by curtc
A little late to the party, but...Jonathan Degann wrote:
At best I can see the tile laying a little like track laying in Transamerica. You can't block but you can play defensively to avoid helping your opponents out... as long as possible.
Well, in TransAmerica the tracks are shared. The are not shared in The Swarm. You can and do block other players. But it's a soft-block, rather than a hard-block. If players are blocking aggressively, then the number of tiles available to overplay will be found to be lacking. I've also seen people play a 4-connector tile when not needed, specifically so that another tile may not be placed on it. With this kind of tile blocking, players find themselves needing to use boats to make connections, which I find interesting. Especially when hazards are used aggressively.
But yeah, it's not brain-melting like Cavum.