“Each player takes a quilt board, a time token and 5 buttons…”
                –Patchwork rulebook; game designed by Uwe Rosenberg

                I don’t have a “finished” thought today. Maybe, instead, I have a kind of game.
                The board game Patchwork is pretty new to me, and I keep thinking about the way it mixes two game mechanics I’ve played lots of times. Part of it is arranging blocky shapes on a grid—like Cathedral when I was a kid, kneeling on the carpet, or Tetris. Part is “engine building” by creating a collection that earns you increasing “income”—a core mechanic for so many things, from Spice Road to Res Arcana to Monopoly. Patchwork simplifies both ideas and puts them on top of each other. I start playing and think I’ve played this before. And I think no I haven’t.
                So for a few months now I’m going around and around, interested in the kind of newness that happens when two familiar things sit on top of each other in an unfamiliar way. The game equivalent of a kimchi quesadilla (new to me, at least, and delicious)? Maybe: but it feels more like the time a coworker and I played frisbee golf inside the empty high school as a break from grading finals. Spaces we often walked through, games we often played—and now we’re wondering, wait, what is this? And I’m wondering, what would you put on top of what?