Digital board games are a wonderful way to expand all your board game collections without taking up so much space. They also allow you to add things to a board game that you can’t do physically. Cue having the ability to have cute cats wandering around your board for you to stroke and scratch. Whilst there are lots of mini gimmicks here, Quilts and Cats of Calico is a fine board game and this has plenty of tactics and choices to be had.
Quilts and Cats of Calico is a tile placement game using hexagonal quilt patches for 1-4 players. You all have your own unique board to fill up with patches and in doing so each player will be score as many points as possible. At the beginning of each game, each player chooses three design tiles to place on their board. These contain pattern and colour styles for the player to try to build. So a design patch that says AA-BB-C-D could be solved by placing two green, two yellow, one blue and one purple patch. As long as you satisfy the two-two-one-one design to touch each of the six design patch edges, you’ll score points. However, you’ll score even more points if you can do that and also match 2-2-1-1 design types too. Each patch has a design like stripes, dotted, leaves or crosses and so the idea is to match the design pattern by both colour and design.
Players take it in turns drawing their quilt patches from a bag and whilst you can see how many patches of a certain colour or design are left in the bag, it becomes a battle of tactics and holding your nerve. There will always be three patches for each player to choose from but you might all be looking for the same colour or pattern and so you’ll need to gamble on what everyone else will go for and what gets drawn from the bag at a good time for you. It is extremely rare that the stars align for you and that’s what makes the gambles and strategy so interesting. You’ll be making the best with what you get and the game offers you different ways to score additional points.
Buttons are sown onto your quilt to mark points scored. If you manage to get those design patches completed you’ll score big points for colour matching and even more points for matching both colours and patterns to the design requirements. Alongside that you’ll also score buttons for placing three matching coloured patches together. There are six colours in the game and if you match all six you then score a bonus rainbow button which is worth a lot of points too. If you muck up the design patches, grouping colours is a worthwhile alternative tactic.
Then we have cats. Cat photos are placed on the left hand side of the screen, each with a patch requirement and two randomised patterns placed beneath them. So a cat might require row horizontal patches of the same pattern placed to then score the cat badge. I found the cat pattern element to be some of the most difficult to pull off but if you can get one or two on your way, you’ll usually be in a good stead for victory. What’s great is that there is a cat editor in the game which allows you to create your cats, name them, give them their design requirement and save them to then be pulled at random into games. It’s a lovely touch and very easy to use.
Games scale nicely so if its a 2 player game, you’ll have plenty of options to choose from whereas a 4 player game is more about sneaking tiles that work for you before others get them. You can play locally, online, and add in three different difficulty AI’s who play tactically and sneakily. There is also a story mode which adds more of a puzzle feel to the game. Instead of purely playing full games, you flip between full games and part built boards with only a few quilt patches to place down. There is often only one solution and so you’ll be looking at all the pieces available to you before making the judgement call. Interestingly, I often found the puzzles a bit trickier than playing the full game!
A delightfully bright and joyous title that is deceptively tactical. Between tactical moves, gambling on what’s coming next and working with what you’ve got and not what you need – there’s plenty of fun to be had. I never thought I’d get this excited about quilts!
Review copy provided by publisher. PC version played.
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