Tapestry is a game about advancing a civilization through millennia as it discovers new technology and expands. This is the core of the game's appeal: it promises the flavor and trappings of a "civ builder" game -- though at 90-120 minutes, it will take half the time (or less!) of other games with similar themes.
The gameplay defies full description without the components in front of you for easy reference. The highlights, then. There's a central game board with four tracks devoted to different lines of advancement; each player will pursue some of these but be unable to do them all, and where they make different choices is a key part of where their strategies will diverge.
Meanwhile, each player has a personal board in front of them, a sort of Sudoku-like 9 x 9 grid subdivided into 3 x 3 sections. Buildings are arranged on this grid to unlock things, including some large buildings representing major construction efforts (and represented by substantial pre-painted miniatures). Filling in parts of your personal map, and working around its natural obstacles, is another axis of the strategy.
Depending on how slavishly you want your civilization simulation to be, parts of the system may drive you nuts. There's a sort of tech tree to things, with X leading to Y along the lines of a game like 7 Wonders -- but not a great deal of interconnectedness. It is, for example, possible to discover vaccines while simultaneously being a bit sketchy on that whole "wheel" thing. There's also a rather abstract approach to progressing through the five delineated ages into which the game is divided -- though the turn order always proceeds clockwise, player choose to advance ages when they're out of actions. The result: some players could be in the figurative Bronze Age while other opponents might still be in the Stone Age, even though they're all competing with each other for access to same things. Personally, these are trade-offs I don't mind making in the name of streamlined play, but I've seen some reviewers ding the game for the odd flavor.
I do have other reservations about the game. My biggest is that early turns matter a lot. It's pretty common for games involving resource management to depend on building good resource generation early on. But Tapestry really demands this to a greater degree, and it's not always clear just how bad a subpar choice is until it has snowballed on you through the game's five ages. The endgame has players dropping out one by one as they run out of actions, and the games I've played or heard about often end with one player (who had a strong early game) taking many more turns than their opponents. Final scores have not been close, with a 100-point scoring track often getting lapped two or even three times by a winner who is generally more than 100 points ahead of the last place player. It feels vital to me that whoever is explaining the game stress enormously how important early game economy matters. And then, even if they've done that, the first game will likely be a blowout.
The game does contain an element that appears to be intended as a catch-up mechanism to address this issue. The first player to cross into an age before anyone else gets some rewards, which in theory seem to balance for the players who still have actions to finish in the previous age. But this is not how it's shaken out in games I've played or observed. Running out of actions first in an age is not necessarily a sign that you've made weaker choices. A smart player (or a player more experienced than their opponents) can make strong choices and still finish the age first to collect the "catch-up" reward going into the next age. It can be double gas for the savvy player, an advantage they can often collect for several ages before the sheer momentum of their engine finally slows enough that the game's true trailing player(s) might ever "end an age first."
Those pre-painted miniatures the game comes with? I'm not really a fan of those, either. They are beautiful, to be sure, but they actually make the game harder to play than it would be with more conventional punched tokens. For one thing, the rounded, artistically rendered bases don't always clearly conform to the precise square patterns of the mini-map you're trying to place them on. For another, the height of the minis makes it hard to tell from an angle just what is really covered. You have to lean over your mini-map and look straight down on it from above to tell exactly what's covered. And if you want to know how an opponent is doing, which building they might be after to fill in the perfect area on their map? Forget it. Flat, 2D chips wouldn't look as cool, that's for sure, but they'd be far more user-friendly.
It seems the game isn't particularly well-balanced either, even apart from the extreme score differential between players of different skill levels. The game comes with a number of different civilizations you can play, each with their own unique ability to use. Some of these abilities seem strictly better than others as you read through them, and a few even seem to explicitly counteract an advantage given by a different civilization.
A series of errata was announced recently, acknowledging the imbalance between the civilizations. A few were weakened a bit, while others were buffed up. But the nature of the buffs doesn't seem especially compelling. In most cases, the weaker civilizations are spotted some number of victory points at the start of the game, depend on the number of opposing players. This doesn't affect the way the civilization actually plays; instead, it seems to be a tacit acknowledgement that even if you try to do what they do best, the best way it can possibly be done, you'll simply come up that many points short. Should you even bother doing it at all then, when you could look other ways to score points?
I might be willing to try Tapestry again under the right conditions. If the players are all clear-eyed about the value of early actions, if certain powerful and/or weak civilizations are simply excluded from the game, then there are hints of game mechanics in the mix here that might be pretty fun. (Mechanics I could not easily explain above without having the pieces to show for reference.) But it's hard to imagine wanting to make such allowances here with other gaming options available -- including stronger ones from Stonemaier Games like the widely beloved Scythe, or Viticulture, or Wingspan, or Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig.
For me, Tapestry is at best a C. But as I said at the outset, there are plenty of gamers out there who love it. If you were considering it, you might watch a video review on YouTube for a "second opinion."
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