Quiltable
- Board's Eye View
- Apr 23
- 2 min read
Published by Circle J Games, Quiltable is an attractive card game where the 1-4 players are drafting pattern cards and quilt blocks from a central display to create their own quilts. You are working to create a 4 x 4 tableau of quilt blocks but how your tableau scores will depend on the pattern cards you've drafted.
Each of the square cards in Quiltable shows a pattern (scoring requirements) on one side and a block on the other. On your turn you can take two actions: take one of the four pattern cards in the central display, take any two or three 'connected' quilt blocks (ie: blocks that are adjacent to each other) or return 1-4 connected cards from your grid to the central display. You can choose to take the same action twice. In our plays at Board's Eye View we found that on most turns players tended to take a pattern card and 2/3 connected blocks or take connected blocks twice; we only very rarely used an action to return blocks but there are occasions when that can be the smart move where it frees up space in your grid for a higher scoring opportunity.
That's pretty much the basic game in a nutshell but the game incorporates optional 'advanced' rules that you can incorporate individually or in combination. The quilt blocks show one of four patch symbols on each side, not all in the same position. If you incorporate the patches rules, players additionally score for every patch in your quilt that matches up with the same patch in the same position on a neighbouring quilt block card. The advanced rules also reward players whose quilts are vertically, horizontally or diagonally symmetrical.
The game comes with five double-sided 'Quilting Assistant' character cards. The Quilting Assistants each provide a special mostly once-per-turn ability. To incorporate these, you assign one to each player and add one to the central display. Players must choose which side (ie: which special ability) they'll use. They can't ordinarily flip their card but they can trade it with the card in the central display. We've particularly enjoyed the additional dymamics introduced by the Quilting Assistants.
Quiltable makes for an entertaining filler. It's a clever puzzle optimisation game that plays in 20-30 minutes. The box suggests it's suitable for ages 8-199. Players at the younger end of that range will enjoy the pattern building but may struggle with the scoring optimisation; we've not tested Quiltable at the upper end of that age range :-)
