Unused tile combination?

[IAmBarabbas]

Anybody else notice that there are no cards that combine buildings and mountains? Any thoughts as to why?

[tbhp]

I'm not sure why, except that you don't usually expect to see buildings in the middle of a mountain.

They still could have done a mountain temple thing, similar to what they did with Peacock.

[loungelizard24]

I’ve seen some of the new cards and 2 of them require a house next to a level 1 mountain. So they won’t be a unused tile combination for long.

[Skrybowiedzma]

I see some potential reasons.

1. Mountain streams are very beautiful and the game designer could like them and have them in their mind while thinking of the cards, resulting in many cards combining mountain with water. And then with many mountain + water combinations, adding some mountain + building card could make too many mountain cards in the deck.

2. We have a lot of other building cards that feel natural. Like a duck or a crow. I bet if you tell someone "I'm designing a game where some animals will live on certain terrain adjacent to another terrain and there are trees, fields, mountains, water and buildings", then without knowing the rest of mechanics and any balance, they would instantly feel that a crow should get building+field and a duck should get building+water. But it's a nature-themed game, so we want some buildings, but not many of them on the player board (so we have less red tokens and we need 3 different colors nearby for reds to score).

3. With the scoring rules, mountain+building could be a tiny bit harder to build with both scoring, because if the cubes go onto the mountain card next to a building, you'd want both (all 3, all 4...) mountains next to the same building (so they touch each other and the building), making the number of available spaces around the building smaller and making it harder to have 3 required colors while also having synergy with other cards. With cubes going to the buildings it would be easier, but I don't really have a good idea what animal would match this thematically and we don't want the players to build many buildings.


I don't think any of them is a strong reason, but it could just be that the designer started with other cards for those reasons and then decided that the game is finely balanced without any mountains+buildings cards, so with some little reasons not to include them, but without any particular reason to do include them, finally decided not to.