Latice Hawai'i

We found Latice Hawaii in a thrift shop on our Sedona trip.  It was colorful and the box was unusually heavy, and I had never heard of it.  So my curiosity got the best of me.

Unboxing it, there was an attractive board and long stacks of plastic tiles, along with a heap of plastic gems, all high quality.  The rules looked complicated at first but in between the helpful images it wasn't hard to follow. 

Each player gets a stock of tiles and a tile holder.  Draw five tiles to start.

Most of the tiles are pictures and to place a tile you must match all adjacent tiles by either color or icon.  Then there are Wind tiles which let you bump any piece one space ... you discard the Wind tile and then play again.

So, it's just a tile dumping game?  Technically true, but then the gems come into play.  If you match two adjacent tiles you get a half stone, match three get a sunstone, match all four to get two sunstones, and if you place your tiles on a sun space, you also get a sunstone.  You can't hold more than three sunstones at the end of your turn, but you can hold any number of halfstones.

Now, the fun part: you can spend a sunstone or two halfstones for an extra turn, and take as many turns as you can.  The only limit is that you don't refill your tile holder until the end of your turn, so you can't keep burning through your tiles indefinitely.

We started off timidly, but by the end of our first game, we were each chaining together three or four moves per turn.

There are a few other rules,  but that is the gist of it.  It's an interesting game with a lot of possibilities.

The first video review I found was by a player who dismissed the whole thing for being too random. The was from The Dice Tower.  We thought it was fun, and it felt like it would be fun to explore further.  And if dumping games are no good, there go most of the classic card games where you try to make matches and go out.

It looks like the company itself is no longer there, as latice.com is a dead URL and the only other links I could find that looked official were also offline.