Calico is a deceptively cute game, ostensibly a simple game about cats and quilts but in fact a much deeper strategic experience that asks you to plan every tile and think about every move. It would have made my top 10 last year had I seen and played the game in time to write it. It’s between printings right now, but its amazon page is still active.
Calico is a tile-laying game where each player gets a board that has a frame around it showing pieces of hexagonal quilt tiles, and three scoring hex tiles placed on the three designated spots on their boards, each showing a specific scoring method associated with it, such as AA-BB-CC (three pairs) or AAA-BB-C (a triple, a pair, and a singleton). Over the course of the game, players will draw tiles from the supply and place them on their boards to try to surround those scoring hexes with six quilt tiles of different colors and patterns to meet those scoring tiles’ requirements. The tiles come in six colors and six patterns. If you meet the scoring tiles’ rules in just color or pattern, you score the lower number, but if you meet it in color and pattern, you score more.
There are also cats in this game, three each time you play, who are looking around to lay on your quilt, but only if it matches the patterns they like in specific alignments of tiles. That can mean something as simple as three tiles in a row, or something more complicated like five tiles in two rows (a row of two and a row of three, forming a sort of trapezoid), or a chain of seven contiguous tiles in any shape. Cats only score based on tile patterns, not colors – the latter are immaterial – and in each game, you’ll get one easy cat to score, one moderate one, and one difficult one, with multiple options for each at the start of every game; they score 3, 5, and 7 points respectively. You can count the partial tiles in the frame towards these patterns.
And there are buttons, which you can get by placing three tiles of the same color together, either in a row or in a triangle, and once again you can count the frame’s partial tiles to create those trios. You can’t create a group of six for two buttons, however; each group of three has to be separate. There are six colors of buttons, and if you collect one of all six colors, you get a bonus rainbow button. They’re all worth 3 points apiece.
You start the game with two random tiles from the supply, and on each turn, you’ll place one of them on your board, then replace with one of the three tiles in the supply. The game proceeds until all players have filled their boards, at which point they score their points from the scoring hex tiles, their cats, and their buttons.
That’s as detailed a description of Calico’s rules as I can give, and it’s not even 500 words. It’s an extremely elegant game that you can learn in a few minutes, but the game changes each time you play depending on the hex tiles, the cats, and the random draws of quilt tiles from the bag to supply the market. The first two options can be random, but you can also use them to fine-tune the game to the difficulty level you want; the rulebook suggests a starter game with specific tiles and cats for first-time players, which I think is also useful for learning the game’s icons and symbols.
The one drawback to game play is that you’re limited to the tiles that appear on the table, and, with only three tiles of each specific color/pattern combination and 108 tiles in total, you can easily find yourself waiting for a tile that never comes. You have to play in a way that allows you to capitalize if you get the tiles you want but prepares you for the more likely outcome that you get some of what you need, and even so, you can still lose just because the right tile never appeared. That randomness can also help level out the playing field between older and younger players, or more experienced players and newer ones, and in this case I’d say the randomness is in service of the game’s larger goals rather than just being there for its own sake.
The art in Calico is cute, maybe a little over the top in that regard, but artist Beth Sobel is one of the best in the business, with Wingspan, Lanterns, and the new edition of Arboretum all to her credit. Those cats on the scoring tiles are, in fact, actual cats, and they get their own bio section in the back of the rulebook, if you care about such things. Ultimately I’m swayed by the combination of easy-to-learn rules, subtle strategy, and replayability, though, all of which make Calico (belatedly) one of the best new games of 2020.