Tom Awesome’s Review Score: 8.25
Taking a civilization from the creation of fire to space exploration takes planning, careful application of resources and a little luck. Tapestry allows you and your friends to research technology, explore new lands, make scientific breakthroughs and crush your opposition in glorious combat.
Tapestry is a civilization-building game for 1-5 players from Stonemaier Games. Each player guides a unique culture from their earliest days through several ages. Along the way you build a capital city, gather resources and play a series of Tapestry cards that set your dynasty apart from your rivals.
How the Game Works
The game has two kinds of turns: income and advancement. On the first turn, every player takes an income turn. This is when you gather resources, (usually) get the unique benefit from your society, advance a technology and score victory points. Once you have resources from the initial turn, you spend resources to advance your civilization. Once you are out of resources, you have to take another income turn. The game ends once the last player has taken their fifth income turn and whoever has the most victory points wins.
The game has four progression tracks:
- Exploration
- Science
- Military
- Technology
On advancement turns you spend resources to advance on one track. Each advancement track is broken into three tiers with three segments apiece. The first tier requires one resource to move up a space, the second and third tiers cost additional resources. Every time you advance you get a benefit from the new space, such as placing a building, drawing a technology card or conquering a territory. You often have the option to purchase a bonus for additional resources. The first space in the second and third tiers also grants a landmark to the first player to reach that space. Landmarks are figures that takes up a number of spaces in your capital city.
Each player has a different capital city, essentially a Sudoku board that you fill in with resource buildings and landmarks. It consists of nine rows and columns, with some spaces blocked off as impassable/unbuildable terrain. Each nine-by-nine grid you completely fill in grants you a resource, and every row or column you fill in grants you victory points on your income turns. The more houses you build, primarily by advancing on the exploration track, the bigger the bonus for rows and columns.
Each track is tied to a resource. As you progress you remove associated buildings from your playmat into your capital city, unless your culture has special rules that allow you to use them in other ways. As these buildings come off your mat, they represent advancements in your culture. Advancing down the military track allows you to place armories in your capital city and represent your culture achieving racing and team sports. These advancements determine your-and your neighbors’-eligibility for tech upgrades, unlock additional resources for future income turns and grant victory points.
Advancing along the technology track grants you technology cards. Each technology card has two benefits on it, with one in a circle and one in a square. To earn those rewards, you have to upgrade the technology by either advancing further down the technology track or taking an income turn. Each technology can be upgraded twice, the first time you get the benefit in the circle and the second time you get the reward in the square. Rewards range from resources to victory points or landmarks. Some of the rewards require either you or the players on either side of you to have reached certain achievements, like team sports.
Everything you do contributes to your victory points. There are also bonuses for the first two players who reach the island in the center of the board, complete a progression track or conquer two enemy territories.
My Impressions and Takeaways
Now you have an idea of the sheer variety of things you can do in Tapestry. Is it fun? Definitely. One of the things that I adore about Stonemaier games in general is how you can focus on your own thing and largely choose your level of engagement with your rivals. This game gives you opportunities to forge your own destiny from the moment you choose from two civilization cards. If you decide to forgo exploration and combat and focus on technology and/or science there is little opponents can do to mess with you. You can’t steal resources from other players; the most aggressive you can be is taking out someone else’s outpost on a territory. And once there has been one combat in a space, there can never be another one.
Tapestry cards do an excellent job of adding variety to each playthrough. While you may start as the merrymakers, you could find yourself guiding them through ages of capitalism, revisionism and pirate rule in the same game. Or your futurists could experience ages of exploration, feudalism and become steam tycoons. Between the civilizations and tapestry cards, you could follow the same strategy and have different experiences.
The game also does a nice job accommodating different player counts. Out of the box Tapestry includes a single player variant and a two-player mode with a shadow empire. Playing with just two players and again with the shadow empire, it was nice to have a third influence on the advancement tracks to provide competition for landmarks. The single player was fully functional and is a perfectly viable way to play the game, it’s just not my preferred mode and played no role in my final score. I preferred to have the maximum five players in a game.
Where the game faltered for me was with balance issues. I found it extremely tempting to spread my resources across multiple tracks. It is cheap to advance in the first tier. In every game I played against at least one player who threw the vast majority of their resources into a single track. Those players always either won or were very competitive. If you want to be a serious contender you need to focus your efforts. If you have to deviate from your primary track, keep your efforts contained to one other disciple. Combat and exploration rely on each other and are a natural synergy.
Wherever you decide to focus, it is crucial to purchase at least one technology card before your first income turn, or you miss out on an easy victory point the very valuable opportunity to upgrade technology. I made that mistake in my very first game and will never make it again. The winner of almost every game I played focused on the technology track.
The science track has the most interesting benefits to me, but in practice they feel the least valuable. Two of the first three rewards have you roll a science die with the different progression tracks on it. You advance on whichever track you roll, but you don’t get the benefit. This felt like a major hindrance early in the game, where rewards for spaces were cheap. Later in the game, the bonuses are very valuable, so I was hesitant to roll then as well. There are perhaps spaces on different tracks where you wouldn’t care about getting the benefits, but unless you are perfectly positioned in each track, you risk missing a reward you need. In the second tier of the science track, two of the spaces allow you to roll the science die and still collect the benefits.
In addition to the balance issue with the technology track, some civilizations seem to be less useful than others. My favorite by far was the craftsmen. They have the ability to play income buildings on their civilization mat instead of in the capital city. This granted additional resources, an additional tech card and a tech card upgrade. For comparison, the mystics reward you with extra resources for reaching milestones you predict before the game and a boost to victory points if you guess the number of milestones, like the number of tech cards you will accumulate, exactly. Isolationists can block other civilizations from taking over their territories and get a bonus in victory points for aligning terrain when exploring.
One of the things I love about Tapestry is that there are only three dice included. The science die and two conquest dice that you roll when you take over a new territory. These grant you either new resources or victory points that represent the plunder gained in your conquest. Ultimately, victory is determined by sound planning and judicious application of resources.
While it feels like there are some balance issues in Tapestry, for me they are far outweighed by the fun and variety that each game brings. I think that other Stonemaier games like Wingspan and Scythe may be better engine-building games, but Tapestry has cemented itself as one of my favorite games and easily my favorite civilization-building title.
The Good
- Lots of variation. With 16 civilizations to choose from and 50 tapestry cards that alter your civilization’s objectives, every game presents new opportunities and challenges.
- After getting up to speed with all your options, you can really plan a lot of your turn while the other players are acting. This keeps a good flow going and can make the game feel very engaging, almost as though everyone is acting in real time.
- There are different play modes to accommodate solo and two-player games.
- The components are very high-quality material.
- Lots of bags are included to help you store things.
The Bad
- Balance issues. I consistently found it difficult to compete with the technology track. The benefits of some cultures seem to lag behind others.
- Visually, it is a lot to digest. A slow onboarding can make put new players in a hole early on.
The Verdict
I love Tapestry. It is one of my favorite board games and something I love sharing with new people. I love the flow and the balance between battling your enemies and doing your own thing. Whether you are into engine-building games or looking to share something where everyone can avoid conflict if they want, I consider Tapestry a must-play title.
To hear Tom’s impressions on Tapestry, Wingspan, Viticulture and Scythe, check out Episode 26 of Outside is Overrated – Stonemaier Games.