Patchwork

Overview

Take your quilting board, a scattershot of fabric pieces, and it’s up to you to weave together a ragged tapestry that’s got its own inner beauty and delightful character. Granted, you’re also competing with a fellow Patchworker (quilter? knitter?) for the same scraps of fabric, but regardless of how things turn out, what you put together will be uniquely yours.

Patchwork is a 2-player game where each player will pick from scraps of fabric to stitch onto their quilting board. Every piece of fabric costs buttons and requires a certain amount of time to stitch onto the board. Some scraps even include buttons on them — important, because that’s how you’ll be able to generate more buttons during the course of the game as income! Oh, and when you pick a scrap, you need to make sure they fit on your board because many fabric pieces can come in zany shapes that might make it difficult for you to slot them in.

So when you play, you’ll need to consider what fabric scraps you’ll need, but also need to pay attention to which fabric scraps your opponent needs to deny them the opportunity to obtain them! You’ll also need to keep in mind where the 1×1 fabric scraps fall on the time track to snatch them from your opponent when you get the chance. Because at the end of the day, it’s whoever has the most complete-looking quilt that is the winner, and you’ll need to grab the right fabric pieces if you want to succeed.

Core Mechanics: Grab pieces of fabric and assemble them on your board.

Victory Condition: Patchwork’s victory condition is to have the most points once time is up. Points are determined as follows: number of buttons minus 2 times the number of empty spaces on your board. Sound familiar? Yeah, it’s pretty much like Agricola since Uwe Rosenberg also designed this game. There’s also a bonus piece that gives you 7 points if you somehow fill a 7×7 space on your quilt!

Ease of learning: Patchwork is light in terms of its rules, but the layers of strategy is enough to be satisfying. It’s a good game to bring to the table on a weekday when you don’t have a lot of time to burn, but want to get a solid game in.

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