Do you like worker placement? Are you partial to an action selection mechanic? Do you yearn for the combination of these things with the intricacies of tapestry sewing and bright colours? I mean I assume you do because you’re here reading this so let’s go!
Introduction
There’s a lot in this box – certainly more than I was first expecting and it’s quite a sight on the table when everything’s in its place.
The premise of Threaded is we’re playing as diligent yarncrafters trying to create the most vibrant tapestries, inspired by Bargello designs. To save you Googling the finer points of that, it’s essentially a type of needlework that dates from probably 17th century Florence, possibly with its origins in parts of Hungary. It’s largely vertical stitches (as opposed to diagonal stitching) and is perhaps most recognisable as a flame or zig-zag pattern.
History lesson done with, let’s explore the box and the gameplay together shall we?
How does it all work?
There’s a fair amount of setup here – with six communal boards representing the different shops you can send assistants to in order to help you craft the perfect pieces. There’s also three decks of cards, 150 cubes (representing threads) and individual player boards and markers in five different colours.
A note on accessibility here because something stands out from the off. The player pieces (“assistants”) come in five colours, with each having a different screen-printed pattern on them for ease of identification which also matches the background of the accompanying player board – this is a good thing.
The 150 cubes – 25 in each of six colours – are just plain cubes. There is a sticker sheet included with each colour having a different (but not immediately easily discernible) pattern to identify them. But you’d have to place one sticker on each cube to cross that accessibility bridge and that feels a little frustrating. There’s obviously enough thought gone into it to make sure player pieces are identifiable, but presumably due to manufacturing cost (?), it’s more DIY for the thread cubes that are really the centre of the entire game. I’m not even close to being an expert on the intricacies of production costs, shipping and RRP but this does feel like an example of inclusion that’s been half done.
In any case, each of the six communal shops has a unique name that all start with a different letter of the alphabet from A-F. It might benefit you to arrange them in this order to make gameplay a little easier, but it’s absolutely not a requirement and you should prioritise sensible table space over this.
Before you play, you’ll have to create the Bonus Box tower (if you’ve made a foldable dice tower before you’ll be grand, and if not, there’s a QR code with easy to follow instructions on how to do this). Optionally, you can also SEW YOUR OWN FIRST PLAYER TOKEN – I’m not joking – again with easy to follow QR code instructions. There is also a cardboard one included if you’re feeling less confident there though.
The last bits of setup are to tip a number of cubes into the Bargain Box depending on player count, deal five tapestry cards face-up next to the Finishes board and put three equipment cards below the Bobbins and Baskets board. Each player draws 3 random cubes from the bag and takes one commission card from the deck and you’re good to go
Assistants – assemble!
The game is really played in two phases, the first of which is sending assistants from your player board out to available spaces in the various shops. And as all good Brits will recognise, they’re going to stand patiently in a queue until it’s their turn to be served.
You’ll get three assistants each (four in a 2-player game) and in player order, you’ll send one at a time out to the various craft shops to pick up various aids to help you stitch the perfect tapestry. Some of the shops have spaces that should only be used in certain player counts and you get blocking tokens to cover those off at lower player counts. I’ll do a quick summary of the shops here
- Awl You Want – allows you to move the assistant from this shop to the end of any queue (even if it’s full) but at a cost of 2 threads
- Bobbins & Baskets – take a face-up and a face-down equipment card from the shop row and deck respectively
- Commission Cards – draw two, keep one. These are the point powerhouses of the game and we’ll cover them below
- Darn Good Thread – take any three thread cubes and add them to your basket/needle. The last visitor tips the remaining cubes into the Bargain Box (this is a lot of fun)
- Ends & Odds – all visitors here take cubes one at a time until there are none left
- Finishes – there are 4 actions here and you can choose two (including the same one twice)
After all the assistants have been placed, they’re resolved in the order above, from left-to-right in the queue
Thimbles may be needed
There’s a few things that it’s important to know as you plan and resolve your turns, and these are what turn the game from a simple “get stuff, make stuff” affair into a more compact puzzle that’s shifting around you a little bit.
Firstly, your basket (player board) can only hold four cubes in reserve. You also have a “needle” space at the top which can hold six cubes, but once these are placed, they’re a little harder to swap around.
Secondly, you can only ever move or rearrange cubes when you take cubes from shops D, E or F (or where another effect would allow you to take a cube). That in itself isn’t terrible to manage an given the nature of how things resolve, it’s partly predictable. Discarding cubes from your basket to the communal scrap basket is fine, but if you’ve committed something to your needle, you must pull them through (from either end) one at a time and spend or give them due to an action or equipment requirement. I think this almost tiny rule can drastically affect how you play – especially as the Finishes shop dictates all the things you need and in what order you need them…
Finishes and Commissions
Sending an assistant to Finishes allows you to pick two of
- Taking a tapestry card from the row of five, spending a thread on each that you skip over to secure your desired pattern
- Make a tapestry by taking the three required colours of thread off either end of your needle in the order they’re shown on the card. As we’ve just seen above, locking these in makes it hard to unpick
- Spend three threads to refresh the entire line of tapestries and draw five new ones – this is an expensive option
- Share the thread wealth by donating a cube to the scraps box and then taking any number out of it
So we’re at the heart of the game now – having a tapestry card you want, with colours of thread you have (or can thread in the right order) that you can use your second Finishes action to make. That’s quite a delicate balance in the scheme of things. At two players it’s easier to mitigate the whole thing to some extent, but with more people you’ve really got to pick your priorities well to avoid missing out.
“But how do you know which one you want?” is a question I can hear you asking. And the answer comes from the commission cards you’ve been accumulating. Intrinsically, completed tapestries themselves are worthless. They have no inherent point value themselves – that all comes from the commissions.
These cards will either have a single colour thread showing, a pair of threads or a specific pattern and these need to combine with the tapestries you make to score points at the end. There’s a giveaway signal to other players here because you consistently picking certain patterns or certain colour combos will explicitly let people know what you’re after. While I think blocking others and furthering your own cause is a tall order in this game, it’s not impossible.
By the end (triggered by someone stitching their fifth tapestry) you should have acquired a set of complimentary commission cards (max 4 per player) that also play into the pattern and/or colour of tapestries you’ve made.
Final thoughts
If I’ve made it sound complicated to you – it isn’t. But it does require some thought and planning to make it work as efficiently as it possibly can. Threads are a flexible but limited currency – obviously used for stitching the all important tapestries, but potentially clearing out the pattern row or snagging a space at the back of the queue cost you a significant portion of what you can hold.
As with any good action selection game, the powerful stuff is at the end and you’ve got to maximise what comes before it to get the payoff. You’ll almost always have a chance to get to Finishes (5-player games mean someone will have to spend the 2 threads at Awl You Want if everyone’s going there) but there’s an element of unpredictability with what gets restocked at Darn Good Thread and what falls out of the Bargain Box at Ends & Odds so you’re never guaranteed anything.
Like I said at the very start, there’s a lot in this box and there’s possibly more to think about than you might expect. This surprised me a little in how sophisticated it felt at times, but I think you could play this with most people and have a good time!
