Gingham

• Designer: Robert Hovakimyan 
• Publisher: Bitewing Games
• Players: 2-4
• Age: 12+
• Time: 20-40 minutes
• Amazon affiliate link:  https://amzn.to/48Jo2I0
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

The race is on! Ants have found an abandoned picnic blanket ripe with sweets, but there aren’t enough for every colony… 

Gingham is a tricky game of confection connection. In this game, players position their queens around the gingham picnic blanket and deploy their ants to connect sweets and claim the stockpiles they create.

Gingham is the second title in Bitewing Games’ Travel Line. This line of games is focused on being supremely easy to play with anyone, anywhere.

To setup, the cloth board for the player count is placed on the table – you will note the diagonal stitch running across the board.  The rows on the board go from the edge to the space which has the stitch. Also, the appropriate amount of sweets (Again for player count) are shuffled facedown and then one is placed face up on each intersection on the grid on the board.  The ability board is placed on the table and the tiles for it are placed at random on the five spots.  Players collect the ants, queens and scoring dial in their color.

The game is played in a series of rounds – until a player has reached the target score (32 in a 4p game, 40 in a 2/3p game) – at which point the game ends immediately. 

The lead player determines which edge of the playing area all players must play on each round. Everyone then places their queen next to a row on this edge, then deploys an ant into the row where they place their queen.  You can place your ant on an empty space, or you can bump a previously placed opponent’s ant.  This bumped ant will be placed by its owner on any empty space at the end of your turn.

The catch is that you cannot deploy your ant beyond the stitch in the blanket, and the rows closer to the star at the end of the row offer fewer options. That said, whoever places their queen closest to the star becomes the leader of the next round and places their queen next to a row on any other edge of the playing area; players take turns in order of the queens in the previous row (moving away from the star). Do you opt for a better turn order position for next round or more flexibility for ant placement this round?

By connecting matching sweet tokens with a line of your ants and by surrounding and claiming stockpiles, players score points.   You will score one point in your shortest chain of ants that connect those two like sweets.  These sweet tokens are then stacked atop one another after connecting, with sugar cubes being left behind (as shown on the empty space left behind). 

If you place an ant next to a sugar cube, you claim one and then can spend it on powerful abilities. You can only use one ability per turn – paying a cost in sugar cubes equal to the tile’s current location.  Once you use the ability, move its tile to the topmost spot (3 sugar cost), sliding everything else downward.

Finally, if you surround a sweet or a stockpile of sweets (by having an ant in every space around it), you score one point per sweet in the stockpile and then place your claim marker on top of the stockpile.  If an opponent already had a claim marker there, score it as if it were a sweet and then return it to its owner.  Players have one claim marker for each type of sweet.  Your claim markers are never safe; if an opponent completely surrounds your claim, they will kick your marker out.

Again, the game continues until the end of a round when a player hits the target score.  At this point there is some final scoring:

• 1 point per sweet in claimed stockpiles
• 5 points for the player(s) with the tallest claimed stockpile of each type
• 1 point for each leftover sugar cube

The player with the most points wins. Ties are not broken.

My thoughts on the game

Gingham is a beautifully designed game that still is an abstract game at heart.  Here, you place your cubes (ahem, ants) to connect scoring pieces (ahem, sweets) and surrounding them to claim them.  

The turn order mechanism is intriguing, and the fact that it changes from round to round makes the placement decision each turn quite interesting.  You are constantly weighing your options whether the benefits of placement this round would outweigh the advantage of earlier placement in the next round.  Admittedly, the true benefit of earlier turn order in the next round matters most when you get to go first – as you do get to decide which side of the board for everyone to play on.  Essentially, if you truly desire a particular spot, you can only guarantee it if you place directly next to the star in the previous round – and, well, there’s still always the chance that someone could surprise you with a rule breaking move using their sugar cubes.

Speaking of sugar cubes, they can definitely be a powerful force in the game – though the rotating cost of the actions will definitely keep you on your toes.  More than once, I have had a great plan set up in my head only to be thwarted because the player before me took the same special action I was going to use, and then I could no longer afford the max cost (3 sugar cubes) of the action once it moved back to the top of the special action board.

Gingham is a game that is always in flux as nothing remains guaranteed.  You can be making a great long path to a particular sweet, but if someone else connects it before you, they can move it out of the way of your train of ants.  You might have a huge stack claimed on the board, but your ants can always be displaced OR the whole stack can be moved to another part of the board if someone else connects it with a non-claimed sweet. 

The game generally moves along at a decent clip, but there are definitely some turns that will take awhile – there are a lot of things to consider with as many as ten columns to choose from and with the special action options to also think about. Our 4p games have definitely come in closer to the 40 minute end of the time range; and for me, this is maybe a bit more than I want for this sort of game.

The wooden bits are great – wooden ants, queens and sugar cubes – though as you likely know, I’m definitely not a fan of the cloth board.  While it is thematic and looks like a picnic tablecloth – I have never been a fan of boards that end up with creases in them which cause the wooden pieces to move around.  (And mind you, I’m NEVER going to be someone who irons their game board before playing).  You can even buy a special travel case. 

I’m not as enamored with the travel case as: 1) it’s barely smaller than the box, and 2) where it is smaller is in the width, and the cloth boards don’t quite fit – so now you’re going to end up with weird curling creases in addition to the folding creases….  That’s a total hard stop for me – but of course YMMV.  I have definitely been told by many people that I’m far to sensitive about things like that.

Gingham is another solid game from Bitewing Games, and this one proves that their success is not dependent on just reprinting Knizia games.   Gingham is an engaging abstract game that challenges players to place their ants in the right space at the right time to control the board. The artwork and pieces help disguise the abstractness of the game itself, and this would definitely be the sort of game you could take to play on a picnic with family or friends.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it.
• Neutral. Dale Y
• Not for me…

Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/48Jo2I0