Tigris & Euphrates: Is it Knizia's best?

 

          It’s tough, at first, to wrap your head around this game. There’s something about the four-colored dynasties that, for one reason or another, just doesn’t ‘sit’ right in the brain right away. It has something to do, I think, with a traditional, though not hard-fast ‘rule of thumb’ in gaming; that as a player, you get to play with a single color. It should be easy to evolve into an understanding that with this game, everybody has four colors at their disposal, but it isn’t, at first. It’s a little like asking a right-handed pitcher to throw ‘lefty.’ The mechanisms are all there to develop the skill, but the kid’s gonna get hammered on his first couple of trips to the mound. You actually have to play this game a time or two before you can start to conceptualize the idea of kingdoms and the colored leaders and how their creation (kingdoms) and placement (leaders) plays out through the course of the game. Figuring all this out is a bit of a challenge and you have to move beyond that challenge, into a conceptual comfort zone before you can effectively understand your turn-by-turn decisions.

         The folks over at Mayfair, who graciously sent me a copy, were a little surprised that I had never actually played this game and were eager to have me join the legions of board game folk who think that it’s first of all, the best game that Reiner Knizia has ever designed. Fans of such diverse games as Ra, Hollywood Blockbuster, and Poison would argue the point. It ranks among the Top Ten ranked games on the BoardGameGeek Web site (# 8), with an average rank of 8.04 from just over 9,000 people. Mind you, this is not a random sampling of people off the street, an overwhelming number of whom would likely have never even heard of it. These are gamers. There are 134 pages of comments (25 or so per page) on this game and you have to go by 121 of them before you start running into anybody who gave Tigris & Euphrates a “2.” There were 20 of them out of the 9,000, last time I checked.

         During an interview, BoardGameGeek administrators, Derk and Aldie were both surprised that I had never played Tigris & Euphrates, adopting the same tone of voice I use when I find out someone has never heard of my favorite game (Puerto Rico).

         “What? You call yourself a gamer and have never played Tigris & Euphrates?” the two of them said to me, more or less simultaneously.

         That was seven years ago and until the past few weeks or so, I had still never played it. The closest I had ever come was an unsuccessful attempt to learn the game by playing against artificial intelligence (AI) opponents available to me at Game Table On-Line (www.gametableonline.com), which as it turned out, was of major importance to me when it came to finally learning the game.

         Tigris & Euphrates is the first game I have ever learned without ever having actually played it against a live opponent. The final process went from DNA (removing the cellophane from the box), through birth (laying out pieces and playing it out against imaginary opponents to get a feel for the turn-by-turn actions) and then, back to Game Table On-Line, where, on my first attempt, I was able defeat two AI opponents.

         So automatically, I’m thinking, “Lousy AI opponents. Must be a crude program,” because there is no way, for the first time ever in my life, have I just picked up a game and won, first time out of the box. Or, on the screen, as the case was.

         So what’s going on here? The board is a 16 X 11 grid of squares detailing the convergence of the two famous rivers, which flow through Bagdhad today, the Tigris and the Euphrates. The rivers are shown, and the squares through which they flow can be occupied by only kind of playing tile – the farmers. As did the civilizations, which had occupied the banks of these rivers since 3,000 B.C., players are tasked with the development of kingdoms and awarded victory points, commensurate with their ability to develop four major components of their kingdoms. They’re going to want to have Settlements under the rule of their King, Farms run by their Farmers, Temples by their priests and Markets in the hands of their Traders. They’re going to do this by putting their leaders and a number of civilization tiles out on to the board. For each player, there are four wooden disks in four separate colors; each one representing a leader. What they have in common for each player is the picture being represented in four colors. The player who chooses to be The Potter gets the four disks with a picture of the vase on it, outlined in the four colors – red, green, blue and black. The Lion will get the same four colored disks with the Lion on it, etc. The black disk is your King, the green disk is your Trader, the red disk is your Priest and the blue disk is your Farmer.

         On your turn, you may perform two actions, out of four available. You can place your leader, place a civilization tile, place a catastrophe tile, or swap tiles in your hand (you get six to start, and replenish to that number every turn). There are 10 temples on the board at pre-determined spaces, at the start of the game. Each has a ‘treasure’ on it, which’ll become significant later. The tiles relate to the leaders by color; black King to black Settlement tile, green Trader to green Market tile, red Priest to red Temple tile and blue Farmer to blue Farm tile. Any time you place, as an example, a Settlement tile (rimmed in black) and by so doing, attach it (adjacent to another tile, horizontally or vertically) to a kingdom with just your black leader (the King) in it, you get a point. Two settlement tiles and its your black King in there? Two points.

         The final score is calculated by comparing your least developed component of the emerging kingdoms on the board, whether it was settlements, farms, markets or temples and comparing that least-developed component to that of your opponents. So it’s not about how well you do one thing, but about how well you do all of the things you’re expected to do and then, taking your least successful result as the measure of your overall success.

         This is turning out longer than expected, with a lot more to talk about. I can see right away why Tigris & Euphrates has garnered the support that it has since it was released 12 years ago. There is a lot going on with this game and thanks to a couple of AI opponents at Game Table On-Line, I’ve been able to shift into that conceptual comfort zone, that, if nothing else, has given me the bullets necessary to fire the review gun. Or maybe just the comment gun. I’m more or less up-to-speed now, and anxious to play this against some live opponents to determine (I suspect) just how poor my ‘tutor’ AI opponents were, really.

Next: AI opponents, the acquisition of relevant skills to play, and Tigris & Euphrates at the World Boardgaming Championships