Hold and fold: Isles & Tiles

Your island, your deck, your destiny: forge a utopia one hexagon at a time.

‣ Isles & Tiles
From: Birdworks
Platforms: PC
Release: August 2025
Genre: Tile Puzzle City Builder
Steam Page • Developer Site
Demo Video • 10 Minute Video

[This week’s article was written by Grant Wilson, an Oxford-based teacher, esports coach, and student mentor from South Africa. He spends his time between the classroom and esports suite, helping young people understand the psychology of gameplay and applying academic research. All fuelled by strong coffee and a passion for learning! Look out for his upcoming article on peripheral perception on Ready Scholar One and @readyscholarone.bsky.social. Follow him on Substack.]

Like Helios forging a new land, you’ll rise an island out of the depths to create a perfect, little tiled utopia. This is no small feat, but the challenge is compelling and surprisingly relaxing.

That’s as long as you don’t let hubris cloud your judgment. Build your colony using the cards dealt to you to in Isles & Tiles, a cosy tile-based puzzle game.

The gameplay loop is a spatial puzzle. Each level has a specific objective, such as placing 60 tiles or generating 10 gold coins. To beat the level, you must meet its objective. But run out of mana gems and you lose.

You start a game with a hand of cards. Every turn, you can add a new card from a selection drawn from your deck. The cards represent land tiles, buildings, or special abilities. Playing a card lets you do something: place land, erect a building, or use a special ability, such as changing a tile type.

Every card costs something to play. Placing a land tile costs 5 gems. A house costs 5 wood and stone each. Once you placed a land tile, you can put a compatible building on top of it and harvest resources from it. Mines need mountains, homes go onto grass patches, and lumberyards need adjacent forests tiles, and so on.

Generating resources is the key to winning. A church is expensive to build, but it will generate more gems. An archery increases the size of your hand. A well gives you more cards to select. You’ll need lumber, stone, food, gold, people, and gems, each generates by a different building.

This is where the strategy comes in: placing land and erecting buildings to help you afford playing future cards. With some foresight and luck you get the right cards and play them, unlocking resources and exploiting combos so you can slowly expand your settlement.

But if you cannot play the cards that help your strategy, you may soon start getting too few resources or be forced to discard cards and make space in your hand.

Each run of the game is different. You don’t know what cards you’ll get or tiles you’ll start with. In between rounds, you can use victory points to unlock new buildings and abilities, permanently adding them to stack things in your favour.

During a run, you also find powerful artefacts that can alter the game’s rules. For example, the Peasant’s Bath artefact gives you an additional population and Onions reduces all food costs. These elements keep the gameplay fresh, altering the challenge level and changing with every session.

📽 Demo Snapshot: Phew! Just in time!

Yet, for all the strategy this is still a relaxing game. It has a laid-back sensibility, supported by a soundtrack of soothing melodies. The colours are bright and vibrant, and the art looks very homely.

Isles & Tiles blends the genres of deckbuilding, terraforming and hexagon grids into an engaging and satisfying spatial puzzle. Sometimes, you are on a streak. Other times, you wait impatiently for a card to show up or grumble when you have to choose between a house and a market because you don’t have enough to go around.

Simple, yet it has the kind of depth that keeps you engaged. If you felt your deck-building lacked some strategic tile gameplay, check out the demo of Isles & Tiles.

Isles & Tiles is set for release in August 2025 on Steam.

This review was written by Grant Wilson from Ready Scholar One:

Explore The Game with Youtube Chapters:

• 📽 0:48 Let’s make a big Island!

• 📽 2:24 My first home

• 📽 7:05 My first mine

• 📽 9:48 Two ships (Story Element)

• 📽 14:46 Making a loss, got to think strategically

• 📽 18:06 Finally, the right card! Out of the red!

• 📽 24:53 An Erudite Triumph!

• 📽 25:17 Let’s buy some cards

• 📽 26:08 A new round

• 📽 29:03 Artefacts

• 📽 37:03 Cute tavern

• 📽 46:13 Dark Dreams (Story Element)

• 📽 48:47 Huzzah! A deft victory!

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