How one player found her way towards the art and code of knitting—and her nana—through crafty games.
Threadsteading is a competitive, territory-control game built on a quilting machine. The game is played on a hexagonal grid printed on cloth, using the limitations of the quilting machine to define gameplay. Two players act as the leader of a team of scouts, exploring towns marked on the cloth map, and they take turns choosing directions. Each player must pick up where the last player began—a restriction tied to the nature of the quilting machine—and travel until their crew gets tired, when a tile is awarded to the leader. The more tiles a person controls, the more likely they are to win.
Both games use craft in its literal sense—the act of making something—as well as as a storytelling theme, in a more abstract way. They bridge the perceived gap between technology and craft, a perception that Shoop discusses, too: "I loved the fact that there is a perception—usually wrong—that there's a world of computer (soulless, technical, 'geeky') and a completely different domain such as knitting (traditional, 'female', craft)—yet there is a clear overlap."
On knitting games.
