Town 77

The residents of Town 77 — located just down the road from Town 66, mind you — can’t stand it when houses with the same shape or color are lined up with each other. Try to build as many houses as you can while keeping in mind which houses in your hand can be built at the end.

In Town 77, each player has a hand of tiles, with each tile showing one of seven house styles in one of seven colors/patterns. (The color/pattern of a tile also shows on its reverse side.) The game has 49 tiles in total, one of each possible combination. Each player starts with a hand of random tiles.

The first player places a tile in the upper-left corner of an imaginary 7×7 square, then on each subsequent turn a player adds a tile to a row or column in this square so long as this tile is adjacent to at least one other tile and the color/house style isn’t already present in this row and column. After playing a tile, a player can choose to draw a new tile or not. Once you lower your hand size, you can’t increase it again. If you can’t play on a turn, you’re out of the game, and once everyone is out, whoever has the fewest tiles in hand — or who played latest in the event of a tie — wins.

If you play your final tile, you win, but if you don’t draw new tiles, you might find yourself unable to play!