Xmas Sweaters for Christmas

 Xmas Sweaters was my Christmas game this year. It’s a free Print-and-Play Roll-and-Write themed around decorating a holiday sweater. Of course, it’s abstract to the point where you could replace the holiday symbols with anything from geometric shapes to Doctor Who logos and you wouldn’t notice the difference.

The play sheet consists of five rows of twelve symbols. They are colored green, red, white, green, red. Most of the symbols are hearts but scattered amongst them are six different holiday shapes like Santa Hats and Stockings.

Each turn, a red 12-sided die, a green 12-sided die, a white 12-sided die and a black six-sided die get rolled. You pick one 12-sider to write a number in that particular color . The black die is a modifier, letting you add or subtract it from your chosen die.

Some restrictions apply. Cards in rows have to go in ascending order. The same numbers can’t appear twice in the same column. 

The game ends when someone either fills in four rows or they check off all the penalty boxes you have to check off when you can’t make a move. Full rows are worth more than incomplete ones. Complete sets of symbols are worth their summed value. Marking down the number ten five times is a bonus too.

Okay, let’s talk about the elephant in the room. Xmas Sweaters is a pretty obvious riff on Qwinto. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If you make reinventing the wheel requirement for quality, you are setting up an impossible requirement. Still, Xmas Sweaters has to be, at the very least, meaningfully different.

While there are more rows in Xmas Sweaters and the scoring is a little different, the key difference for me is the changes in dice and dice manipulation. D12s compared to D6s. Qwinto lets you make dice pools while Xmas Sweaters has the black die as a modifier.

All things considered, I personally like Qwinto more. I like its blunt simplicity and D6s have less variance, letting you make more educated guesses. But Xmas Sweaters holds together mechanically and is fun.

As cynical as it is to say, one major advantage Xmas Sweaters has is that it is ‘free’ and available. Access to a printer and some dice and you’re good to go. From what I can tell, Qwinto is out of print. 

Xmas Sweaters doesn’t have an actual holiday feel. However, it is a solid R&W experience. If you don’t want to make a homemade, pirated copy of Qwinto, it’s a good call.