Elemental Connection

ECON is a simple online board game where you play against the AI, and can be played from your browser. Basically each player has square tiles which are 4 sided, with a certain color on each side, and you try your best to place them on the board so that colors match up to earn you points. You also lose points if the colors don't match up.

The game looks very clean and elegant, with a well designed UI, and looking very professional overall. There's also a very nice looking zooming animation that shows your results, when you place tiles on the board. There's some nice relaxing music in the background that can be toggled, although the overall volume is a bit high, so a volume slider would have been nice. For gameplay options, there are various difficulty settings and options to change some minor elements for switching up the gameplay experience. Other than that, each game is basically the same, with mostly just the AI's ability slightly tweaked.

The gameplay itself is pretty simple and easy to pick up. It's pretty fun to play, and it doesn't require a whole lot of thinking or strategy, and there are no time constraints. After a few games, you might start to pick up on a little bit of strategy, but even then the strategy is not too deep. You only have 2 tiles to choose from at any time, so your options are pretty limited, and you don't have any info about your remaining tiles or your opponent's tiles.

Most of the strategies you can come up with won't have a huge direct impact, and it will just help increase your odds by a tiny bit, but with only 2 tiles, sometimes you just won't have the right options available to you, or the AI will magically have the perfect useful tile, so there's nothing you can do about it. In the end you do need to depend on a bit of luck, and I did manage to beat the highest level AI.

Here are some of the possible strategies I came up with:
-try not to place tiles perpendicular to other tiles (unless setting up your own play), to reduce the chance of giving the opponent a 2-side matching opportunity
-if the opponent does the above play, assume he may be setting up his next play, and try to take up his spot if possible
-when placing a tile with possible different rotations, try to pick one that could be useful for your other tile in hand

Overall, this was a simple and relaxing game to pass the time, with nice and clean visuals. There's not a lot of deep strategy involved, which can be good or bad, depending on what type of player you are. The gameplay mostly feels the same with each play, but there are enough options to change things up a little bit, so you should be able to enjoy playing a few games at your own pace.