A Love Letter to Patchwork
My new favorite board game
I am far too competitive about anything and everything, which means that I have always loved board games. As a kid, I adored the classics: Monopoly (specifically the Spider-Man one we had), Life, Sorry!, all that good stuff.
As I grew up, the same passion remained, and new games entered the fray. I will always remember nights of Game of Thrones Risk and Secret Hitler, the latter of which is my absolute favorite party game because I apparently just like any game where I can lie to win.
Every game I’ve mentioned is great, but currently, none of them have quite been able to steal my heart like a game about making a quilt.
I discovered Patchwork when looking for two-player board games as a Christmas gift for my girlfriend. As the nearest second person to her on account of me living in the same apartment, I figured that a two-player game would be a good “gift” for her that was actually a gift for me. I’m brilliant, I know.
Here’s where I will admit what you might be thinking if you clicked on the link to the Patchwork game: This doesn’t look all that fun. The premise seemed fine enough, but the concept itself was not why I got it. Instead, it was the amount of times I saw Patchwork show up on lists of best two-player games and the amount of positive reviews it generally received that sold me on giving it a shot.
There are few better decisions I’ve made in my life.
This game is so much damn fun. It’s a perfect amount of time, difficulty, competitiveness and learning curve to make each time you play exhilarating while never getting tiring.
Let me give you a rundown of how Patchwork works:
Each player gets a blank 9x9 board and five buttons (currency) to start the game.
From there, you take turns picking different pieces to build your quilt. Each piece has different values that cost either buttons or spaces moved.
Your turn ends when you move enough to pass your opponents’ piece on the main board.
The game ends when both players move all the way around the board, and then there are two-button deductions for every square not filled in on your board.
Player with the most buttons at the end wins.
Again I will reiterate: This may not sound that exciting! It really takes playing it to see the appeal, and for me that appeal became obvious immediately. For a two-player game, it hits that sweet spot in duration, with each game taking ~20-30 minutes. It’s long enough to feel satisfying, but quick enough to do a Best of 3 if you have more time to kill.
As for the game itself, it has a competitive angle both as an individual and against your opponent. The 32 pieces the game gives you make it extremely difficult to get a perfect board with no holes (after playing like 100 times, my girlfriend and I have one perfect board each), and that’s not even the full goal as there’s also chances to sabotage by taking pieces that your opponent may desperately want.
There’s also something deeply funny about a specific Patchwork piece just fitting like complete shit. If you look around the image above, there are some that have shapes that almost never fit well on a board, and yet sometimes it’s all you can afford. Watching your opponent try and make it happen is hysterical, a little delight that can happen at any time.
I know this is some real niche discussion for a newsletter, but I wouldn’t be talking to you about Patchwork if it hadn’t completely taken over my life. We play this game more nights than not, usually 2 or 3 times in those nights, and it has only gotten better over time.
While some of the game absolutely is random, a lot of it has a skill level when it comes to using buttons efficiently, picking pieces to go in certain places, how far to move on the board, etc. We are so convinced that some pieces lead to more wins than others that I’m prepared to make an Excel spreadsheet and use data from our games to find out (this is not a bit I’m absolutely doing this).
There’s just something special about a game that is both extremely simple and perfectly effective. I want to win every game we play, but the ride is fun enough that even losing leads to fun discussion on what moves may have led to a defeat. It’s something that anyone could pick up, but that you can definitely get better at over time.
Patchwork is a perfect board game. Please play it.
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