Tapestry

Tapestry makes a strong first impression: lavish production, and a design so simple it is almost cheeky for a game presented in such an expensive box. It is handsome. It also appears to be courting people who want a quick teach and people happy to pay handsomely for the privilege.

At its core, you manage resources and programme actions, building your civilisation’s progress without being buried under choices. That is genuinely engaging for the first few games. The system is clean, moves swiftly, and has the good sense not to pause and admire its own cleverness.

Player interaction is mostly a race to run your own board more efficiently, with virtually no downtime. That is where the trouble becomes impossible to ignore: when the civilisations in the base box are this uneven, the contest stops being about decisions and becomes a comparison of privileges. One game can put together a civilisation later given the largest boost in an expansion and another handed the harshest nerf. An instructive experiment. Not much of a game.

I will give it one more chance with the expansion and its civilisation adjustments, because it is supposedly improved there. As it stands, though, Tapestry offers a very small return for such a large promise; even the unremarkable Civilization: A New Dawn is a noticeably better playing experience.