I love the board game of Calico. I can’t say that I’m very good at it, but it’s still very satisfying to try to lay out 22 tiles in a way that satisfies as many of the goals as possible. There are tons of different ways to score points, but your different options mostly don’t work together, and there’s a lot of tension in the endgame as you get down to your last few critical spaces and have to hope that the right tiles become available. All of that is true of Quilts and Cats of Calico as well, but it comes with a lot of bloat that’s simply unnecessary.
The story mode is by far the biggest issue. Calico’s theme is paper-thin even by the standards of abstract board games, so it was hardly begging to by expanded into a proper narrative. But even by judging by those expectations, the story is awful. It’s just a sequence of random NPCs you don’t care about asking you to stitch equally random fabric items in order to “attract the cats” and a bizarre plot about trying to outdo a mechanical quilting loom. Thankfully it’s at least easy to click through the story instead of reading it, but the writing is hardly the only problem with this mode. The gameplay is inexplicably determined not to be Calico. You might have expected games against increasingly strong AI players or perhaps partially complete boards that you need to finish for a high score, but instead it’s almost entirely a sequence of puzzle boards where the pieces come out in a visible order and you need to obey placement rules that are not part of the original game. Most of them are something like “get six buttons” while only placing pieces adjacent to matching colors, and the pieces in the bag are such that there’s only one solution. Between knowing the exact order of tiles in advance and not being able to place wherever you want, this has remarkably little in common with the regular game of Calico. I also think that the character and background art in the story is quite ugly, but that’s both subjective and easily ignored. You can make your own decision from the Steam page screenshots.
So the story mode is a bit crap, but what about the rest of it? Well, there’s not much else. The Wingspan Steam version didn’t have a story mode and costs the same amount, but it made up for it with voiced factoids for every bird, great ambiance, online challenges, and fun statistics tracking. Calico has the same price, but outside of the story, the additions just don’t feel anywhere near as significant. The board really doesn’t look any more “alive” than an actual Calico board and outside of automated scoring, the only real addition is the animated cats that sleep at the top of the board. They might as well not be there if they’re just sleeping, but if you wake them up, they walk on top of the board and block your view. Even the music is rather underwhelming. It’s not bad, but neither does it really create the relaxing atmosphere that Wingspan‘s music does. It’s just a bit boring.
Having said all that, the issue here really isn’t that it’s a bad implementation of Calico. If all you want to do is play regular game against an AI or other people, this is a perfectly reasonable way to do that. The interface sometimes requires a few more clicks than I’d like and I’m not sure that making the information about remaining tiles available is going to help certain people take their turns quickly, but it all works. The trouble is that you can buy the physical version of Calico for $30, so if all you want to do is play it with a friend, it already costs more for two people to buy this version than to just get a copy of the real game. That’d be fine if there was something here that really made it worth a higher cost of admission, but there’s not. If there’s ever a version without the story mode and some of the other fluff for $5-$10 less, that would be an easier recommendation. As it is, you’re paying for a lot of unnecessary and underbaked extras.
Rating: 60%
Time to beat: 3-5 hours for the main story depending on how many side missions you do.
MSRP: $20
For more reviews, see my Steam curator page: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/43219041