Build an abstract civilization

Have you played Tapestry? It is a somewhat abstract civilization building game with streamlined gameplay and incredible colorful clay-like mini buildings. 🤩 In usual Stonemaier fashion, accessibility is one its core strengths, and you could play with up to 5 players.

The rules are quite simple: on your turn you either pay to go up on 1 of the 4 tracks and gain the depicted bonuses, or you go to the next era and gather income. You play over 4 eras, then the game is over - normally you try to maximize your gains in an era and only go to the next one when you are all out of resources.

What are these 4 tracks? 🤔
🧭 Exploration mostly has to do with drawing hex tiles and/or placing them down on the map. Upon placement you gain the bonus depicted on the tile, plus you are also trying to match terrain types for additional points.
💡 Technology is about acquiring technology cards. If you fulfill their prerequisites, you can upgrade them with certain actions to gain their bonuses.
⚔️ Conquest is for taking control of all those tiles that you lay down when exploring. It also involves rolling 2 dice and picking a reward from one of them. Attacking enemy hexes is pretty simple: you either automatically win, or the enemy plays a Trap card and you lose.
⚗️ Research has you rolling a 12-sided die to additionally go up on another track at the same time.

Of course each track has many things going on, I only listed their unique actions. They also might let you draw tapestry cards which are an important aspect of the game. You can play one of these at the end of every era to gain some special effects for the next era - these allow you to customize your strategy on the go in really cool ways.
The 4 tracks also let you place down 4 types of buildings to unlock income and scoring opportunities. Upon reaching new thresholds first on a track you also get bigger landmark buildings. Every building goes on your city board, where you are trying to complete rows and columns for points or 3x3 sections for bonus resources - in a kind of Sudoku-way. There are blocked spaces that make this a bit more nuanced.

We’ll be back with more thoughts soon!