Tapestry, designed by the prolific Jamey Stegmeier (whose game reviews and cat pictures always seem to be at the top of the feed whenever I open Instagram) caught my attention due to its beautiful cover art and nifty fully painted plastic buildings. I took a chance on it without really reading any reviews, so imagine my relief when it turned out to be a solid, engaging game. Actually, three solid, engaging games that feed into each other in interesting ways.
First, you have a variation on worker placement, where you spend resources to progress along four tracks representing aspects of civilization such as science, technology and warfare. The farther you move on each track, the more expensive each movement becomes, so a key decision point is whether you want to focus on moving as far as possible along one or two tracks, or move along all of them evenly, which gets you more but smaller rewards.
Several spots along these tracks reward you with either small income buildings or larger monuments (the aforementioned nifty prepainted miniatures), which you then place on a 9x9 grid representing your capital city. It has certain squares pre-filled, and the goal is to fill up your city as efficiently as possible, with rewards of additional resources when you fill up a 3x3 portion of the grid, or an entire row or column. These resources are then used to move you along the civilization tracks described above.
Additionally, the center of the board is occupied by a hex map representing the unexplored land around your city, which is used for exploration and conquest. As you move along the exploration track, you draw tiles and add them to the center map, with each new tile giving you a one-time resource gain. As if that weren't enough, when you progress on the warfare track you can conquer previously explored tiles, with each conquest giving you resources or points, and also the chance to slow down your opponents' progress.
It can sometimes seem like you're playing three separate minigames, except that they feed into each other to such an extent that you can't really afford to focus too much one one or the other (with the possible exception of conquest, which does provide a good way to gain points and resources but doesn't really directly affect the other two aspects of the game.
To add even more variety, each player starts with a specific civilization style such as alchemists, entertainers, or craftsmen (to name just a few), which gives a unique ability or benefit. On top of that, at various points in the game you play a new tapestry card, which gives you additional benefits and can help steer you towards a particular strategy. This is particularly helpful as the game gives you a lot of options for what to do with your turn, and can sometimes trigger the dreaded analysis paralysis.
The game may seem complicated but it runs very smoothly, with only four pages of rules, and graphics on the board and cards that serve as great reminders once you get the iconography down. We have found that after a couple of plays we rarely need to look anything up in the rulebook or online -- the game does a great job of explaining itself.
Of course the full color buildings especially stand out, but all the components are bright, colorful, and extremely well made, with some really nice artwork on the cards and tiles.
Rating: 5 (out of 5). Tapestry is one of those rare gems, a game that is both simple and complex, easy to play but with a lot of variation and replayability.