Patchwork Doodle

"Patchwork Doodle is a new Roll & Write game for 1-6 players from Uwe Rosenberg and Lookout Games, the creator and publisher of Patchwork. Much like the original, your goal is to fill a quilt with various patches. Be careful though, because you want to fill up your quilt and leave as few open spaces as possible before you run out of patches.

 

To start, each player gets a sheet, pencil and starting shape. You also deal 8 shape cards in a circle in the center of the table with the token for keeping track of patches in between two random cards. Once each person has drawn their starting shape, you start the game by rolling the die and moving the token that many cards clockwise around the circle. Each person then has a chance to draw the shape on the given card, after which the card is discarded. Afterwards, you continue on in this fashion (rolling the die, moving the token, drawing the shape and discarding the card) until there are only two cards left. At this point, you score points for the largest rectangle of filled in space on your board, then proceed to the next round. After three rounds of drawing and scoring, you subtract the number of empty spaces left on your board and have your final score. Throughout the game, you can also use special actions (drawing a shape adjacent to the current one, filling in one square on your quilt, cutting the current shape in two and using only one of the pieces) which help you to fill in extra space on your board.

 

The biggest question going in when playing Patchwork Doodle is "how does this compare to Patchwork?" One of the biggest differences is that Doodle is for up to 6 as opposed to just a two-person game so if you wanted more people in your Patchwork experience, this will fulfill that. The other big difference is the change in player choice. In the original, while the set-up was random each time, there was no randomness beyond the initial set-up. In Doodle, on the other hand, your choices are if/where you want to try to fit the current shape and if you want to use one of your actions. The shapes are determined randomly by die roll and you get no info about rounds 2 or 3 until you get to them (as opposed to seeing the order of pieces the entire time in the original). What this makes for is a more casual experience than the original Patchwork as you only have to care about your quilt and don't have to worry about what your opponent can do since none of their decisions rely upon yours. I recommend Patchwork Doodle as a puzzle-like, Patchwork-like game for a more casual audience."

 

-Alapai