Patchwork Review
The heavily meme’d 2 player game isn’t an actual joke.
You and a partner seek to build the best quilts through slotting Tetris-like pieces into their boards! With economic elements like button income, a variable buying market, and a short runtime of 30 minutes, Patchwork delivers on the online joke of playing with “the wife” in a good way.
Video published July 7th, 2023
Grab an empty board and quilt to fill it up!
33 patches included let you visualize different shapes
Try to get the 7x7 if you can!
What we played
Played it 3 times, with 2 different opponents! One session was on TTS.
Need to learn how to play? Or want more reasoning for our points? Our review video’s got you!
Component/Learning Pros
Great components
Boards, Tetris patches, and buttons feel great
Wooden player markers and patch selector
Pleasing art
Quilt on the back of the central board and sides of the box
Patches all have different visual designs so you can tell them apart easily
Rulebook
Excellent visuals and diagrams
Good iconography
Easy to setup and teach
Randomize the Tetris pieces, grab a board, 5 buttons, take out wooden pieces
Just explain how you’re trying to fill up your board, buttons are $, last player on central track takes a turn
Gameplay Pros
Patchwork handles actual filling up of board well
33 patches have few exact copies, only 3 pairs that are the same
H’s, T’s, skinny pieces let you visualize different junctions of shapes
7x7 goal is a trade off between racing for that and trying to fill up your board completely
Positioning of player marker meeting patch placement
Every time buy a piece, have to evaluate its time cost, higher is usually worse (less turns left)
Want to get income up before crossing income thresholds
Gameplay Pros Cont’d
Counterplay possibility with complete open information
Grab pieces your opponent needs with purchasing pawn, or jump over them
Always look at buy-able patches in clumps of 3
Button system handled well
Option to jump ahead for buttons means you don’t have to hard rush button income, alleviating for newcomers
Buttons double as VP makes end game scoring extremely intuitive
Progression
More patches disappearing, including leather ones, will lead to scarcity in market
Meanwhile scarcity in the flexibility of fitting pieces
More button income over time
Moving up player markers EVERY turn for tight gameplay also keeps game true to ~30 minutes
Very well interconnected mechanics
Doing 1 buy a turn is moving purchasing pawn, filling up board, moving time, maybe increasing income
Misc. Pros
Good replay value
Boards always the same, but randomizing 33 Tetris pieces leads to so many combos
Learning/Component CONS
Rulebook
Says that you get button/patch space benefit when you move “ONTO or past those spaces”; cannot actually move onto those spaces
Just remove “ONTO”
Components
Not enough plastic bags, get 2
Gameplay Cons
Initial randomization of tiles can lead to lowered player agency
Sometimes cannot afford tiles in front of you, forcing you to jump player marker ahead for income
Sometimes just 1 buy-able thing within 3, have to buy it, since moving up marker is usually not efficient
Not completely removing agency because such free-form placement of pieces, and open information does allow for some planning
Inconvenient truth that completely randomization of tiles can lead to some weird game states
Suburbia (1-4 player Euro) splits tiles into 3 categories throughout the game, also can discard tiles or buy from a different market
NITPICK
Would have been convenient to have player income track
Counting all of buttons come late game can get tedious
Recommender Score
Patchwork is actually a tight economic game underneath the cuddly blanket of a low rules quilting fest. You buy assets with uhh gold… to generate MORE gold… and the bigger assets you buy, the less negative gold you incur end game. Quite frankly, Patchwork could have been re-themed as… “City TYCOON 69”. You are a business developer, tasked with filling up a square city with the right buildings, and some buildings like malls or sport stadiums just end up generating more cash for your business. Hmm, could there be a way to perfectly calculate the expected value of buys?
But Patchwork is wrapped in fluffy quilts, which makes it an INCREDIBLY friendly and unique theme, and to many, a quite calming presentation. Look how simple these rules are! Again, with it not highlighting its economic backbone, you can totally just vibe with the awesome shapes and colors for your first game or 2. It’s with this subtle economic approach we can see that the Patchwork wasn’t meant to be balanced at every random patch setup, and how blocking off your partner IS possible but not a focus. In fact hate-drafting is really minor nonexistent early game, as both players are still figuring out how to build their quilts.
0 luck and perfect information is not advertised anywhere on this box, we didn’t even know Patchwork was like that until after our first game. And that’s how cuddly this game is presenting itself, Patchwork doesn’t WANT to be known as a 0 luck game, its known as the accessible 2 player quilting game… that happens to have that perfect info idea there for the gamers who see it. If you’re not very familiar with perfect info, this is an excellent pickup to get your feet wet.
BUT ASHTON, you may say, I am a connosseiur of board games, I play political area controls like TI4, or I have better luckless games like Go, Chess, or Gaia Project that I can play instead. Or… I’m more of a card gamer who NEEDS asymmetry.
Why would I play this… abstract looking LIGHTISH GAME?! Well, because gaming is also about WHO you are playing with, and this is an AMAZING starting point to get people more into this awesome hobby.
While you, the gamer might be optimizing button efficiency and building an engine and hate-grabbing patches, your opponent might not be into or not ready for that type of tryharding yet, and they can STILL have an amazing time playing the visualization game of putting shapes together and seeing button number go up.
Heck, if you don’t carefully count your opponent’s buttons all the time, you also might not even be able to tell who’s gonna win the game! Why not just go ham on the theme and replace the buttons with actual buttons? Why not just play so much with your wife’s boyfriend that you both taking quilting up as a real hobby?
