Damask

Oooh it’s finally here!!! The game that made my husband dream of wild wallpaper patterns for weeks is finally here!! And I’m chuffed as chintz that it is!

The Road To Damask

In Damask, we play Master Weavers using looms to create beautifully patterned fabrics out of luxurious silks (known as “Damasks”). Heading from Damascus to the textile houses of Venice, we want to make the most money as well as impress the very generous Weaver’s Guild.

The silks are represented by cubes on a spinning wheel board. The cubes complete (“mount”) patterned cards representing the intricately designed Damasks. Each damask is a mixture of two out of 6 colours (black, dark blue, light blue, yellow, pink, and red) and four patterns (concave, fleur, shield, square).

Played over three rounds (“seasons”), we are aiming to build a connected line of Damasks that match in pattern and colour. For everything that shares a feature with the last card you mounted, you’ll earn an extra coin. And, if you just so happen to be producing the season’s most fashionable colour and/or pattern, you’ll impress the Guild so much that they will bestow favours upon you!

In another textile twist, silks you don’t use up immediately are “overstock”. And these can be taken by other wily weavers. This sounds sneaky until you find out (a) they must pay you in Guild favours for stealing and (b) each round you will get taxed for the cubes in your overstock when the spinning wheel passes the hand of monetary doom! Okay so it’s not called that, but my experience paying taxes totally makes it feel like that!

Silky Smooth Strategies!

As with most of the games I really enjoy, every turn in Damask presents thinky choices and trade-offs. The subtle crunch wasn’t obvious from the first game we played. But the tactical threads woven into the gameplay became clear very quickly into our second session.

Even choosing whether to take cubes at all becomes a back-and forth battle between what you want and what impact that has on the spinning wheel. After all, take too many too soon and you’ll be heading to the end of a fashionable season earlier than you might like.

Same with the overstock option. You could steal another player’s cubes and further your own Damasks. That would certainly help frustrate their fashion forward efforts. But, by doing so, you are gifting them Guild favours and potentially risking a hefty tax bill. Both are going to work against you eventually. Question is; do you risk it?! The fact that there is a payback for stealing takes the sting out of the action – it feels a lot less mean and is actually very strategic. Clever stuff for a game on the lighter end of the weight spectrum.

And those Guild favours are sweet gifts indeed. As well as helping with straight up Damask filling, they open up a world of combo-tastic possibilities. By using them like currency, you can spend them to do additional actions including replacing cards in the pool, mounting an additional damask, and using them instead of coins when the tax man cometh. And if used in conjunction with the right season and the colour/pattern of your last Damask, well, coins and favours rain down upon you!

Final Thoughts

As you can probably tell, we really enjoy playing Damask. It’s easy to learn and tricky to master which is slap bang in our spinning-wheel house! The desire to synergise your current turn with your last one using colours and patterns is a very simple but effective challenge. And it doesn’t hurt that the game looks gorgeous.

The designer has worked hard to make it so that each element is tied to the silk weaving and trading setting in some way. And of course, whilst cubes will never really be silks, they are an innovative way to make the wheel work and not roll off the cards or get tangled like spheres or strings would. The wheel design is also very cool and feels sturdy and smooth to operate. Interestingly, both the silk cubes and the cards are drawn blind from bags. It feels a little unusual to draw cards out of a bag. I was expecting a dispenser, I must confess. But I’m all for novelty and it works. As a two-player game, it feels tenser – you know moving that wheel is definitely going to affect your one and only opponent. And for us that’s great because we love to be the architect of each other’s demise! It’s also quicker at two which fits in with our board gaming obsessed but crazy busy lives. Plus, there’s a solo mode which I can’t wait to try. And what perfect timing as I am weaving my way through my own collection attempting to play all of my I player mode games in the #2023solochallenge!

If you like gorgeous abstract strategy games that focus on pattern matching and set collection with unique open drafting and crunchy choices, then Damask could be one for this season’s gaming!