For this project, I wandered into the MAAD Center with the sole purpose of trying out a new game in order to grasp what it would be like to learn a game without any participant previously playing the game. Admittedly, this is the first time I have done this before, as every other time I have played a board game a previous player accompanied me. This time I opted to play Patchwork with my friend Victor. It was a two-player board game that involved a level of resource management and practical skill (regarding piecing together your patchwork).
The game was very straightforward, making it fun to take advantage of the simple rules. The game worked as follows: every player had to move their piece around a board collecting the best, most suitable fabrics to complete their patchwork. There were three boards at play: the game board, and the two patchwork boards that players would add fabrics to. Every turn a player could choose between two actions: one was to simply move while the other was to grab a piece of fabric. The fabric option was quite simple, being that the player would choose any of the three fabrics in front of the time token and move the corresponding amount of spaces (every piece had a button cost and a movement command). The movement option was interesting because you were meant to move however many spaces it took to get exactly one space ahead of your opponent. Your turn would continue until you were ahead of your opponent. The winner was determined by a combination of who had the most buttons and the most full patchwork.
Admittedly, I have never been super explorative when it comes to board games, so this is one of the first times I have ever had to read the rules. Luckily, they were easy to read and understand. The rules themselves were fairly simple, involving a fun turn-based mechanic that ensured the players thought about which piece of fabric they were going to add to their patchwork. Every piece forced the player to move X spaces, and a player could continue to play until they have been moved in front of their opponent. This allowed for interesting chaining sequences, where players were forced to think about a string of moves to maximize their turn, mitigate their opponent’s turn, and not run out of/maximize the number of buttons (this game’s currency). This made the game very competitive, as Victor and I were constantly battling to grab the most amount of pieces for our patchwork and give each other the least amount of space to do the same thing. However, I was critical of some of the gameplay and rule explanations.
The first problem resided in my two movement options. While one option was to just move in front of my opponent, the other would allow me to do the same thing while collecting fabrics. While I can understand the strategy behind choosing to simply move, Victor and I found that just playing for fabrics was the most functional. It allowed us to both move on the board and progress with our patchwork. This is probably a fault on our end, but this leads to my next critique. Regarding the rule explanation, they never fully explained how the patchwork fabrics fully worked. Every piece of fabric, aside from the special ones, had a cost and a movement command. While the cost was straightforward, the movement option left one important question: do we collect that number of buttons? One important mechanic of the game was button acquisition, and for every space you moved, you collected that amount of buttons. While this added to the resource management aspect of the game, some pieces seemed to just be free, while others made you profit or go into the negatives. That was the way Victor and I played the game but I am unsure if that was really how we were meant to play it. This aspect felt kind of fundamental to our gameplay experience, as it seemed playing with and without this interpretation of the rules would lead to two very different experiences.
Despite those two complaints, Victor and I had a wonderful time playing this game. It was a perfect combination of competitive and playful. The whole time we were talking smack to each other but also helping each other figure out how the game worked or just overall encouraged one another. The rules were mostly easy to follow and the game was just a great recommendation for two players to easily pick up. I could see myself playing this game again and even opening my mind to trying more games I had never picked up before.
-Dylan Martin
