Tangled Yarns

We are going to kick off this year’s Halloween Spooktacular by talking about Tangled Yarns, a cooperative tower defence board game where you play a flock of sheep trying to save the world from Lovecraftian horrors. Its Kickstarter campaign recently finished, but late pledges are available, and I will put the link below for anyone interested.

For a two-player game of Tangled Yarns (which is how we mostly played it), you each control two sheep and work together to close all six gates around Parokiam (the city you play in) before the Shepherd reaches one of them or a cultist makes it to the Sacrificial Altar. At higher player counts, you control one sheep each, which helps keep the game balanced. The city is built from hexagonal tiles surrounded by the Shepherd’s Way track, with different relics, walls and routes creating a maze you need to navigate.

Each round follows six phases. The Shepherd moves first, activating a new effect and potentially spawning cultists and wolves. Your sheep then move and take actions in any order, letting you attack enemies, collect power-ups, sacrifice a sheep to buy some time or, most importantly, stand on the right relic tiles to close a gate.


After this, you can rotate parts of the city to change the pathways, which can help your own movement or make life harder for the cultists.

Combat and various other choices are handled using the Fate Box. You add the relevant coloured marbles, shake and tilt it, with whichever marble ends up furthest to the left deciding the result. This is really cool, offers a great alternative to the usual dice rolling and adds a fun and unique element to the game. I’d love to see more games using alternative ways of determining outcomes beyond simply rolling dice. Cultists then move towards the centre, while wolves head towards the nearest sheep and attack if they reach them. If a cultist reaches the altar, the Shepherd reaches an open gate or too many of your sheep are lost, the game is over.

Once all six gates have been closed, the game moves into its final act and the Angel appears. You can’t attack it directly, so instead you need to hunt down the remaining cultists while the Angel chases your sheep around the city. Remove the final cultist and you win the game.

When you start, there appears to be quite a lot going on in Tangled Yarns, but once you get through the currently slightly intimidating rulebook (which I am hoping will be streamlined significantly for the final release) and actually start playing, the structure of each round is surprisingly easy to follow. The six phases give everything a nice rhythm, with the Shepherd moving and spawning enemies before you get the chance to send your sheep around Parokiam, fight off servants, collect power-ups and, most importantly, try to get everyone into the right places to close the gates. As the game is cooperative, you can easily play this with younger kids by reminding them what to do on their turn while letting them make the decisions. It works well and is easy to follow.

What I particularly liked is how cooperative it feels. You are constantly discussing who should go where and in what order you should activate everyone. Tower defence games lend themselves well to cooperative gameplay, and it’s surprising there are not more board games out there in that genre. For instance, you might need one sheep to grab a power-up, another to hold off an approaching cultist and the other two to get themselves onto the correct relics to close a gate. Being able to mix the order in which all four sheep move and act gives you plenty of freedom to work things out together rather than simply taking completely separate turns.

The rotating city tiles add another nice layer to this. You aren’t just moving around a static board, as you can change the pathways through Parokiam (we gave up and just called it “the city”) to make your own routes easier or, more importantly, make life much harder for the cultists trying to reach the centre. Anyone who has played a tower defence video game will be right at home here with the pathing. Add in the different abilities of each sheep and the changing Shepherd’s Way effects, and there is plenty to think about without it ever really feeling like you are just repeating the same turn over and over again.

The switch to the Angel after you close the final gate is kind of like having a boss, and while I can see why it’s there, it occasionally felt unnecessary. Just when you think you have completed the main objective, the game changes slightly and suddenly becomes a race to clear out the remaining cultists while the Angel hunts down your sheep.

The components are also one of the strongest parts of Tangled Yarns. There is a huge amount of character throughout the game, particularly in the sheep themselves, which all have their own artwork, player boards and individual abilities. The whole thing has a slightly dark storybook look to it that works really well.

The modular hex tiles make the city look great once everything is set up (which definitely takes a bit longer than I wish it did). Because they are randomly arranged and rotated each game, the layout and location of the weak points feel different each time.

Then there is the Fate Box, which is probably the component people are going to remember. Filling it with the different marbles, shaking it and then tipping it to see which one makes its way furthest across is completely unnecessary in the best possible way. The game could almost certainly have achieved the same thing with cards or dice, but it wouldn’t have been anywhere near as much fun.

Tangled Yarns is a really interesting cooperative game that hides quite a clever puzzle underneath a really strong theme with great artwork. There are a lot of rules when you first open the box, and I don’t think the rulebook does the best job of making the game feel as straightforward as it actually is, but once you understand the round structure, everything starts to click very quickly.

We have enjoyed our time playing Tangled Yarns. It is a really strong and distinctive cooperative tower defence game. Amongst all its uniqueness, though, I was still left wanting something a little more. Maybe some more standout bosses, so it isn’t the Angel every time, but hey, that’s what expansions are for.

If you are interested, the game is still available to back as a late pledge on Kickstarter at the time of writing.


Disclaimer – An early prototype copy of Tangled Yarns was kindly loaned to us by Kadena Entertainment via UKBG Review Circle. We have not been paid for this review ands all of our thoughts and opinions are our own.