Yesterday afternoon at The Luxe I got to play a 3 player game of Tapestry. Jeff and his son Jonas had very kindly agreed to meet up and play.

Unlike Friday where Gavin and I scanned through the civilisations and chose one from them. This time I went with the official way of dealing 2 to a player and they chose one to keep and play, discarding the other (Some online have suggested a mulligan option to supplement this rule).

I went with the Isolationists, which encouraged me during the game to explore and conquer. Jeff went with the Historians, while Jonas went with the Traders.

Tapestry is just a stunning looking game. From the art to the hand made landmarks. Tie that in with the usual high production values for the components of the game and you have yet another beautifully produced game by Stonemaier Games.

The boards (Civilization, Capital City, and Player) have a lovely rough texture to the front of them. Jeff liked the effect but felt he should be striking a match on them! Surprisingly the super thin 4 page rule book didn’t use the same paper that was used in Wingspan.

The game once set up takes up a lot of space. Not just the board. But the play area needed by players. Things can get quite wide. Especially when you start getting technology cards, and possibly additional civilisation cards.

I do like games that have a table presence, and look a bit theatrical on the table. They draw players in, and give a wow factor. I think Tapestry has this, and unusual for a game (or I can’t think of one at the moment) particularly on the player boards with the capital cities when they get buildings and landmarks added.

Friday there was no teaching of the game. Gavin and I had both been watching YouTube videos before hand, and had a pretty good grasp of what to do. So yesterday was the first time I had to teach the game. For a game with basically 2 actions that you can do, it still took about 20 minutes to teach. Which still isn’t bad.

Tapestry is all about developing your civilisation over 5 eras. Hence why it identifies itself as a civilisation game on the box. But does that theme come across while playing? To some extent yes, and also a big no.

This is a very euro like game, where you are building an engine. The purpose of that engine is to get you resources and victory points. The more resources you get the more things you can do. And that engine building bit doesn’t feel very thematic.

It’s little touches like when you place a building and reveal the space underneath has a word/technology that you have just developed like VR or video games. And the story your tapestry cards tell for your civilisation through the eras, and the technology that your civilisation invents, and the tracks you advance on. Although I think Jonas’s civilisation explored space without developing any technology! It’s that weaving a story/narrative for your civilisation that feels thematic.

The actual action of advancing on one of the four tracks, allows you to conquer, explore, develop technology, advance on a track, get tapestry cards, place buildings, plus on certain spaces pay for an additional benefit. The nice thing is that the main action theme for a track like exploring for example is only possible to do a limited number of times.

I like the simplicity of conquering a tile. Plus the random element of the dice rolls, where you then have to decide between points or a resource. It’s quick and easy to teach. In fact you probably take longer deciding which die result to take than the conquering action itself. There is a way to avoid having a tile you control conquered using a Trap tapestry card. The aggressor still gets to roll the dice, and places a toppled token on your tile. But you remain in control of it. With the basic rule of a tile can’t have more than 2 tokens on it of any kind. It locks down the tile so you can’t be attacked again on that space.

I love that each era you are trying to eek out the most value from the limited resources that you have. Which gets harder and harder as the further you advance on a track the more costly it becomes to advance and do the more powerful actions. It’s also fair to say you start off doing a handful of not so powerful things, and as the game progresses you get to do more and more, and the stuff you do is getting more and more powerful.

It’s this side of things, the engine building and the next point that makes Tapestry dry euro game like. Add in the capital city board and the trying to complete rows and columns (for points) along with 9×9 grids (which give you an instant resource of your choice when done).

I can see for some that doing their fifth and final income round, and having to sit and watch others continue playing may be an issue. Especially if the other players have a lot of actions they can still do. But I do like the fact everyone does their income rounds at different times, and you have that decision of when the optimal time is to take it. Sometimes it may be forced on you because you have no more resources or not enough left to take actions.

There is also the random nature of the tapestry cards that some may find clouds their enjoyment of a game. It’s possible to get cards that don’t synergise with your civilisation, or would have been better earlier in the game. But that’s not an issue for me, it’s a challenge to overcome.

I like Tapestry, can’t wait to play it again. It’s not replaced Scythe as my favourite Stonemaier Games game. But it’s good, real good.