Patchwork

You sew a quilt on a nine-by-nine board from oddly shaped patches, paying for each in buttons. When both time tokens reach the end, you count your buttons and lose 2 for every empty square. A bonus tile goes to whoever first fills a seven-by-seven area. The patches lie in a circle around a wooden spool marker. On your turn you buy one of the three patches ahead of the spool, paying buttons and advancing your time token by its time cost, or you pass, jumping ahead of your opponent and collecting one button per space. Whoever is behind on the time track moves next, so a cheap patch can give you two turns in a row. This is the two-player game we point families to when they want something gentle with depth. The pieces are Tetris shapes, the maths is small, and a game runs about twenty-five minutes.