duo, though it continues the irritating trend of placing artificial competition and interaction in a game that doesn’t really call for it. There’s no need for majority competitions when you don’t have any sort of market to manipulate, and the tiles come out in a random flop. In puzzles that are this multilayered and complex, it’s unnecessary grit that adds very little to the experience.

I’ve played about a zillion games of this type, and this one fits the bill if you’re looking for a tile-layer solo puzzler in the milieu of The Tree Lined Avenue, Cascadia, Planet Unknown, Project L, or Calico. Enjoy the meeples.