About Kilim

We found this clever little game at Essen Spiel last year, and it flies completely under radar. In this game you play as a weaver who tries to win the favor of the sultan 👳‍♂️ by making the most beautiful carpet (Kilim). To achieve this you have to acquire carpet pieces on the market through secret bidding and use them to weave your Kilim so that you score the most points. Points are given for patches of the same patterns, the Kilim being rectangle, etc. 👌

Sounds simple right? Yes most of these elements are fairly common in similar tile laying games. What makes this game interesting is the secret bidding: you have a deck of cards with values between 1-15 and for every carpet piece you have to place a bid (a card), until your hand is empty and there is no more carpet pieces to bid on. If 2 players bids the same highest value, they get ignored (and of course the card is lost for that round) and the next biggest bid wins. This let you play funny mind games on your opponents... 🤭🤭 and lure those big cards out early. This mechanism often leads to the funny situation where a highly valued piece is than bought cheap by the next player. You have to be careful, what card you place and how interesting for you the current tile is - you'll lose the card you placed either way.

There are also a few other game elements which spice the game up, like torn carpet pieces which bring you negative points, special cards to use special actions or buy special tiles.

We played Kilim with 2,3 and 4 players and it reaches its full potential at a higher player count, and I would recommend playing it with at least 3 players. However it has a 2p variant, which is ok.