LogFAQs > #966040630

37. Tigris and Euphrates

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/42/tigris-euphrates

Category: Player vs player
Key mechanics: Tile-laying, area control
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 4
Game length: 60-90 minutes
First played: 2019
Experience: 5-8 plays with 2-4 players

In Tigris and Euphrates, you control one of four civilizations, competing to have the best-rounded civilization in four spheres, represented by four different colored tiles and leaders: religion, trade, agriculture, and military. You score these points by laying tiles and controlling leaders in the corresponding colors. Conflicts will arise when two leaders of the same type are in the same kingdom, either by having one leader deposited into another's kingdom (revolt) or by having their kingdoms joined (war). These result in leaders and tiles being removed from the board and other scoring opportunities. Your final score is the number of points you scored in the weakest of your four categories.

This is one of the oldest (designer) games on this list - released in 1997 by the venerable Dr. Reiner Knizia. It is often cited as one of his absolute best designs and once sat atop the boardgamegeek Top 100.

This is possibly the single game on this list that would jump the most if I created it today versus at the end of last year. I've since played it a few more times at meetups and with friends, and plus gotten in some more reps online.

Tigris and Euphrates is beautifully elegantly designed. Each of the four colors has a unique gameplay purpose, which infuses the seemingly abstract game with more theme than you might expect - the religious temples anchor leaders, who need to have the support of the church in order to maintain their influence; the Trader, when spanning across kingdoms with treasures, will collect the treasures; farms and only farms can cross rivers; and the king of the military will collect points in all colors in which a specialist leader does not exist.

I haven't particularly made strategy breakthroughs in this game. It strikes me as highly tactical - because there is no engine-building, and because of the random nature of the tile-draw, and because you can't control who your opponents choose to attack, to me it feels like you can rarely make big plans beyond a couple of turns and maybe setting up one big-time war or revolt.

For me, this game is just about kind of seeing how the board develops - the initial race to unite the base temples with their treasures, the clusters of tiles that fill up the board, the monuments that may or may not crop up, the reversals of fortune that come when people cut apart a kingdom with catastrophe tiles, the drastic effect of a revolt that allows a leader to steal the support of an established leader, the wars that reshape the board entirely by eliminating the opponent's supporters and blowing their leader off the board. Each player plays all four colors; you are delineated only by your leaders, who are distinguished not by color but by sigils representing your clan (bull, archer, potter, and lion). Again, without much flavor text, art, or chrome, this sort of ebb and flow of the board state can evoke the actual rise and fall of civilizations.

The most Knizian part of this game is the way the final score is determined. You can try to specialize as much as you want - build up that giant military and try to steamroll all your opponents' black tiles and score up to twenty or more black points. But the final score mechanism is so punishing, because if you neglect placing any blue farms, then your score will literally be zero. The idea that in the end, you'll by judged by your weakest category, is incredibly Knizian. In this way, while you may have a "player who's specializing in scoring red" and the "player who's got all the green points," you're forced not to lean into this strength, but to scrape for the way to make up your weaknesses.

And because it remains opaque to me, in some ways I respect the design and experience of T&E more than the attempt to win. While players can get analysis paralysis in Tigris and Euphrates, overall, the game - especially at four players - can often feel almost too short. There's no engine to build, and your desperate attempts to draw into the right points will often leave you scrambling. It's hard to get stuff done, and in some games you won't actually get anything done. But as long as people are moving along, you'll get to be a bystander or victim in others' conquests. And that's part of the beauty of it.