Are you feeling a little mentally threadbare and in need of someone to patch you back together? Then crawl under your soft little patchwork blanket, because we are about to get cozy and puzzly with Quilts and Cats of Calico, the digital edition of the popular board game.
Quilts and Cats of Calico is the digital edition of the popular board game Calico. For those who are not yet properly familiar with Calico — which is a shame, by the way, because it is a fantastic tile-laying game — let’s briefly explain how the game works.
On each turn, you place a tile from your hand onto your player board. Tiles come in different colours and different patterns. After placing a tile, you take one of the three face-up tiles from the patch market. On your board, three scoring objectives are available. Around these objectives, you need to place colours and/or patterns in specific ways to score points. In addition, you can earn buttons by creating a group of three patches of the same colour. Cats will curl up on your quilt if you have collected enough tiles of a certain pattern or arranged them in the right shape. At the end of the game, you score points for your cats, buttons and completed objectives. The player with the most points wins. Purrfectly simple!
In Calico — and therefore also in the competitive version of Quilts and Cats of Calico — you need to puzzle carefully if you want to claw your way to victory. You can also drive your opponents up the proverbial curtains. For example, by taking the tile your opponent had clearly been brooding over. Still, do not spend too much time watching the cat in the tree. Try to focus on specific tiles so you do not get completely tangled up in your puzzle. Calico is a very entertaining and very challenging puzzle, and absolutely comes recommended.
This digital edition of the popular board game largely follows the same gameplay, but besides a regular game of the board game, most of the cat meat is found in the story mode. That mode shakes up the familiar gameplay and transforms it into a puzzle game with different levels and a storyline centred on the worship of cats in a magical world where everyone is busy making fluffy patchwork quilts. Cozy fantasy for fans of granny hobbies, basically.
The storyline revolves around assignments you complete for different characters. In a kind of semi-open patchwork world, you choose the level you want to play, and the character gives you an assignment connected to the story. Players then need to solve a puzzle. This means the focus is less on the point optimisation of the board game and more on completing specific objectives by puzzling in the right way. Unlike the base game, you can see which tiles may still be in the bag and which ones are coming up next on screen — a bit like in Tetris — and often part of your quilt has already been completed. As a result, the story mode games feel similar to puzzle games such as Rush Hour, where you mainly need to stitch, knit and crochet the solution together.
The game also includes, of course, a multiplayer mode that more closely resembles traditional Calico, but the cats entering your quilt have been given just a little more personality and a will of their own. During the game, the cats will often walk across your blanket and, just like real cats, they frequently seem to get in the way on purpose. Fortunately, they are also easy enough to move aside, and sometimes you can even pet them, if they allow it.
Quilts and Cats of Calico is a cozy implementation of the board game and, in addition to the board game itself, offers an interesting story mode for players who want to enjoy some solo puzzling on their game console or tablet.
