Tapestry

Tapestry by Stone Maier games is another one of their amazing games. In this asymmetric game, you play as a unique civilization with the goal to advance your technology, military, exploration, or science in order to gain points and ultimate victory. These advance tracks give a race feel with also providing a hot pot of mechanics such as area control, tile placement, engine building, and worker placement. Also being from a well established publisher, no one advancement track or faction seem too overpowered or underpowered. There are definitely some factions/tapestry combos that can be very synergistic but that heavily rely on RNG. My favorite mechanic in Tapestry has to be the Capital city, a Tetris-esque grid board that you place Landmarks of variable sizes. By placing rows or columns you'll be able to score more points, and by completing an area, you'll be able to get one time bonus resources. The balance between choosing whether to get bonus vs points cause the most analyzes paralyzes for me.

While Tapestry to me while extremely great looking aesthetically, it is in essence a RNG game. While not always the case, the advancement track you choose is basically dictated by the faction/civilization you receive at the start. It is also highly determined by the turn order of the players. Since the first player is going to act first, they are usually the player to advance the quickest down their needed track, and will get the first age bonus. The only incentive to advancing before the first player is the one bonus resource, which usually hurts your production regardless. Also, there is the Tapestry cards themselves... Some Tapestry cards are just better than others. While there are some tracks that get you new Tapestries, I find it very frustrating to get a mediocre tapestry like "Traps" on the first income. Usually only getting point Tapestries in the beginning incomes will drastically affect your engine later on.

In the best game Tapestry game I had, I was able to score 408 points by abusing the "Marriage of State" Tapestry in the first income. From the player and track I choose, I was able to benefit from approximately 10 to 12 advancements on the Technology track (that player took two incomes before I finished this Tapestry). I even on the end of tech track which gave me the restart + 4 bonus resources. As a result, my engine was boosted so much that even with 4 players, I basically had the last phase play all to myself. The next closest score was 260, so I feel like this game is just too much RNG to be fair. Now we did an analysis of the other player, and he could have not advanced on that track... but that player would have missed out on all the bonus buildings. Is it worth that player sacrificing their strategy to screw over one player's tapestry? I'm not sure...

Overall this game is kinda trash... Since this game is on the longer side, 2 hours or so, then getting a bad start just demoralizes me. I can't stand a game where the startup RNG just leaves you envious the rest of the game.