Warp & Weft

• Designer: Cami Munoz Villar
• Publisher: Fractal Juegos
• Players: 2-5
• Age: 8+
• Time: 30 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

The art of weaving has been essential to the development of almost every culture in the world. The colors, embroideries and patterns have hundreds of folkloric meanings that make many of the hand-woven garments unique.  In Warp & Weft you will play four rounds, trying to weave different colored threads on your Loom to form attractive patterns.

In each round, you’ll collect four threads, in a simultaneous draft, that you’ll need to make your design. You will then weave them onto your Loom board and commit to a specific pattern that will grant you a certain amount of victory points depending on how many times that pattern is present on your Loom.

The 100 yarns (20 each of 5 colors) are mixed in the bag.  Each player gets their own loom board as well as the four buttons in their color.  A shared goal card, 4 adjacent pattern cards and 4 interwoven pattern cards are placed on the table.

The game is played over four rounds. There are four phases in each round

1] Each player draws 5 random pieces of yarn from the bag

2] Draft yarns – each player now chooses one of the yarns in their hand and places it in their area, passing the unchosen ones to their left.  Repeat until all players have chosen 4 yarns.  The final unchosen one is discarded from the game.

3] The four yarns are now woven onto the loom board. They must be in a straight vertical or horizontal line. They can pass over or under previously placed yarns.  There is no restriction on where to weave your yarn, though you will lose points at the end of the game for too many of the same color in either direction.

4] Choose a bonus – Each player now places one of their buttons on a Pattern card.  Round buttons go on adjacent patterns and Square buttons go on Interwoven patterns.  Thus, by the end of the game, each player will have chosen two of each type to score at the end of the game.

Repeat this process four times; then players score their loom

• Shared Goal card – if you have both patterns on the card anywhere on your loom, score 5 points
• Adjacent Pattern cards – for the two cards which you have marked with your round buttons, you score 1VP for each instance where you have the left yarn woven next to the one shown on the right.  It is possible for a single yarn to score twice.
• Interwoven Pattern cards – for the two cards which you have marked with your square buttons, score 1VP for each time you have the top horizontal yarn on top of the bottom yarns.
• Penalty of -1VP for each yarn of the same color more than 3 in either direction on your Loom

The player with the most points wins. There is no tiebreaker.

My thoughts on the game

So I don’t know if I have played any other games that involved shoelace weaving, and I was definitely interested after my short demo in Essen.  The game is really quick as each of the four rounds does not take very long to play at all.

The drafting is simple enough, though it can be a bit awkward as there are some possible timing issues – unlike most drafting games, you can see the entire contents of the hand coming towards you… so, knowing what you might be able to draw next, you might choose something different from your current handful of strings.  We have had to make a little house rule where everyone has to mentally commit to a string to draft, and then when we have all chosen, we then draw said string and pass the rest on.

Once you have the four strings drafted, then comes a bit of puzzling as you try to weave the different colored strands in a way to score the most points.  One thing to always remember is that you’re only going to be able to score two of the round bonuses and two of the square bonuses – so you don’t have to do everything on the bonus card tableau.    I have found it helpful to see what other players are going for, and then considering going for different goals that use other colors of strings – this helps reduce the competition for the strings that I want.

You could try to disguise your goal by waiting until the last round to place on the one you are most successful at – but of course if you do this, you risk committing to a goal that you don’t score at all.  By the end of the game, all of the holes around your player board will be full, and then you’ll have to stare at your board to figure out the scoring. 

The game itself is pretty straightforward, and like I said, it doesn’t take long to play – maybe 15 to 20 minutes once everyone knows the rules.  Having people concentrate on the intersections of the strings is the easiest way to make sure that people score correctly.  Warp & Weft is definitely a colorful filler for your game table.

Until your next appointment,

The Gaming Doctor