Tile-laying games have always held a special
place in both my gaming life and my game design career. It was Carcassonne, one
of the best tile-laying games ever made, that first introduced my wife and me
to the board gaming hobby in Germany in 2001. Five years later, it was a
tile-laying prototype of my own called Heartland that impressed my group of
established Berlin game designers enough to encourage me to show it to
publishers, and it was that game that garnered my first contract. I returned to
the genre a few years ago with Citrus, another tile-laying game that has proved
to be my most favorite recent game.
