Gatherbrook: A Cozy, Patchwork Village Tabletop Card Game

Gatherbrook: A Patchwork Village

Gather what you need to grow a community.

[Header image: the Gatherbrook key art]

Somewhere past the big trees, a village is waiting to be put together, one card at a time. A pea patch here. A library with someone already shelving the books. A tea shop that wasn't there last turn. Gatherbrook is a small, cozy card game about gathering what you need and slowly growing a place that feels like yours.

It plays in about 30 to 45 minutes, works with 2 to 4 players, and fits in a box you can bring anywhere. Everything in it is cards, around 120 of them, and that's the whole quiet trick of it.

Build a village out of cards

Most card games ask you to collect cards into tidy rows. Gatherbrook asks you to build with them. Cards overlap (foundations, columns, and roofs) to form little illustrated structures that actually stand up on the table. Two overlapping cards show three columns instead of four, so which card you lay on top gently changes everything: what your village can afford, what it's worth, who ends up living there.

By the end, you're not holding a hand of cards. You're looking at three to five small buildings that, together, look like a real place. A patchwork village that nobody else at the table grew quite the same way.

How it plays

You start with almost nothing and a great deal of possibility.

The cards you build reveal resource symbols, like water, plants, and art, and those symbols stay. They aren't spent. They're simply what your village can now afford. A village that grows quietly grows richer. From a shared market called the Commons, you gather new cards, fold them into your structures, bring the symbols you want out into the open, and reach for things that were out of reach only a few turns ago.

Underneath the coziness there's a gentle puzzle. Which side of a card to use (they're double-sided, with a different life on each face). Which structure to grow next. When to seal a building with a roof and commit to it for good. Nothing is fiddly. Every turn comes down to one clear, satisfying choice.

A village full of people and animals

The pea patch, the well, the library, the bakery, the tea shop. These aren't backdrops. Each structure can take in its own characters, like a gardener, a librarian, a baker with flour on her apron, someone who has clearly kept the tea shop for years. Pets wander in too, and settle where they like.

And all of them do something. A character shifts what a structure is worth, what it produces, how it scores. The person who moves into your library changes your library. Nothing here is decoration pretending to be a game. Every lovely thing on the table is also a decision.

[Image: a few character cards and a pet]

The art

Gatherbrook looks the way it does because of Sab (instagram.com/sabgeid).

Her work is warm and handmade and lived-in, the kind of cozy that carries a little weight. There's a quiet melancholy under the sunshine, a sense that these are real small lives rather than cute stickers. Every character looks like a particular person, with a job and a temperament and a favorite corner of the village. Sab is the reason the world feels inhabited instead of merely illustrated, and, honestly, the reason it feels worth making at all.

Who's making this

Gatherbrook is a partnership.

Sab brings the world to life. Alongside her is Tucker, a solo designer building, and finishing, and actually launching a first tabletop game, which has been equal parts terrifying and lovely. We kept the scope small on purpose. No board, no plastic, no sprawling rulebook. Just a well-made box of beautiful cards that plays well and travels light.

What your support makes possible

Most of the village already exists on paper. What we're raising for, first and foremost, is the rest of Sab's art. The characters, the pets, and the structures still waiting to be drawn, so that every corner of Gatherbrook is as alive as the pieces you've seen here.

Your support also lets us make the finished object properly, with good card stock, honest color, and a tuck box worthy of the art inside it. A print run we can be proud to put in the mail. Back it, and you help fill in a small village, and you get one of the first copies of it.

Stretch goals

Gatherbrook is finishable at our funding goal. Everything past it makes the same village a little fuller and the finished box a little nicer, and all of it reaches every backer, not only the ones who arrive later.

As more of you join, two things change together. Sab gets to draw more of the world, and the cost of printing each copy comes down, which lets us fold better paper and better packaging into every box. Here is where we are headed, roughly in the order we hope to unlock it.

• New animal
• New villager
• Linen card stock $18,000
• Thicker card stock $20,200
• Spot gloss on cards $23,000
• The Yarn Shop $25,900
• Illustrated rulebook $29,500
• Embossed + cushioned box $37,800
• Rigid two-piece box $45,000
• Magnetic box $55,000

We're glad you found your way here. Come gather what you need.