Dr Kool-AIDS fucked around with this message at 04:56 on Oct 6, 2019

SlyFrog fucked around with this message at 01:31 on Oct 7, 2019

• As others have said, there is not a whole lot of interaction. There's the first-come-first-serve building rewards, the central map (more on those two topics in a minute), maybe a couple of civilizations and cards that depend on what other players are doing or have done, but for the most part everyone is playing their own game. I'm not necessarily going to dock points for this since I have both played and enjoyed games that are even more solitaire than Tapestry, but I still think it's a fair warning to anyone who's looking to buy it, especially since it's clearly pretending to be a 4X game.
  
• I can't really comment on the alleged balance issues after just one game, but some of the civilizations and Tapestry cards did seem far more useful than others.
  
• The decision space seems pretty small at first, since you basically just have to choose one of four tracks to advance on in most turns. Despite this, several players in our game suffered from severe AP at times, leading to some extremely long turns. All in all, our five-player game (with three new players, including myself) took well over three hours. By the end, everyone was more than ready for it to be over, and the two players who finished early (including myself) had gotten up from the table and were wandering around while the other three finished up.
  
• The landmarks were such a disappointment. They look awesome, I loved the color scheme and the amount of detail, and then it turned out that they do absolutely loving nothing except take up space on your little Sudoku map. There is zero difference between the buildings except for their footprint, and even more strangely, most top-tier buildings have a smaller footprints than the mid-tier ones, making it even more of an anti-climax when you unlock them. This might be cynical, but I'm convinced that these buildings were only added because high-quality minis sell copies on Kickstarter.
  
• Speaking of adding absolutely nothing to the game, gently caress the Sudoku maps as well. I guess they were going for a Rosenberg-esque spacial puzzle mini-game, but the Sudoku thing is way too shallow to be interesting, and the potential rewards are too small to really give a poo poo. It adds zero depth or strategy, it just takes up space and time.
  
• The map is another strange disappointment. You would think, looking at promotional pictures, that this is where the game takes place, but for the most part the map is just another way to score some points. Exploration is just about finding out which tile gets you the most points and/or best reward, while the main reason to conquer a tile seems to be the dice roll reward. There is almost no downside to getting conquered either, and the only real reward for conquering someone else seems to be the 15 points for being the first to conquer two tiles. Even in Terraforming Mars - another game where the map is far less important than initially appears - the final map state can at least have a significant impact on scoring. In Tapestry, there is essentially no reason to look at the map unless you're actively placing a tile or tower.
  
• Which brings me to my last point: The complete disconnect between the supposed 4X theme and the actual gameplay. We had one player who went all-in on the science track, but at the end of the game, nothing about his civilization or game state felt particularly science-y. Similarly, with the map state being largely irrelevant, the player who went highest on the military track felt less like a great conqueror, and more like the guy who happened to put down the most tower tokens. I went for exploration, and despite reaching the end of the track, I believe I actually put down less tiles than most other players. Of course, Tapestry isn't the first game to have a tacked-on theme, but like with the pointless lovely landmarks, I can't help but feel like the game promised something far more interesting than what we got.