Base price: $29.
1 – 4 players.
Play time: 30 – 45 minutes.
BGG Link
Check it out on Kickstarter!
Logged plays: 1
Full disclosure: A preview copy of Knitting Circle was provided by Flatout Games. Some art, gameplay, or other aspects of the game may change between this preview and the fulfillment of the Kickstarter, should it fund, as this is a preview of a currently unreleased game.
Alright, weird week! There’s a third secret preview that I can’t talk about until the morning of October 15th, so you’ll probably notice the conspicuous placeholder that’s on the front page of the site. Just trying to keep things interesting for y’all. It reminds me that I should probably do some site-wide updates, soon. My Hot 15, for instance, really needs an overhaul to reflect that I kind of just constantly play Captain Flip, Burgle Bros., Cartographers, Sea Salt & Paper, and Middle Ages, at this point. It’s a good constant cycle of games I never get tired of. On a related subject of publishers I never get tired of, Flatout is starting their annual Kickstarter shortly, and I’m pleased to get to tell you more about it. So let’s dive right in and check out Knitting Circle!
In Knitting Circle, players are once again crafting with the best of them (the best of them being your cats). This time, instead of quilts, you’re making various garments for friends, family, and otherwise. The cats don’t really help beyond messing with your yarn, which thankfully has no in-game implications. Instead, you’ll be drafting various yarn pieces to try and assemble your various garments, giving them buttons corresponding to the garment type, the color style, and the colors used. Meeting your button goals will net you more points, sure, but that’s also a lot easier said than done when you’ve got multiple players with their own goals all drafting tiles. Never a dull moment. Extra public goals can also be put in play, giving everyone some shared challenges to try and shoot for, mixing a bit more strategy and chaos together. Will your strategy end up knitted or knotted?
Contents
Player Count Differences
As with any drafting game, there are liable to be a few differences, here, but I think Knitting Circle does a nice job balancing for player count, in my experience. The easiest way to do it is the first thing that the game does: with more players, you play on a bigger board, so there are more pieces available to draft, and since you can skip over players you naturally can hit more of the board on a turn with more players. This means that planning and strategy still matter, but you also have a few more options easily accessible to you. I worry about table space a bit at higher player counts (the Garment Cards are long), but otherwise, I wouldn’t say I have a major preference. Simultaneous play once the drafting phase has ended does a lot to keep the game moving pretty quickly, and I appreciate that. For those of you who are interested, the game will also have a solo mode.
Strategy
- Naturally, plan ahead. You want to take tiles that are going to help you in the future, and that often means taking tiles that, say, you can spend to get garments that you need for public goals or for your own buttons. You may not always be taking tiles just because you want to put them on a garment.
- Don’t just take tiles willy-nilly; you need to make sure you’re taking tiles that you can play correctly or you’ll have useless cruft left over. If you only take tiles that face the same way, for instance, you’re not going to be able to play all of them without having to spend one to flip the tile over to its other side. That’s obviously inefficient, so try to avoid that.
- You don’t want to waste tiles, so try not to have more than two left over at the end of a round. You can only keep two tiles per round, so, any leftovers get returned. If you can’t spend them, at least use them to get new garments or something so that you’re not just burning extra tiles.
- Use your buttons to guide which garments and tiles you’re going after. Your buttons will tell you which garments, patterns, and colors will score you more points. That can (and should) inform what other stuff you’re grabbing. If you have sweater buttons, take a sweater (if you can). If you have a pink button, take pink tiles and add them to your sweater. Do things like that, and the bonus points you’ll get will work in your favor.
- The public goals are good things to shoot for if you have nothing else to do. Sometimes it’s hard to know what to do next in a game like this. Your buttons are one good metric to measure against, but if you’re not seeing much from that, you can look to the public goals. They have a lot of points tied up in taking care of certain tasks, so see what you can score from there and then execute accordingly.
- There’s pros and cons to finishing garments early or pushing for the full length. The major con is that you need more tiles, but you also get more points (and occasionally other bonuses). It’s worth considering the trade-offs each time. Sometimes it’s even worth making an Ugly Garment (one without a pattern) just because you can finish it faster and move on to something new. There’s not always one right answer.
- Grabby Paw tokens are scarce, yes, but you should make sure to use them! They’re pretty handy for completing certain challenges or letting you get certain garments later in the game if you haven’t seen any tiles of a certain color. Don’t hold on to them indefinitely; they’re not worth anything at the end of the game.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- I appreciate that we’re keeping the Calico controversy alive. It’s essentially a meme at this point. For the uninitiated, Flatout’s first game in this “series” was Calico, a quilting game with a distinctly-not-calico cat on the front. Calico is also a quilting term, you see. It’s funny. This led to some huffiness, so to placate, Flatout added a calico cat to the front of their next game, Verdant. This means that now the “Flatout game with a calico cat on the cover” is Verdant, not Calico. I think this is quite funny. There’s a polite reference to this on the orange cat’s player board, and I love it.
- Great art, as usual. Beth is one of the best in the business for color work and cozy-adjacent realism. She just has a really good grasp of presentation and form, and her work consistently hits. She’ll hate that I’m saying this, but it’s just always rewarding to see a practiced expert in their craft, and I’d say there are only a handful of board game artists who are producing such consistently high-quality work in this business.
- I think this does a better job aligning with my personal tastes in puzzle games, where planning is rewarded but it’s not quite as taxing, cognitively, as the original Calico. I’m less frustrated when I play, which is nice, but I still get to make a complex plan and execute it. I just don’t feel as strangled by my previous bad decisions as I was with the original Calico. Whether or not that’s good is truly a matter of preference; I have some friends who absolutely love that feeling.
- Word on the street is that this might integrate with Calico in some way, so, look forward to that. I can’t confirm, deny, or comment further. Guess you’ll need to wait and see.
- I particularly appreciate the simultaneous play aspects, especially the shared goal cards that all players can benefit from. I like that there’s no real point in racing for them; anyone who achieves one in the round it’s first achieved gets the “first to claim” bonus, and then all players after just get the points (not the bonus and the points).
Mehs
- It’s kind of odd that most of the things you’re assembling are scarf-looking, even though there’s only one type of garment that’s actually scarves. It’s a bit of gameplay disconnect. It’s not that the tiles need to make something hat-shaped; it’s just that everything kind of looks like scarves, and that threw me off a bit. Not really sure what to do about it, but that’s what happened.
- It would be nice if there were more avenues to get tiles of colors you need; we didn’t draw a green tile for about a solid third of the game. I suppose that’s what the Grabby Paws are for, but man, you can get some strange luck in low player count games since you’re drawing fewer tiles.
- Similarly, it seems odd that a rainbow garment would be considered “ugly” under the game’s rules. Some people like that aesthetic!
- It can be a bit tough on your first play to tell the difference between the two sides of the tiles; keep an eye out, because that can affect your strategy. It’s helped a bit by the fact that two tiles of the same side won’t fit together quite right. Use that to help guide you.
Cons
- Shuffling six individual decks of strangely-sized cards can be a bit irritating. It slows down setup without multiple people helping, and then the cards are almost a bit too strangely-sized to actually shuffle well. I haven’t encountered something I can’t riffle shuffle in a while, and I do have to say I was a little impressed.
Overall: 8.5 / 10
Overall, I think Knitting Circle is pretty great! I’m always going to be most partial to Fit to Print and Cascadia, but, I mean, Flatout is pretty well-known for dropping a winner every year and this year is no exception. There’s still a big push for cozy crafting games in both the video and board game spaces, and I’m glad to see there are folks going for it in their designs. Knitting Circle shares some of the same DNA as Calico, but I think provides a more gradual ramp into complexity that its senior doesn’t necessarily have. And that’s fine! Calico is a game aiming to bring experienced gamers into the cozy gaming space, and Knitting Circle provides a ramp from the opposite direction: it gets crafting-prone folks excited about board gaming. Being able to approach from both sides lets players meet in the middle, and I think Flatout has been doing a great job publishing games that broaden the scope of the hobby (notably the Spiel des Jahres jury agrees with this assessment, as far as Cascadia is concerned). I do wish the cards weren’t absurd lengths, but, it’s quirky. I like the puzzle that Knitting Circle presents, and I think Beth Sobel’s art continues to be one of the biggest selling points of these games. They’re all gorgeous, and a good-looking game with an approachable theme is how you get new people in and trying games. That’s to all our benefit. So it’s another great and approachable title from Flatout, and if you’re interested in that sort of thing, you like knitting, or you just correctly have Flatout on your shortlist of “Publishers Who Don’t Miss”, I’m happy to say that I definitely recommend Knitting Circle! It’s been a lot of fun.
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