What it is
Calico is a calm, colourful tile-laying game in which everyone sews their own quilt. Your board is a grid of hexagons with a border that’s already decorated, and you fill it tile by tile: each tile has one of six colours and one of six patterns, and when the quilts are full the game ends.
Points come from three places. Inside the quilt there are three goals, and each one asks for a certain combination of colours or patterns in the six tiles around it, all different, in pairs, in threes. Then there are buttons, which you sew on when you put enough tiles of the same colour next to each other. And there are the cats. Each game three cats have their favourite patterns and come to whoever builds the right group, and the bigger or trickier the group, the more the cat is worth.
There’s little interaction, and it all goes through the market. New tiles are picked from three face-up ones in the middle of the table, so everyone sees what you take. The rest is a personal puzzle in which every tile has to do several jobs at once.
How it plays
Unfortunately luck counts for quite a lot here. The goals on your board want specific tiles, of certain colours or with certain patterns, and there are only three copies of each tile in the bag: it might never come out, or come out and end up with another player. If that’s exactly the one you’re missing, you can be as good as you like, but there’s not much you can do.
Compared with Carcassonne or Isle of Skye you feel the difference. There you can always place a tile somewhere, at worst you start a new city or a new lake. Here the quilt has its borders, the goals sit in the middle, and if one asks for three completely different tiles they have to be completely different, or you score nothing. You can soften the luck by keeping your options open, without tying yourself to a single tile for each goal, and by going for buttons too.
The nugget
Calico, first of all, is a fabric: a plain cotton that Europe bought in India and then printed with patterns, named after Calicut, the city in Kerala it shipped from. Only later, because of those colourful patchy designs, did people in English start calling the three-coloured coat of cats calico too.
At our table
A tile-laying game for cat lovers: you sew a quilt, and if it’s well made, the cats come.
How long does Calico take?
The box says 30–45 minutes. At our table: 25 minutes at two, 40 minutes at three, 60 minutes at four.
The box
Video tutorial
Show the video tutorials 4 in Italian
CALICO | Tutorial #73 | Gioco da Tavolo boardgamesfrancesco ·YouTube
[Tutorial] Calico - Gioco da Tavolo ITA theuncle ·YouTube
What is your favourite tile placement game?
There are all kinds, from medieval cities to Japanese gardens.
