Seismic by Ted Alspach
Seismic is published by Atlas Games. The BGG page is here.

The industrious yet short-sighted Seismic Asphalt & Paving Company -- located in the sleepy town of San Andreas, California -- has put you in charge of one of its many road crews. Your job is to build a network of roadways around San Andreas proper. But San Andreas is rather prone to earthquakes, which have a tendency to destroy the beautiful stretches of pavement you've been laying. After all the asphalt is put down, which road crew will end up connecting the most highway in between quakes?"

In Seismic, players place hexagonal highway tiles to build long, complete sections of highways, scoring points for each tile as well as bonus points for the ending intersection tiles in their routes. Scores aren't tallied until the end of the game, because at any time, earthquakes can occur, destroying tiles along the most-built direction leading out from the central San Andreas tile. Players constantly need to be claiming as many long roadways as possible while ensuring that their highways aren't the ones that are going to be destroyed if and when an earthquake occurs.

Seismic Apparel: T-shirts and more
Choose from different Seismic t-shirts, to show the world that you play the best tile-laying, road-constructing, earthquake-avoiding game out there. Visit the Seismic section of the Board 2 Pieces cafe press store for a variety of designs and products.

Seismic Player aids: Quick setup and tile manifest
Download the Quick Setup/Tile Manifest PDF. This player aid makes it even easier to start playing Seismic, and the handy tile manifest serves as a reference for the different tile types available in the game. While setup is pretty straightforward by using the rules, this makes it even faster, especially when you haven't played for a while and would have to look up how many and what types of tiles are used.

The Tile Manifest is a complete list of all 80 tiles in the game. This can be quite handy during the mid or late game, as you can figure out if there is indeed a tile still potentially available for a hard-to-fill spot. One interesting tidbit is that there is exactly one tile that has 1 highway fragment (the +1), and exactly one tile that has 5 fragments (the +5 tile). There are 39 2's, 4 3's, 21 4's, and 8 6's. The San Andreas tile, while it's used to start the game and is the epicenter of earthquake activity, is otherwise just a simple 6-sided intersection.

There are a lot of 4-sided tiles in the game; this is because there are three different basic combinations of tile types: (1) the highways are next to each other, with two adjacent spaces, (2) there are three adjacent highways, a space, a highway and a space, and (3) two adajent highways, a space, two more adjacenet highways and another space.

The sheet is designed to be exactly the same size as the rules in the box, so it'll fit nice and flat (and you can print multiple copies so each person playing can have one).

Download the rules to Seismic
Download a PDF of the the English rules (in color).

The rules to Seismic fit on a single page. In many ways, the basic rules are simply the following:

1) Flip a tile.

2) Choose one of the three face-up tiles, and place it next to any tile that's already in play.

2a) If a quake tile appears, remove the number of tiles equal to the magnitude of the quake on whichever side of San Andreas has the most tiles.

3) (optional) Place a road crew marker on the tile you just placed.

That's it. Of course, the reason for a whole page of rules is 'cause there's lots of details and what ifs. But the game itself is pretty darn straightforward.

Seismic Strategy 101
As you're starting to play Seismic, you'll want to keep in mind the following basic strategies:

1. Play defensively when possible
If you don't have a chance to score, set yourself up for a score, or send a road you own further into the safe zone, focus on increasing one of the spokes (danger zones, indicated in red) coming out from San Andreas that will make it more likely for an earthquake to hit. Straights are great for this, and they can be tough to recover from.

2. Stay in the Safe Zones
The Safe Zones are the area indicated here by white, and the danger zones (those tiles that can be destroyed by quakes) are in red. Tiles in the Safe Zones will never be destroyed by an earthquake, so focus all your road construction in those areas.

3. Always be aware of open spots off intersections in your opponents' areas.
Just because your opponent placed an intersection tile doesn't mean it's theirs! Spreading yourself into your opponents' areas helps avoid devastation at earthquake time.

4. Have an idea of what intersections remain.
There are a limited number of each intersection: exactly one copy of each of the possible ways of setting up each number. For instance, there are three +2s, one that is straight, one that is tight, and one that is loose. There's nothing more frustrating than waiting for a specific intersection to close a set of highway segments and then realizing too late it was already used.

Solo Variant
Seismic's puzzle nature lends itself well to solo play. In this variant, strategy is paramount; optimization of your score is the goal.

Setup
Setup is just like the regular game, but instead of turning up 2 tiles, you'll only have one already turned up. That means that each turn you'll have two tiles to choose from.

Gameplay
Gameplay is just like the regular game, but in this case you are limited by the 20 road crew markers (in the regular game, the supply is "infinite," though it's almost impossible to exceed 20 placed markers). This means that placing markers has to be done judiciously, as you *will* run out if you aren't careful. Scoring will be quite high: expect your score to be greater than 100. My highest score so far is exactly 200, as shown in the picture on the right. Note the "decoy" fault line I built out of San Andreas to trap quakes and keep them away from my valuable completed roads.

Balance Variant
In order to reduce potential lopsidedness if an uneven distribution of intersection tiles appears during a game of Seismic, the following variant can be used. This variant adds some additional strategy to the base game by ensuring that each player receives the same number of valuable intersection tiles. You can download a nicely formatted, ready-for-printing pdf of this variant here.

Setup
Pull out all the intersection tiles except the +1 at the same time the quake tiles are separated from the deck. Mix the 6 quake tiles with the 6 simple highway tiles, but only remove five tiles from the game, shuffling the remaining six with the standard highway tiles (not the intersections). Flip 2 standard tiles face up (the starting tiles).

Next, separate the shuffled standard tiles into as many piles as there are players, and evenly distribute the intersections (face down) onto each pile:

For 2 players, each pile will have 30 standard tiles and 6 intersection tiles.

For 3 players, each pile will have 20 standard tiles and 4 intersection tiles.

For 4 players, each pile will have 15 standard tiles and 3 intersection tiles.

Gameplay
Each player takes a pile and shuffles it. On their turn, they draw a tile from their pile and may place it or one of the face up tiles. When a quake tile is drawn, the standard actions take place regarding how the quake affects the built roads, with the “flipping” player choosing the direction in case of a tie. The player who drew the tile then uses one of the face up tiles to place a tile, reducing the number of choices for themselves and everyone subsequently. After two quakes, there are no more tiles face up except the one being turned, and the player who turns up the quake tile does not get to place a tile or marker; play moves to the next person clockwise. Close to the end of the game, it is possible that a player who has turned up more quake tiles will not have any tiles to play when it is his turn; this player is skipped through the end of the game.

Fun with Seismic tiles
The 74 highway/intersection tiles (there are 6 Quake tiles) can be used in all sorts of interesting ways. A great brain exerciser is to try to achieve goals such as a perfect game, highway system, or hexagon. For these activities, it’s best to put away the markers, tell your friends to get the hell away from you so you can focus, and then start laying out tiles. For most of these, treat the San Andreas tile as a six-sided intersection.

Maximum Scores and the Perfect Game (Scoring)
The total number of points possible per game is 272 total (assuming no quake tiles or shared roads). However, scoring that many points would take 24 markers, and each player is limited to 20 markers each. That lowers the maximum score potential by 10 to 262, which would be considered a perfect 2 or 3 player game. Up to three people could theoretically score the 272 points each, if each road was shared by all three players (requiring each completed highway to be at least three segments long. While theoretically this is possible, it is unlikely that a pattern could be construed with the variety of highway tile types that would allow for the perfect game.

How was the maximum score calculated?
There are 90 segments on the highway tiles, for a total of 90 points. There are the number of segments as there are points on the intersection tiles, so the possible points on each intersection is the square of the intersection (i.e. a +6 intersection is 36 points). Adding these together results in the maximum number of points that can be scored.

The Perfect Highway system
A completely closed highway system (no open ends, all highways terminate in an intersection) is fairly simple to achieve using less than the entire set of tiles in the Seismic box. However, using all the tiles is again unlikely, given the distribution of the tile types.

The Perfect Hexagon(s)
A 6x6x6 hexagon of hexagons requires 91 hexes, while a 5x5x5 hexagon requires 61 hexes, a 4x4x4 hexagon requires 37 hexes, a 3x3x3 hexagon requires 19, a 2x2x2 requires 7, and a 1x1x1 requires 1 hex. Therefore, a single set of Seismic tiles (74 highway/intersection) can produce at most 1 5x5x5 hexagon, with several pieces left over. This is possible to create legally quite easily, but creating a perfect 5x5x5 hexagon that is closed is another matter entirely.

Another, more interesting option would be to create two 4x4x4 hexagons using ALL the pieces. This is challenging when there are open paths, but feels impossible if the requirement is that they are closed.

Other Shapes
Snowflake designs are a natural fit to hexagons, but again make closed systems nearly impossible. Double or triple thick tile sets (three columns or rows) are a totally different type of challenge.