Basically, in a 5-player game of Tapestry, you need 5 landmark cards in the expansion or you can’t use them at all. So Arts & Architecture also includes 5 new landmark cards and their corresponding minis. That, anyway, is the promise of Tapestry. A beginning of time to modern (or near future) civilization-building game that isn’t going to take you all day. So, how does it work, and does it fulfill its promise? Time to find out. Gameplay Overview: As a designer, I often struggle with unique card design as we get deeper into a particular brand, but I had some great help in this case. Mike Young contributed a number of really neat ideas—including a new type of tapestry card—and Gheorghe Orbesteanu also shared some clever concepts that we iterated on. However, Tapestry comes in a pretty big box, so I polled Tapestry fans a while ago to see if they’d rather us make an organizer box (which would be a quite expensive) or if they would be just as interested in a well-designed, custom insert that fits all Tapestry components (including all three expansions, and including third-party accessories like base snaps) into the original box. The majority chose the custom insert. For example Cloud City has 9 districts which are each a different size and shape, but it does come with its own ability which lets you move two previously placed income buildings each income turn. The Caverns top 3 grids must be filled before buildings can be placed on the middle tier and the middle completed before the bottom. It also doesn’t give any points for columns but makes it up by awarding 2 points per complete row in the top and middle tiers and a whopping 3 per bottom row. So on and so forth, they each provide a unique twist which is another neat way of adding even more asymmetry to Tapestry. Cards For Yards

Note: we don’t feel like we need the Shadow Variant to enjoy the 2-player game, so feel free to tell us we should pretend that variant doesn’t exist and be on your way :) We only tried it because it said it added more interaction in a 2-player game, and that sounded interesting. When I finished designing the Plans & Ploys expansion for Tapestry, I was out of ideas. My tendency is not to add complexity to expansions, especially for a game like Tapestry that already gives players a lot to think about on every turn. Urban Planners: This civ has a big risk/reward payoff. It includes 2 small benefits—an extra landmark card and the ability to place hold landmarks instead of placing them immediately—and the potential for up to 49 VP if you’re able to contiguously connect 7 landmarks at the end of the game (or fewer VP for 1/2/3/4/5/6 landmarks).

More DLCs from this game

Plans & Ploys included 5 landmarks cards and their matching landmark miniatures. For Arts & Architecture, we could have just included a couple new landmark cards (and their minis) to mix into Plans & Ploys, but our philosophy at Stonemaier Games is that no expansion should depend on someone owning another expansion too. We’re going to play a 2-player game again tomorrow without the Empire and using the Futurists and the Craftsmen civs to hopefully give us those good feels we got when we first played this game a few months ago! You’re welcome to spend your money as you wish–I’m not trying to tempt anyone to do anything they don’t want to do (especially if they’re not able to wait just 6 more days to buy a game that they’ll receive a few weeks later). Here is the explanation I posted on Monday about the review embargo: If you gain this civilization in the middle of the game, immediately give 4 of your player tokens to opponents, leaving the squares exposed on this mat.” Since this rule is not explicitly overridden in the Automa rules it’s still in effect as described in this rule in the first column of the Automa rulebook: “Any rule not explicitly overridden here is still in effect”.

Focused on tech cards, Inventors get what is basically another upgrade at every income turn. They can even upgrade opponents’ tech cards, reaping benefits from them.Taking again the Architect as an example, since your home town will unlikely generate anything before era 3, the reward for that role comes in late and is rather poor. The role addendum sort of tries to fix that by giving the player a head start of many VP but this is not rewarding. It just feels kind of cheating when you get 40 VP as Architect or even 60 VP for the “Chosen ones”, ahead of others when playing with 5 people. This massive points fixing is a clear indication that certain strategies, linked to to those roles, are weak in concept.

Our most recent addition to the collection is Tapestry….just played it for the first time and darn do we love it :-) After getting the bits and bytes of the rules and reference guide puzzled together we (in scythe terms) “encountered” 2 situations along the first play that we couldn’t quiete get ahold of. It’s quite possible that the new capital city mats are my favorite part of the Arts & Architecture expansion.

Mike presented a number of “advanced” capital cities to me. He could have just created some new configurations, but instead he gave each capital city a completely asymmetric puzzle for a player to consider.