Game: Tigris & Euphrates
Designer: Reiner Knizia
Artwork: Doris Matthaus, Tom Thiel
Publisher: Mayfair Games (1997)
Age Range: 12 + (a 10-year-old with a good head on shoulders could play this)
Number of Players: 3 or 4
Game Time: Two hours (maybe more with veterans or newcomers)
Mechanics: Tile Laying/Empire Building/Hand Management/Set Collection
Complexity: 5 (with finger poised over the “6”)
Challenge: 5 (ditto)
By the time I sat down to a play my fourth game of Tigris & Euphrates with artificial intelligence opponents, I was starting to ‘see’ things about the game that I hadn’t seen before. My opponents were AI Hammurabi and AI Gilgamesh, so naturally, I thought of them as “AL”s, like two guys from Brooklyn.
I see, for example, that there is an immediate ‘engine’ available for generating early victory points. This entails placing a leader on the board. I’m the Archer this fourth time out and I look for a position next to a temple. I place my red Priest leader next to a temple and as my second action, I put a red temple tile next to my leader. Every time I place a red tile adjacent to this red leader, I get a victory point. So I keep placing temples next to Priests and as the turns go around, I’m putting other Leaders next to temples and supplementing them with appropriately colored civilization tiles. The Victory Points start pouring in. Sort of. My random selection of civilization tiles (done for me by the program) seems to be generating enough different kinds of colors that I’m moving along.
Up close, courtesy of Simon Holding (BGG)
Then come the conflicts. You can only play this game as though you were in charge of an isolated fiefdom on the outskirts of town for a while. Eventually, someone is going to challenge you. As the number of tiles grows on the 176-space board, you’re going to run out of room and even before you run out of room and start squabbling over large areas of the board, someone is going to place a leader of the same color, adjacent to a temple that until that moment was yours and create what’s known in the game as an Internal Conflict – two same color leaders duking it out in one kingdom. The battle is decided by a count of the number of Temples (temple tiles) adjacent to your colored leader, compared to the number of temples adjacent to your opponents’ (same) colored leader. Whoever has the most (and you can add Temple tiles from your hand to the count) wins the conflict, knocks out the other guy’s leader and gets a single red victory cube.
When a tile is placed that joins two kingdoms (much like the ‘merger’ function in the game of Acquire), an External Conflict is triggered. This conflict is resolved by comparing the number of tiles of the same color adjacent to the leader at the time of the conflict. And the victor gets a victory point for the displaced leader and even more victory points, for each tile the opponent had to discard in the battle (the ones he/she had in her hand and added).
I see, too, early on, that there is only one area of the board where a Monument can be constructed with farms. To place a Monument (another VP-generating mechanism), you need to position four tiles into a 4 X 4 square. With the exception of this one space (where the rivers meet in the northeast section of the board), the river, upon which only farm tiles can be placed, never touches four spaces. There are 10, overlapping areas where it touches three spaces, but this is the only place on the board where you can build a monument with its requisite four farmers. I see this, put down a blue leader next to the river and start to drop farm tiles onto the required four spaces. I get a Monument that starts generating points every turn and I’m a happy camper, for a while.
I learned that there are times when you want to initiate conflicts, instead of waiting for them to happen to you. I learned that you have to ‘see’ the whole board. To note how kingdoms on the board are developing and how you can take advantage of that development and maintain your leadership in chosen areas of the board. I learned that a well-placed Catastrophe tile (which blocks a space where a possible conflict might otherwise be initiated) can do wonders. And I still can’t figure out how I beat the two guys from Brooklyn the first time I played.
What I’ve learned, overall, with these four encounters is that Tigris & Euphrates hides the richness of its playing experience until you, as a competitor, have broadened your vision horizons to encompass all of its intricacies. Each choice you make during your turn, has a set of wide and as the board fills up, sweeping potential consequences that need to be taken into account. I suspect that one of the primary skills you’ll need to develop is the ability to clearly ‘see’ the kingdoms on the board. As the tiles fill up the board, they’re going to be connected to other tiles and each little grouping of these is going to have a certain visual component to it – it’ll go from here to there, have this many tiles, this many leaders – and seeing each of them separately, you’ll be able to recognize spaces on the board that will trigger conflicts. Or project and see conflicts coming way ahead of time. And you’ll have to think about whether you want to do that. Like I said, seeing the whole board, along with every little nook and cranny of the rules.
The pieces; leaders, tiles and scoring cubes
Tigris & Euphrates debuted at the World Boardgaming Championships (WBC) 10 years ago, although there, it’s called Euphrat & Tigris; it’s original German name. It wasn’t until 2004, though, that people started recording anything about the individual tournaments, other than the name of the winner. In 2004, Game Masters who run these tournaments started submitting Event Reports that outlined in detail not only who’d won, but who’d come in second, third, etc., along with exhaustive commentary about the overall event and details of significant games, including the finals. There are also ranked lists of the game’s best players, calculated with information submitted to a database by these same Game Masters who run the tournaments. This is happening with about 130 or so tournaments of different games at the World Boardgaming Championships in Lancaster, PA every year, but I digress.
Jeff Cornett of Florida is the number-one ranked Tigris & Euphrates player in the country, if you can assume that the information supplied to the people who put his name in that # 1 slot can be trusted. It probably can. It’s likely to be a little geo-centric, because people in Montana (as an example, please. . no letters) don’t play a lot of board games and when they do, they don’t tend to submit detail-rich reports about them to a company on the East Coast. In the five years that they’ve been keeping closer track, Jeff has won this event twice (2002 and 2006) and placed second twice (2005 and 2008). Events prior to 2004 do not list finishers other than the winner, so he may have more finishes among the top four winners than we know about. His wife, Anne, by the way, finished fourth in the first year they started keeping records in 2004.
Aaron Fuegi from Massachusetts has won it twice, as well (2001 and 2007). He ended up in fifth place last year and is second on what’s known as “The Laurels” (ranking) list next to every Web site event report filed with the Boardgame Players Association that produces the WBC.
There are about 43 players on the Tigris & Euphrates Laurels list, which tells you right there, that it has to be incomplete. Only 43 people in 10 years have played this game in a tournament? What about the people who’ve never been or don’t like tournaments who can kick your butt for you at your own table, thank you very much?
Still, it speaks of a game that has withstood the test of what may appear to be a short amount of time, but in a day and age where technology can change things in a day, is actually what’s known as a good track record.
Not a gateway game, applying my usual barometer – too much going on at once. This is a game for people who like to sit down and work with a game system to figure out how to beat it. How to be really good at it. And this takes time that a non-gamer doesn’t usually care to devote to learning a new game system. There is a Forum initiated on the Tigris & Euphrates pages of the BoardGameGeek Web site, sub-titled “Why I won’t be buying this excellent game.” (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/413768) And Graham Dean is right. He cites the time necessary to really understand this game and says (paraphrasing) “No, thanks.” He notes that few of his gaming buddies are interested in the game, in spite of having brought it out onto a table on a few occasions. No big excitement about it according to Dean, and while he had truly taken the time to understand it himself and appreciated all that it had to offer, he’d be passing on owning his own copy.
With the latest edition, Knizia has added a couple of ‘twists, (for which he’s generally known anyway) that includes new buildings (Civilization Buildings, which score points for tiles in a straight line) and what are called Ziggurat tiles, which help you score colored VP cubes in a color of your choice.
There’s still a learning curve ahead of me, but thanks to Knizia and Game Table On-Line, I’m glad I own my copy.
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