Tapestry: Plans and Ploys Expansion
Couldn’t get enough civilization building goodness in Tapestry? Needing some more?
We’ll have we got some news for you on Plans and Ploys – the first expansion for Tapestry! It brings with it lots of fun goodies to add to your game, new elements that’ll have you switching up your strategy, and new civilizations to explore!
If you’re looking for our full review of Tapestry, click here!
What Does Plans and Ploys Add to the Base Game?
Plans and Ploys adds a lot of new and exciting things for your base game. Here are the main elements in the new content:
You’ll most likely first notice the 7 new landmark miniatures! These, like the originals, are all painted and ready to go. You’ll also get 10 new civilization mats! 15 new tapestry cards, 4 new space tiles along with one replacement tile for a misprint found in the base game, and 12 landmark tiles for the advancement tracks. You’ll also get a bag to hold your territory tiles, and for those that enjoy the solo experience, some added content for the Automa game as well!
What Do We Think?
The first thing to note, is that everything within Plans and Ploys is designed so that it can be integrated with the base game. There’s no need to separate the expansion every time if you don’t want to. All of the new civilization mats can be played with the original mats.
Speaking of those Civilization Mats, we really love the challenges they bring to the game. Each mat plays uniquely and we each found ourselves excited to give them a try, even over some of those we like in the base game. The various civilizations bring so much replayability to Tapestry and truly help keep each play feeling fresh for us. Just as one example, the new Aliens civilization allows players the chance to explore space tokens more easily than they otherwise would in the game. This provides a fun, thematic element around a unique civilization while also opening up different strategies due to the early access to space!
The Civilization mats are one of the reasons we love Tapestry so much. Now with these added 10 civilizations, players will have 26 different mats to choose from! Not only is that 26 different civilizations for you to try, but depending on which civilizations you’re playing against, your strategy might change from one to the next giving you a LOT of content to work through and enjoy.
On the whole, we find them to be relatively balanced, though it’s really hard to say. Some civilizations just click better and you figure out an effective strategy for them right off the bat, while others might take a few plays to get the hang of it. Then of course it’s largely dependent on the player as well as we aren’t all equally balanced in our gaming abilities. If you, like us, enjoy recording your board game data, you might like knowing that Stonemaier allows players to submit their game data on their website so they as publishers can track the balance between the various civilizations.
Individual Landmark Cards
While Plans and Ploys doesn’t change the game dramatically as far as mechanics, it does bring in some new elements in the Landmark Cards. At the start of the game everyone gets one and it helps give players something to work towards and build which is especially nice for those games where players may always be just behind on the advancement track and can’t build everything they want to. This can help you fill in areas of your Capital City that might otherwise have gone forgotten. However, your game won’t be won or lost by building your landmark which is also nice. If you don’t want to worry about it you don’t have to.
If you had an issue with the more “organic” design of the landmarks miniatures, this is still prevalent in this expansion. For the most part they cover the spaces in your Capital City fairly well, but players who like things to line up perfectly might find issue.
My biggest gripe with these new miniatures is that they do not fit easily in the original box. I loath carrying around two boxes when I want to play a game and it’s this fact that nearly always keeps us from getting expansions in the first place. While we were able to fit everything in the box, it requires a bit of cramming the new miniatures into any and all open nooks. It’s not pretty, but it works. I wish that there would have been space left for expansion content so that it could fit easily within the base box, which is pretty big as it stands.
Landmark Tiles and Territory Bag
It may seem silly, but we also really enjoyed the landmark tiles. These are just simple tokens that sit on the advancement tracks. They helped us know when a landmark was available or taken by just glancing along the track. It’s small, but it helped.
While the material of the territory bag is quite thin and will probably be prone to ripping, we really liked this simple addition for the territory tiles. This made mixing them up and drawing them easier. Again, another small thing that improved our play experience.
Summary
As players who generally avoid expansions, we have to say that we found this one quite enjoyable! The new civilizations and the landmark cards provide great additions to the game.
If you prefer your expansions to dramatically change the game and bring in new mechanics and a different feel, you won’t find that in Plans and Ploys. If you however are fans of the base game, Plans and Ploys brings you more of all the good stuff without changing the heart and soul of the original game. It’s a “more stuff” expansion and it delivers.
Is it necessary? In our opinion, if you are still loving Tapestry and feel that you have a lot left to explore, we don’t think Plans and Ploys is a necessary expansion, certainly not in the same way that Tuscany was for Viticulture. However, that being said, we found our excitement for Tapestry rekindled with the additional content Plans and Ploys provides and do not see ourselves playing Tapestry without it going forward.
To purchase a copy of the Plans and Ploys Expansion click here. (base game required for play.)
Find this and all our top board game recommendations on our Amazon storefront!
A special thank you to our friends at Stonemaier Games for sending us a copy of Plans and Ploys for review.
As always, our thoughts and opinions are our own.
Game Info:
Title: Tapestry: Plans and Ploys (Tapestry Base Game Required)
1-5 Players ages 12+
Designer: Jamey Stegmaier
Artist: Andrew Bosley
Publisher: Stonemaier Games
