How to Play Tessera

Tessera is a tile-drafting game for two to four players about decorating a mosaic wall one careful choice at a time. Every round you pick up tiles from a shared pool, load them onto a personal rack, and then watch them transfer onto your wall for points — with a scattering of colorless Wild Shard tiles thrown in to bend the rules just a little. Here’s everything you need to play a full game.

Overview and the goal

Each player is building their own five-by-five wall, one tile at a time, trying to arrange colors so that finished tiles sit next to each other in long rows and columns — because tiles that touch other tiles score far more than tiles that stand alone. You’ll also be fighting a constant balancing act: taking exactly as many tiles as you can use, and no more, since anything you can’t place spills onto a penalty track that eats into your score. The game ends the moment somebody completes an entire horizontal row, and whoever has the highest score at that point wins.

Components

Every game uses a shared pool of tiles in five colors, plus ten shimmering, colorless Wild Shard tiles that can be played as any color’s stand-in. Tiles are drawn out onto round factory displays — small serving trays that each hold four tiles — and a shared central area where leftover tiles pile up during the round. Each player has their own board holding three things: five pattern lines of increasing length (the first holds one tile, the fifth holds five), the five-by-five wall where tiles are permanently placed for score, and a seven-space floor line where excess or unwanted tiles go to cost you points.

Setup

The number of factory displays scales with how many people are playing: five displays for two players, seven for three, and nine for four. Every display starts stocked with four tiles drawn at random from the full shared pool. Nobody starts the game holding the first-player privilege — whoever is the first to draft from the shared central pile during round one claims it, and with it, the right to go first next round.

A turn, step by step

On your turn you choose exactly one source — either a single factory display or the shared central pile — and exactly one tile type present there, which means one of the five colors or the whole Wild Shard group. You take every tile of that type from your chosen source. If you drafted from a factory display, whatever tiles are left on it slide into the shared central pile for later players to pick through.

Now place your haul. Choose a pattern line that isn’t full, isn’t claimed by a different color, and whose matching wall slot for that row isn’t already occupied by your color. Drop tiles in, left to right, until it’s full or you run out. Tiles that don’t fit spill onto your floor line — and you may always send a whole haul straight to the floor line by choice, sometimes the smartest move when nothing else is worth taking.

Worked example: you draft four blue tiles from a factory display. Your third pattern line is empty and its matching wall slot is still open, so you drop three blues in, filling the line. The fourth blue has nowhere left to go on that line, so it lands on your floor line instead, costing you a point later.

If you drafted from the shared central pile and you’re the first person to do so this round, you also pick up the first-player marker. It occupies a floor-line space of its own (another point of penalty) but guarantees you’ll move first next round. Play continues around the table until every factory display and the shared pile are completely empty — that ends the drafting for the round.

Turning your drafts into score

Once drafting ends, every pattern line that’s completely full sends exactly one tile across to its matching spot on the wall — any extra tiles beyond that one are simply set aside. Lines that aren’t full stay exactly as they are for next round. Whatever’s built up on your floor line then costs you points, and the floor line is cleared out for the next round.

Wild Shards

Ten Wild Shard tiles are shuffled directly into the pool, and you draft them exactly like a color — take every wild sitting in your chosen source. A wild can be added to any pattern line that isn’t full, whatever color it is or isn’t committed to, and it never locks a line into a particular color the way a regular tile does. When a line made entirely of wilds fills up, you choose which still-empty slot in that wall row it settles into — the one moment of real freedom on an otherwise rigid grid. That freedom has a cost: a Wild Shard on your wall still counts toward finishing a row or column, but never toward the big bonus for finishing a whole color, and it permanently blocks that color from ever landing in that row.

Scoring

When a tile lands on the wall, count how many tiles it’s touching in an unbroken line left and right, and separately up and down. If both directions reach two or more, score the two lengths added together; if only one does, score just that length; a tile touching nothing scores one point. A tile with two others to its left and one above it scores three plus two, for five points total.

At the end of every round, your floor line costs you points based on how many of its seven spaces are occupied:

Floor slot	1	2	3	4	5	6	7
Points lost	−1	−1	−2	−2	−2	−3	−3

Your score can never drop below zero from these penalties, even in a very bad round.

When the game ends, three bonuses are added once, on top of everything else: two points for every horizontal row you’ve completely filled, seven points for every vertical column you’ve completely filled, and ten points for every color where you’ve placed all five tiles somewhere on your wall. Wild Shards never count toward that last bonus, and a wild sitting in the wrong spot can permanently keep you from ever reaching it for that row’s color.

How the game ends

The instant any player completes a full horizontal row of five tiles, that round becomes the last one. Everybody still finishes their own pattern-line scoring and floor penalties as normal, and only then are the three end-game bonuses tallied. Whoever has the highest total score wins. If two or more players are tied, whoever completed more full rows takes it; if that’s tied too, the win is shared.

Variants

Tessera doesn’t offer optional rule toggles — the Wild Shard tile described above is a permanent part of every game, not a switch you can turn off. If you’d rather work through a single fixed position instead of a full multiplayer round, the game’s built-in solo challenges hand you a preset board to solve for a star rating, using the exact same rules with no opponents drafting against you.

Quick-reference summary

Setting	Value
Players	2, 3, or 4
Factory displays	5 (2p) / 7 (3p) / 9 (4p), 4 tiles each
Tile colors	5 standard colors + Wild Shard
Pattern lines	Lengths 1 through 5
Wall	5×5 fixed color grid
Floor line	7 spaces, penalties −1 to −3
End-game bonuses	+2 per row, +7 per column, +10 per completed color
Ends when	Any player completes a full horizontal row
Wins on	Highest score, then most complete rows, then shared