Playing the haul from Spiel!

Layers is a pattern matching game for 1-4 players that takes about 30 minutes. It’s from some of the same team that brought you the Fold series of games (two of which are also covered in this project).

Whilst a distinctly different game to the Fold games, you can feel that DNA running through it. Each player gets five pieces of card, the cards have holes cut in them and different coloured patterns on either side. The active player will choose a target card from decks for either 3,4 or 5 layers. Each player will then try and match the target pattern by combining the cards in front of them on top of each other, on the right side, in the right order, and in the right orientation. A scoring tile is drawn for each round which tells you how your score will be changed depending on if you solve the puzzle 1st,2nd, 3rd and so on.

It retains the innovation from Magic Fold of a timer after the first player solves a puzzle. Ensuring that games don’t have long periods of one person sitting around waiting for slower puzzle solvers.

It adds a piece of card you use to cover your solution once you think you have it, this replaces the small tokens grabbed for solving used in the Fold games. This has two benefits, it stops other players looking at your solution and trying to use it to help them, but it also stops you from seeing if your own is wrong and wanting to go back on your “token grab”. It’s a small thing, but it does address an issue that could occur in more competitive games of Fold-It.

While it is fun, it does feel like you are taking an IQ quiz or a Mensa entry test at times!

It is a game we have played with a few friends, and in general, I think it’s a bit of a return to form of the originally Fold-It in terms of being an innovative mechanic and a clean pure abstract game. It retains some of the improvements from iterations on the Fold-It and ditches perhaps some of the cruft.