Tapestry Review - with Tom Vasel

[Music] and now it's time for another diced our review with Tom vassal hey folks I'm Tom vassal and today we're taking a look at one of the most hyped to get I shouldn't say one of the most hyped game of the year tapestry from Stone mire games which is well known for games that people really like likes I've and vide culture and wingspan and in fact I really love most of their games I think that they do a fantastic job they games looked fun a lot of cool interesting ideas in them and this was touted as a civil ight style game it says inherits called tapestry a civilization game but the hype behind this one was huge so what I did when I found out about this game and saw the hype is I deliberately tried to not pay attention to any of it I didn't want to be affected one way or the other because it's kids it's a tough thing right there's so many people who are talking about how great the game is and then a lot of people saying it can't be that great and then saying it's bad and that's all craziness I just want to play the game and see how much I enjoy it so let's jump into it with that in mind I was able to play this a lot there's 16 sibs in the game I have either played or been in a game with all 16 of them I've seen how this works I I probably put a lot of effort into this one because I want to make sure my review was right let's take a quick look at how it plays and then we'll come back [Music] there are two sides of the board this is aside for four or five players each player is going to be dealt two of these factions are sixteen different factions in the game from the entertainers to the architects and historians to the nomads each has a special ability where as you can get extra points or something especially that that faction can do and so player is going to pick one of those two they're also going to start with a pseudo-random board like for example this is the desert but that basically is where you start so that desert here would be on number four so because the blue player here is starting at number three that's the tropical board and this board is just basically a random grid hair looks like a pseudo goo board with some of the spots being impassable terrain essentially those spots are already filled in so each player has a player board here in which they have four different types of buildings placed here where the leftmost space on each of these tracks is open you'll put your civilization board over here and your city board over here players will have some player tokens and some outpost tokens that they're going to have as the game progresses you're going to keep track of different resources that you have here coin workers food and culture and over the course of the game players are going to either be taking an income turn or they're going to be moving on a track on the board now player is only going to be making five income turns over the course of the game the first one is on your very first turn and then when you make your final one that's going to end your turn it's going to end scoring for you and then you are finished while other players still may go until they do their final income when you do income and there's an income turn here the first thing that player will do usually not in turn one but on a second through fifth incomes if you'll you'll check your board here because there might be something about income phase so for example the inventors here can move a token here to technology another opponent has and so you'll do that first then you're going to play a tapestry card now at the beginning of the game you don't play one you've discovered fire but maybe you'll do the age of Wonders or maybe the Renaissance or marriage of state or a few there's a lot of different tapestry cards you'll play the tapestry cards some cards we'll have something happen when you play it this will give you a resource or give you three points for each of your landmarks that you have some of them will give you a special ability over the next era until you do another income phase so when you play a tapestry card you'll play it here the first person to play a tapestry card and each of these sections will get a resource to resources or three resources of their choice you can also increase the technology I'll talk about that a little bit later and then you're gonna score victory points and get resources so this for example gives me a victory point for every technology card this gives me a victory point for every completed row or column on my city here and then the rest this gives me one coin and this gives me one worker and that gives me one culture and this gives me one food I also get to draw a tile and get a tapestry card during an income phase as the game progresses you're gonna be able to take buildings from here which you'll be able to place in different spots here now you want to put these on different spots on this board because when you fill completely one of these grid so this is this is considered filled because the dots in the buildings have filled it you'll get a free resource also if you can completely fill a row or column you'll get points for each of these uncovered icons and as you put more buildings out your income slash points is gonna get more and more valuable as the game goes by you're going to get landmark buildings and these buildings can be placed on multiple squares you can even have them go off the board if you want which will help fill in these spots better the other thing a player can do is they can move a token on a track here move the token of their color when you move it on a track you need to pay the resource at the top so you notice the first three spaces here cost a resource of any type then the next two here costs one food and a resource of the type then a food two resources and then two food when you move into a spot you will get the bonuses of that spot now this spot we tend to look this is the exploration spot on this spot you can draw these tiles some of these you'll get from income but you can also explore them when you explore you'll pick a tile from your hand place it next to tiles that you control and if you match any of the sides so I'll here water water and this half of this matches the water you'll get a point for each one also you'll get whatever it shows in the middle of the tile in this case it gives you a food but there's all sorts of various things that you can get from placing these on the board you can also get the wooden houses placed out here and there's all kinds of cool things later on eventually you'll even be able to go out into space and turn over space tiles and get the benefits on them on the opposite side of the board is the military track as you move up in the military you're going to be able to expand and put out your tokens here onto spots that are next to where you already have cities whenever you place these out you're going to get to roll two military dice and pick one of the options and one of the sides is always going to be victory points which might be victory points for every spot on the board you control the other side has resources or if you roll this and you move on to a tile that has something in the middle you can get the bonus of what is on there if somebody else is already in the spot that you are trying to go to so let's say yellows already here then you can add a token to that spot in one of your outposts you can put there and you'll just tip there's over there is a card in the tap Street cards called trap where they can tip you over instead but the fact is is if there's ever two tokens in an area for any means it can no longer be attacked they don't necessarily lose anything except for they lose control of the area that's pretty much the the worst negative thing that can happen to you the science track as you move up on that is going to often allow you to roll the science die you will roll that and you'll move up on that tracks at a science track lets you move on the other tracks however at the beginning here you move up but you don't get the benefits although later on you'll be able to move up and get benefits or didn't even pick the track that you move on and this one lets you build the great buildings and there's other various things that you'll get here's a place to get more tapestry cards or even turn them in I should mention that as you move on these spaces sometimes there's a bonus on them so if I move here I got a tapestry card I can also pay a resource to put a gray house out you don't have to do the bonus it's just an optional thing that you can pay for finally there's the technology side of the track going here will give you technology car let you later on increase these technology cards as the game goes by you'll be able to get these technology cards and play them when you play technology card you'll play it next to your board down here every income phase you're going to be able to move this technology up so let's say for example I have the barn if I get to move this up I move it to the circle and I'll get whatever it says here in this case three points then I can move it up again you have to meet the prerequisite which means somebody needs to have breeding either you or one of your two neighbors and then if I go up there I get the building that comes with this which is just another building I get put on my board somewhere but there's going to be all sorts of technology cards for example this lets you roll the science die then gives you five points this gives you a tapestry card and then one of those three buildings this lets you draw two tiles and then discover a tile there's even one that gives you another civilization that you'll be able to pick from this one here the radio three points and then another set that you can play getting all the bonuses and benefits of that civilization there's also achievements the first person to accomplish an achievement which means you complete an advancement track get all the way to the end of it here we'll get fifteen ten and five the first person to topple two opponents outposts if you knock them over and the first two people to conquer the middle island on the board will get bonus points this will happen you'll just keep going players are gonna either be moving up one of these advancement tracks or they'll do a full income phase when you do your fifth income phase you are finished you might get some passive scoring from what other players do based on some things that you might have in play but you're pretty much finishing after all the players finish whoever has the highest score is the winner technology is one way to get the buildings but another way to get the buildings is the first person to go into each section will take the matching building of that type and place it on their board these buildings have no special abilities they're essentially just ways to cover a lot of spaces on your board there's no question at the components for this game are stunning and I particularly like the actual small houses for the players I think these things are great they have a good feel to them they look different I played this with someone who was colorblind and they were able to tell the difference between these buildings although incidentally they were not so able to tell the difference between these fortunately there's five colors so if you have playing with someone who's red-green color blind you can just not play with one of those as long as you're not playing five players these buildings are cool but they are functionally all the same which I think will bug some people it won't bother others I do have one concern about these a few of the buildings this one in particular so this building here so if you can see this building here will cover up four spaces this way and for up like an L like that so that's a pretty big space that it covers but when you actually put it on the board it looks like it covers a smaller area than that this is a hard one to get on the board period but it looks like it fits there to actually fit it in its spaces there's a lot of open space around the outside it can't go here I know it's impassable it could fit here for example and I just found it problematic that it didn't actually go to the edges in this case a tile would have been better than these buildings and none of the buildings like even this one has a round base on it and it's supposed to cover up four spaces on your board the building's also can also make it difficult to see a cross table what's covered up and what's not covered up yeah so even though the buildings which definitely increase the cost of the game look me and I certainly like the colors I like that they're pre painted I found that to be problematic other than that the components are fantastic the artwork is great the there's finish on all the boards there definitely is a lot of symbology in the game but as the game goes by you're gonna figure out what that all means pretty quickly not anything it was that confusing but for players first time you'll go wait what's that again that means victory point for every one of those houses you have and you'll get it but there just is a lot of it and fortunately the game comes with you know a sheet here there's a sheet that comes with a game that shows you what each of these track spaces mean but if people are touting and saying hey this has only a four page rulebook well first of all they're big pages but secondly this is literally a page you're gonna be referring to all the time so I think the game is pretty easy to understand and the rules do a good job at talking you through it but realize there's a lot of symbology I do like this round it board though it's very nice board everything fits in the box pretty easily really nice components overall other than wasn't happy with how these buildings fit on this board okay there's a lot to unpack here tapestry is a big game it's a fairly expensive game and a lot of that is because of those pre painted plastic miniatures but at the end of the day I think you're getting a very good quality product and games are getting more expensive these days there's a lot of replayability and tapestry you have sixteen different civilization mixed with the different tapestry cards that you will draw and play over the course of a game mixed with different technology cards that will come up it's every game I played with this was a completely different experience than the last now the game comes with an autumn oh way for it if you want to play by yourself you can I have not touched that but Mike Dilisio and our channel has done a review of that section of things and if you played with two players you can play with a shadow empire variant to bring a third one in I haven't done that I also haven't played this with five players because it takes up a ton of table space with four and it feels like the perfect table space you need a big table to fit that fifth player in it's just gonna be odd also the board doesn't like naturally segments into five players so I wouldn't play this with five four was a fairly long game we're talking to our games or so and I feel like a fifth player game would add more time to the game overall but that being said I want to go on record saying I like the game I think tapestry is a fine game but there are some problems that I had with it so first of all we'll talk about the fact that it's a civilization game I'm at the point in my career here where I don't think a light civilization game is feasible let me make that clear I think you can make a light civilization game I just don't think I think you have to sacrifice the theme to do so you want a thematic civilization game you're gonna have to play a really long one and if I want to do that all this place admires civilization on a computer or longer game like through the ages or Twilight Imperium fourth edition this game has almost no theme which seems weird but so for example technologies in this game there's a technology track in the game and you take a card and you move it up and you get a benefit and then you move it up again another benefit that doesn't feel like technology there's no prerequisites and if I played one game with Z and his first scoring phase he had fire in his second scoring phase he had time travel all right now granted and I just read a short story of the road less traveled about getting some technology earlier than others there some interesting aspects we made there but the technology it's kind of weird because technologies scattered throughout the game as you move up on the advancement tracks they all have different names like tanks or airplanes in a military one well that's also technology and science and technology somatically they're kind of the same thing and now did you take the buildings off your thing you're discovering technology so technologies like scattered all throughout this game so the actual technology doesn't feel like technology also the buildings don't really mean anything you're just covering up grids and roads on your board you feel like you're playing some sort of move a Rosenberg game there and I don't feel theme really at all there's not a lot of conquering in fact so people were arguing this is a 4x game I think you would be hard-pressed to say it's in any X game there's no extermination you're not distorting the other players the attacking has minimal at best yes you can stop someone maybe from getting to that middle island but it has a really weird rule where when you attack someone they can't attack back so if you're first to go after somebody else it's I don't know it just doesn't I don't feel that attacking thing the exploitation exploration I'm sorry as you move around and find things that's interesting as you see this board build but it doesn't really mean anything you're just trying to match sides of tiles the exploitation where you're getting resources you might argue that one as you take the house is off and get more things back and then the expansion more the basically as you're building up your technology I never felt like there was a tech tree or anything in the game now all that sounds negative and I don't mean it to I'm just saying that the theme isn't there so if you're looking for a themed game this probably isn't what you want this game is all about figuring out some sort of engine as you move up these tracks and I have to say the track thing is really fascinating every III every game that I played so far I've tried a completely different thing I ran up the science track I ran up to exploration track around the warfare track I ran up the tech track I want to see how it if I really put my efforts into one thing how it worked and I got wildly different results but they feel like they feel balanced those different tracks and I don't know which track is the best one if I write with science I can get my other tracks up but sometimes that it cost right and the two tracks that are opposite each other tech and science work together exploration and warfare work together so that's really neat and you know as you sit there and try to figure out what to do that's just a really fascinating part of the game and it really has the way the speed of the turns are connector and you take turn you take turn you take a turn you take a turn is really reminiscent upside actually so I love that part of the game I think that's the neatest part of the game trying to figure out what tracks to move up on this is compounded by your special ability the different races that you have at the beginning of the game and by your tapestry cards that you have so the there are 16 different civilizations here and they're called various things mystics to merrymakers to whatever and how you play them they they don't they have a pretty potent effect on how you play the game I think if you didn't have one you probably you you know there's probably a optimal way to play the game without one of these when you have one there's kind of a focus on what's the best way how to deal with it some feel not as good as others I haven't played the game 100 times I don't know like the alchemists for me it's okay they're kind of a pusher luck where you roll dice on your turns and then try to advance on the different tracks they don't feel as strong as the others because you could bust and if you don't push your luck with the alchemist then they're not that powerful while others like the nomads and stuff pretty cool that you're gonna get points no matter what there's one where you got the guest where you're gonna be at the end of the game and build towards that I like that sort of thing I do say that there's some weirdness in it though there's the Futurists and the chosen for example and I find it very weird that the Futurist ability seems to completely nerf the chosen z' and i went online and looked at it I saw some people agree with me I haven't seen anyone argue against that point yet it just seems odd and I really wish Jamie in this game had said for your first game start with these four sips because some of them are certainly easier to play than others or they balance they feel wildly unbalanced but I don't know what is unbalanced is the tapestry cards now granted the game is built in a way that you're you you can try to draw more tapestry cards to have a choice of what to play when but there's no question some type of Street cards with your sieve fit perfectly and some don't and they definitely have wild swings in a game in fact the game is all about wild swings in every game I played there have been some quotes games right but there's always one player who is 6070 hundred points behind everybody else and I'm not sure it's that that player played awfully it might just be there's a lot of randomness between the SIVs and the tapestry cards that you draw or the texts that come up it really is the case that doesn't really bother me a lot but I know it would bother some people and I know it has because now that I played it I've talked to lots of people about their experiences I talked to everyone I play with and the the results have been all over the place for me it's all about the fun of building an engine and if I can go into this game and say this isn't really a civilization game it's kind of a fun engine building game with some civilization trappings and it's fun to say well I got radio and then antibiotics and you know those kind of things are fun and interesting and I'm the you know the merrymakers where the Smurfs coming in and you can you can kind of add that theme yourself but at the end of the day you're going I got three rows and three columns and I'm getting six points and times 3:18 and I'm going over here and doing this the theme is kind of a a back back shell for me in this game so I could put that aside and play the game if the theme is what you're looking for I don't think this is for you if looking for perfect balance I don't think this is for you either because again I really think some tapestry and sieve combos are better than others where are they I don't know but I think in any particular game I think that when you get your tapestry in your civilization you trying to figure out how to do that combo and score it at the end of the game that's fascinating and the way some of these SIVs slash tapestries lets you break rules is fascinating to me hey you can't do this on this turn you can't move on a military track but anyone else who does gives you points well that's pretty cool and now everyone knows that there's definitely this kind of interaction as you're racing up the tracks watching other people go they're getting the buildings and so I think this game is gonna get a lot of play so all that to say what do I think about it I already told you I like the game I don't love it like I think scythe is a better game for example and I think scythe had a similar our people went into it they saw the front of the cover and I saw these mechs going after each other like Oh warfare and that's not what scythe is really there's a little bit of combat inside but not much this has a similar feel it's like whoo a civilization game and the hype is up to here but at the end of the day it's a decent fun engine building game I don't know that it warrants this huge you know this is what this game is but I have a lot of fun playing it each time I played it I was like let's try it again let's see what's next and if you said hey let's play it I would be there I think it's exciting I want to see what combos I'm gonna get it but I've lost enough in this game where when I look back am i huh if I had to replay that game I don't think I'd play much differently but I just think at the right cards at the right moments and maybe I made a few things here and there but at the time I thought that was a good idea you know I it's just it's a fun experience I would not play in a tournament of tapestry and as I think that feelings would get very all over the place interesting I like the name of the game I like the components mostly I like the idea of it and I think it's a fun bill up to an engine point game if that sounds interesting to you certainly check it out tapestry diced our judgment approved thanks so much for watching another diced our video if you enjoy our videos subscribe to the channel for more fun comprehensive board game coverage also consider joining us at one of our events coming to diced our retreats while a small intimate gathering join us for text our crews the largest board game prudency attend dice Powell Claxton Las Vegas for gaming fun on the west coast or diced our East in Orlando in sunny Florida diced our conventions the friendliest gaming conventions on earth I'm Eric summer and you've been watching the dice town [Music]

Channel: The Dice Tower

Views: 153,939

Keywords: board game, board, game, dice, card game, cards, catan, monopoly, tower, dice tower, vasel, review, tom vasel, vassel, settlers, gaming, GeekUsername: TomVasel, board game review, boardgame, uno, ticket to ride, apples to apples, educational games, educational, top 10, Jamey Stegmaier

Id: qHKHjLenGDk

Length: 24min 26sec (1466 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 19 2019