Cats are bastards. Cute, cuddly, adorable bastards.
And so is Calico.
Have you ever tried sleeping with one in your bed? A cat, not the game.
That would be weird.
At first, when the furry feline jumps onto the bed it’s fine. You’re actually glad that the cat has decided to join you. Everything is literally just purring along and both you and the cat couldn’t be happier.
But then, you need to adjust; to shift your position. Get a little more comfortable. But the cat currently resting in between your legs in the most adorable curled up position ever, just…won’t…move.
Sure, you’re twenty times its size. You could out strength and outsmart the little bastard in a nanosecond. But for some reason, the universe has decreed that nothing shall disturb this animal. That neither heaven nor earth shall disturb this fur-ball that is Thor’s Hammer.
This is your life now.
Your fate has spoken.
So you lie in a painful form of Zen. Hurting in your current position, but accepting the cost.
And loving the thing that is causing the agony.
Or in other words, Calico.
A 1-4 person game designed by Kevin Russ and published by Flatout Games and AEG, Calico is an adorable tile laying game that likes to be agonizing and cute rolled into a ball of fluffy game play.
Take a tile from the market of three in the middle and place it on your quilt, wherever you want (“You can have whatever you liiiiike”). Replenish the market, turn goes to the next person, repeat until everyone has filled up their board. Along the way, you’ll collect buttons and cats. The person with the highest score wins.
Like any good Kinizia game, the brain-exploding decision making is in the scoring.
Starting with the easiest, you have three ways to score points.
When you place three colors next to each other, you get to place a button of that color and earn three points. Place at least one button of every color on your board, and you get an extra rainbow button, also worth three points.
Cute!
Cats are color blind, so they don’t care at all about colors. But they do like patterns. Lay down a pattern that they like and you earn that cat on your quilt. And because cats are gonna cat, some patterns are with more points because they are really persnickety and are harder to accomplish than others.
Adorable!
Finally, you have three scoring tiles in the middle of the board where you are trying to follow a pattern around that tile. You can do this with either colors OR patterns and you get the points in the blue circle. Figure out how to do it with both and you get the slightly higher value yellow points.
Fun!
The aforementioned brain-plosion comes in very subtle ways, that like to sneak and pounce on you like, well, umm, yeah…
Calico is a tile laying game that likes to be agonizing and cute.
The first pounce is that there is nothing you can do to change the tiles in the market. Nothing. What you see is what you get. Thank Bastet that you get to hold an extra tile in your hand, giving you a faint glimmer of hope and options, but it might wind up where neither of the tiles in hand are the ones you want or can even use.
The second “what are you doing to me?” is when you realize that what looked like a wide open board, full of 20 empty spots of possibilities is, in fact, extremely restrictive. While the rules try to distract you like a laser beam toy, and tell you that you can use the colors and pattern along the border to fulfill button and cat requests, this is much much harder and requires more planning than originally thought.
And during game play, you slowly realize that there really isn’t a three pattern space to do your own thing. And the same three colors can’t touch each other to count for points. And some of the cats like patterns of 5 or more tiles. And…
You can see where this is going, but I haven’t even gotten to the biggest road block of all. The three scoring tiles in the middle share three empty spaces with each other. The scoring tiles themselves can literally be the antithesis of each other. So, if you have one scoring tile that doesn’t like ANY of the same colors, sharing two empty spaces with a scoring tile that like 3 of one and 3 of another, those two empty spaces have now become the most precarious spaces IN THE KNOWN GALAXY!
That sound you hear during the game is an aria of exclamations and groans around the table as the tiles people are looking for don’t show up, or are taken by someone else. At some point, every player, and I mean every player, will look down at their board and realize that a tile that was placed at the beginning of the game, is in exactly the wrong place.
There’s nothing you can do about it. You’re running out of time. You won’t score the perfect game. You need to make considerations. With every newly drawn and chosen tile, you can feel your breath of hope slipping from you.
There’s no use fighting it.
Just accept it.
Your fate has spoken.
If you’re, like magic, the chosen one, that one glorious tile appears. The one you have been hoping for, saving the space until the very last moment like a shrine to St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes.
You gleefully pick it up, put it in its rightful place, and breathe deeply. All is right with the world.
Better than right, it is now whole.
As difficult and as painful as it is, those moments of sweet victory are hard fought. This was not an experience where every thing positive is thrown at you. So the few good moments that do make it through, feel earned.
Making them all the more valuable and special, and worth the pain.
Much like the cute, fuzzy adorable bastard sleeping between my legs right now.
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