In addition to fiber arts, I love tabletop games. As a child, we had many games in my house. The flowering of "Euro" games in the past 25 years has intensified my enthusiasm. You can imagine my delight when one of my Mensa friends said she had accidentally backed a new game twice on Kickstarter and would I like the spare copy?
The game is ArchRavels. It is a knitting-themed board game. Swoon!
The basic game mechanic is acquire yarn, craft objects, redeem objects for
points. There's a six-card market. In the example below, yarn available
includes 1 yellow, 1 orange, 2 of any color, 1 orange & 1 yellow
together, 1 blue, and 2 green. The yellow in the lower left is the top of the
discard pile. A player choosing the shopping action picks from those cards,
then adds the wooden colored tokens to his or her personal yarn bowl.
Each player has slightly different skills, adding to replay value. In the
example below, Derrick is a very fast knitter. He can craft 4 items on a turn
(notice the 4 with the yarn bowl in the upper right on his card). The four
spaces on the card represent the choices of what to do on your turn. You move
your marker to choose, but you can't leave it on the space from the previous
round. Thus, the game forces you to keep doing different things.
Most of the time you are making hats, teddy bears, mittens, scarves, or blankets. (Notice the tokens in the game tray photograph below.) Groups of finished objects can be traded in for more points than they would be worth alone (see the three cards along the bottom of the marketplace photograph above). The "special request" cards add extra fun. Within the game, they allow you to craft something directly for lots of points, instead of crafting items and then redeeming them. The special request cards have lots of geeky references, perfect for those of us who have spent many a weekend at a science fiction convention.
The basic game has a cardboard central board and plastic yarn bowls. The fancy
Kickstarter version has a neoprene mat (similar to a mouse pad) for the market
cards and wooden miniature yarn bowls (as in my photographs). The nice game tray to organize the pieces comes standard. The yarn tokens in the game are made of wood and have slightly
different shapes to help distinguish among all six colors. The game as well
as the upgrades are available on the
XYZ Game Labs webstore.
I've played the game a couple times now and think this is one I'll enjoy again
and again. Once you understand the rules, play time is under an hour. The
theme is fun. The components are nice. The geeky references make me smile.
What's not to love?
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