Verdict

Threaded’s light worker placement rules are approachable for beginners, but once the needles start to sew, things get brutal. This is an engaging game of careful drafting and ruthless ‘take that’ moves. The high levels of luck involved may frustrate strategists, and the components aren’t quite perfect, but the snappy play time means Threaded rarely outstays its welcome.

Pros

Beginner-friendly
Surprisingly tense, strategic gameplay
Interesting decisions to make

Cons

Heavily luck-based
Impractical components

Needlework isn't a topic often touched by board games. When the two hobbies meet, the result is usually a cozy tile placement game like Patchwork. Threaded: A Game of Needles and Points appears at first to follow the same trends. But, after several tests with a review copy, this pastel paradise turned out to be a world of cutthroat business enterprise.

In Threaded, you're in charge of a bustling needlecraft studio. You and your assistants (for this is a worker placement game) make your hay by crafting beautiful bargello tapestries for commissioning customers.

Sounds idyllic, right? They say if you do a job you love, you'll never work a day in your life. What you will do, however, is get into a fistfight over the best scraps in the bargain bin.

There's plenty of competition in Threaded, and resources are scarce. You can't afford to waste thread, so you'll spend most of the game racing to the shops to beat your buddies to the goods.

Each round, players take turns assigning one of their three assistants (or four for two-player games) to a unique store. When everyone has sent their minions shopping, the stores resolve in alphabetical order, with the earliest arrivals getting their first pick of the products.

First, you'll get to gather equipment cards. These offer one-off powers when used at certain stores, which can be anything from swapping out a thread color on your needle to crafting an entire tapestry for free.

Next, you can draw fresh commissions. These secret cards represent the colors and patterns demanded by your customers, and you'll score points for each tapestry you make that matches their requirements. You can have up to four of these, and it's worth it to spend some time sifting through the deck to find the picks that best suit you.

After that, you'll gather thread cubes. These can be stored in a basket on your player board, but you can only keep so many. The excess must be threaded onto your needle, or they must be sent to the communal scraps pile.

Finally, you head to the finishes store. You'll take two actions from the list here in any combination. You can draft new tapestries from those available, craft a tapestry from your hand, spend a thread to source new ones from scraps, or spend three threads to refresh the line of tapestries. After this, everything refreshes, and the first player token (which, adorably, you can make a needlework version of) passes to someone new.

At the heart of the game's strategy is your needle, and it presents an interesting conundrum. Firstly, once a thread is added, it can only be removed when you craft a tapestry - or it gets pushed off the end of the needle by incoming threads. You also can only move threads between your basket and needle when you take an action to gain threads.

This means you'll need to thread your needle before the store where you craft your tapestry opens. That means placing the color combo you need for your next tapestry publicly. If you haven't drafted said tapestry yet, you leave yourself wide open for a 'take that' draft from a rival.

Playing it safe, however, erodes your efficiency. With only three actions per turn, you can't hit every store on the street. Plus, the game ends when someone crafts their fifth tapestry. Racing to the finish line doesn't guarantee you the most points (careful drafting of commissions and tapestries does), but if you fall behind on output, your chances of winning grow slim.

Threaded is low on the complexity scale, but it's tense and strategic regardless. I found myself falling it love with it the more I played. Four players feels like the sweet spot for me - more crowded and cutthroat than two players, but less bloated than the full five players.

I'm a fan, but I have two qualms of note. Firstly, the components are pretty, but they're not very practical. The pastel color scheme makes the player tokens tough to tell apart at times. Each set is printed with a unique pattern (presumably to support color-blind players), but the details are too tiny to help much.

There's an even bigger elephant in the needlework studio, and that's Lady Luck. Every aspect of this game relies on randomness. You have limited control over the threads, commissions, equipment, and tapestries you're working with. It can feel frustrating to be thwarted by bad draws instead of another player.

Basically, Threaded is a lightweight delight, but strategy gamers who enjoy more agency might want to stay away.

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