Patchwork Review
Competitive quilt making, that underground sport, has long been banned throughout the Home Counties and beyond. Time was, Women’s Institutes across the country were hives of furious quilt making, with the inevitable side affects: gambling, bickering, (tea) drinking and the consumption of highly sugared conserves. These quilt making rings regularly had to be broken up by police, and rarely a week went by without a late night raid on a village hall, old ladies leaping garden fences to get away, buttons spilling out of pockets. Those were dark days indeed. Patchwork, from legendary farm lover Uwe Rosenberg, is a fascinating study of the addictive nature of competitive quilt making, and features important lessons for us all.
Faced with a bare square of cloth it is man’s natural inclination to fill it with brightly coloured tetris-style pieces of cloth (or “patches”, as they’re known on the streets). In Patchwork, you are offered a grand selection of differently shaped patches with which to make your quilt, spread out in a great ring. Some are larger, some smaller, some are bare cloth but some, some will feature buttons. Oh sweet, fondlable buttons. The object of desire, the measure of your worth, but also your currency in this underground marketplace.
Each patch needs to be paid for, costing you your precious buttons, or your precious time, moving your wooden counter around the central time track that spirals inwards towards the end of the game (which not too long ago may have been prison but fortunately Uwe left that part of history out). You are forced with each purchase to choose how much of each you can afford to spend, and pretty quickly the number of considerations you need to take into account begins to balloon outwards. This is why WI jam is so sugary: it enables the brain to operate on a higher level.
The time track is central to these considerations: at various spots around it are buttons that, when your marker passes over them, award you income, each a little payday dropping a smattering of new buttons into your lap, one for each that holds pride of place on your quilt. So you want to hit these points before you run out of buttons. But its not a disaster if you don’t. Instead of buying a new piece you can just move ahead on the time track until you pass your opponent’s piece and collect one button per space moved, the quilting equivalent of unemployment benefit. You’ll inevitably have to do it at some point, but it still feels like a failure.
You also want to race ahead and grab the 1×1 patches on certain points of the track, as only the first player to cross these will get to add them to their quilt, filling in those pesky gaps where the main pieces didn’t quite fit together properly. Inevitably useful since every gap left over at the end of the game is worth minus 2 buttons! Not the buttons! You can’t have them, noooo! But you can never get too far ahead because whichever player is behind on the time track goes next…
Leaping ahead might allow your opponent to snaffle multiple tiles at once, or it could force them to waste big chunks of time collecting buttons when they’d rather not. Managing both your time and button economy is a taxing puzzle and almost certainly accounts for the lower frequency of Alzheimer’s in ex-competitive quilt makers. But this challenge is smeared like creamy butter on top of the crumpet of patches, because at any point you can only chose to buy one of 3 patches, the next 3 in the ring.
Except what you are actually doing is looking at the next 6, the next 9 tiles, working out which ones you want, which your opponent wants, which you can afford to buy, how many buttons they will add to your quilt, how far along the time track they will move you, and how much time that will give to your opponent. It’s one of the most beautifully compelling puzzles in board gaming, offering you an incredible amount of depth yet never so much that you look at it and think you can’t possibly work it out. Much like chess, the skill is not in what piece you choose this turn, but what each of you will be doing 2, 3 turns down the line.
Honestly I’m not sure what I can say to criticise this game. Maybe the bonus points for completing a 7×7 region of your board first are a little too powerful, typically (but not always) going to the player who ends up winning. Also, the theme at first glance may be dull, but you wouldn’t say that if you’d seen my great aunt’s tattoos after her stint at Her Majesty’s pleasure. Patchwork is one of the best 2 player games on the market, and unlike so many directly confrontational 2 player games, this one allows you to compete without that face-to-face give and take that can sometimes prevent couples from being able to enjoy them together. It’s still beautifully interactive, thanks to the turn order system and the time track, but not in a take-that kind of way. Patchwork is therefore a great couples game too! There is so much to enjoy here be prepared to find yourself playing this a lot! Just keep it safely in the tabletop realm.
And remember, if anyone comes up to you on a dark street late at night and offers you some shiny new buttons be sure to say no, for your own sake!
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