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Calico

Regular price $56.95
Regular price $69.95 Sale price $56.95
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Game Details

  • Number of Players: 1-4
  • Recomended Age: 10+
  • Play Time: 30-45 Mins

Cats! Quilts! Buttons on quilts stay, cats on quilts lay... Calico is a cosy tile laying game where you place patches into your quilt, sew buttons, and attract your friendly feline friends. Calico is easy to learn but contains deep gameplay with players seeking to draft patterns and colours in order to complete their quilt.

Mechanics

  • drafting
  • pattern and colour matching
  • tile laying

How to play

Set up

For a beginner game, place the three cats Millie, Tibbit, and Coconut and their tokens in the centre of the table with 2 randomly chosen pattern tokens (these are black and white). The rest of the cats are for the standard game.

Within reach of all players, shuffle and make a pile of patch tokens (face down, or use a bag), and the buttons tokens and button scoring tile.

Each player takes a quilt board and 6 matching design tiles. For the beginner game, take ≠, AAA-BBB, and AA-BB-CC and place them on the board (the rest go back in the box).

Each player draws 2 patches from the centre pile for their own hand of patches.

Finally, turn over 3 patches from the centre pile as the market. The person who has pet a cat most recently goes first!

Game play

Everyone takes a turn going clockwise around the players.

On their turn a player will do these two actions in this order:

  1. Place a patch from your hand onto the board, and check to see if it scores (and score it - see below)
  2. Take a piece from the 3 faceup marketplace patches. Replace the tile from the facedown stacks

What to look out for

Whilst the rules are straight forward, you are looking to score points based on Design Tiles, Cat Tokens, and Buttons. 

Design tiles are the three placed on your quilt and refers to what colours are placed in the surrounding six spaces around the design tile. For example, AA-BB-CC means there needs to be three pairs of different colours (eg. 2x yellow, 2x green, 2x blue), whereas AAA-BBB are two trios of  colours (eg. 3x yellow and 3x green).

Cat tokens are attracted to your quilt based on the pattern (not colour - cats see in black and white!) and each cat will have two patterns in a particular shape. This pattern can be reversed and/or flipped, but it must be made up of one of these patterns, not a mix. You can attract more than one cat to your quilt of course, but each set must be unique and not be used or overlap with another set. You can use the border pieces of the quilt board when scoring these.

Buttons are 'sewed' on once a group of three or more colours are made. These can be any shape, and can also use the border pieces of the quilt board. If you sew all six buttons you also gain a rainbow button to sew anywhere! Note that each group of 3 or more buttons must be separate - eg. a group of 6 green patches is only 1 button, not 2.

Ending the game

Once everyone has completely filled their quilt boards each player scores points based on Design Goal Tiles, Cat Token Tiles, and Button Tokens. Most points wins!

 

 

Shipping & Handling

All of our games are packed and shipped to you by the next business day.

We ship where possible by re-using materials from our own deliveries. We do this to minimise our own enviromental impacts in getting your games to you.

Calico Resources

Calico on Boardgame Geek

BoardGameGeek is an excellent resource including reviews, community forums and videos. The forums are full of helpful informtaion and there is a genuinely helpful community. It is one of our favorite resources, although does tend to be focused on heavier games.

How to Play Calico

Calico Review