Review of Tigris & Euphrates

Tigris & Euphrates is a classic Eurogame by Reiner Knizia, manufactured in the United States by Mayfair Games.

Players: 3-4
Ages: 12+
Playing Time: 1-2 hours
Complexity: 4 (of 10)

This is a revision of a review originally written in April, 2003. It's a review of a slightly older printing of the game, though I have some comments on the newer printing at the bottom of the Components section.

The Components

Tigris & Euphrates comes with a pile of stuff:

• 1 game board
• 153 civilization tiles
• 16 catastrophe, unification, and dynasty tiles
• 1 bag
• 6 monuments
• 16 leaders
• 140 victory point counters
• 10 treasures
• 4 player screens
• 2 rulebooks

Game Board: A 6-panel map of the Fertile Crescent . The art is workmanlike, but clear. Decorations on the borders give a feel for the time and also highlight the symbols of the four dynasties in this game, something done throughout the various components.

Tiles: These are all small, square, cardboard pieces with period-appropriate artwork.

The civilization tiles come in four colors--black, blue, red, and green--and each one depicts the type of peoples associated with those colors (kings, farmers, priests, and traders, respectively). The back of each tile shows a quarter of the foundation for a monument.

The catastrophe, unification, and dynasty tiles are cut just the same as the civilization tiles, but are used for different purposes in the game. They unfortunately have the same back as the civilization tiles, which makes it a real pain to sort them out if you accidently mix them together.

Bag: A large, cloth bag. It's used to hold the civilization tiles, so that you can draw them out.

Monuments: The first of the wood pieces. They actually come in two parts, which you assemble before your first game; this allows each monument to be two colors. They match the same colors as everything else: red, blue, green, and black. The monuments are very nice looking, though we had to struggle to get a few of them together because their cutting clearly isn't precise.

Leaders: Circular wooden tokens. They come in four dynasties--bulls, potters, lions, and bowmen--and each dynasty has a piece in each color--red, blue, green, and black. One player commented that the colors don't stand out quite enough on the leader tiles because they're stamps rather than the whole disc being colored.

(For the first couple of games you'll also be confused by the fact that your tokens are marked by an icon, not a color as is standard in most strategy games.)

Cubes: Victory points are painted wooded cubes. They come in the typical four colors, and also in two sizes, small and large. The treasures are small, unpainted victory point counters.

Player Screens: Each dynasty has a short screen. The main point of the screen is to hide a player's tiles and victory points. However, some of the core rules are also printed on the screen, which is nice if you're new to the game. Overall the screens are very nicely cut and look quite good. They also appear to be very sturdy.

Rulebooks: an overview and a rule book. They're printed in four colors and very pretty to look at. They're also full of pictures to explain how things work. They do manage to explain the game decently, but they're absolutely terrible to use as reference because of the lack of contents or index, and the fact that the organization isn't obvious. We searched through them for several minutes a couple of times during each game we played.

Overall the quality of the components is quite good, but they are somewhat plain as well. The game thus earns an above average style rating of "4" out of "5".

For the newest Mayfair printing of the game, the quality of the components has been somewhat increased. The tiles and board are now linen-textured, which is often a nice touch. The board also looks a lot brighter, and I think that loses some of its detail. Overall, it's a slightly nicer edition, however.

The Game Play

The object of Tigris & Euphrates is to take over powerful civilizations and build monuments in the ancient Fertile Crescent.

Setup: Ten temples (red civilization tiles) are placed on the board in specified places. A treasure box is put on each of those ten temples.

Then, each player is handed his four leaders, his two catastrophe tiles, and draws an initial set of six civilization tiles. As already noted, the civilization tiles are one of four colors: red, black, green, or blue. Each player has leaders likewise matching those colors.

Kingdoms. During the game you'll be constructing kingdoms. This is a group of one or more connected tiles with one or more leaders in it. Note that different players could have different leaders (or different colors) in the same kingdom. This is totally normal and in fact trying to play by more "standard" strategies, where you expect to rule your own kingdoms and gain points from them will usually result in defeat in T&E.

Order of Play: During a turn a player may take two actions (which can be the same), drawn from the following list:

• Move, withdraw or place a leader
• Place a civilization tile
• Discard and replenish up to 6 civilization tiles in your hand
• Play a catastrophe tile

Placing Leaders: Leaders are the whole heart of Tigris & Euphrates. You'll always have four of them: king (black), priest (red), farmer (blue), and trader (green). They can be placed on any empty square adjacent to a temple that's not a river space. They also can't be placed in such a way as to join together two kingdoms. You'll need to get them on the board in order to later earn points.

If you place a leader in a kingdom that already has a leader of the same type, you generate an internal conflict.

Internal Conflict: When you place a leader in a kingdom already containing the same color of leader you generate an internal conflict. The attacker (who placed the leader) counts the number of temple (red) tiles directly adjacent to his leader and then commits a number of additional temple tiles from his hand. The defender counts the number of temple tiles directly adjacent to his leader and then commits a number of additional temple tiles from his hand. The person with the highest temple total is the winner; a tie goes to the defender. Whomever won gets one red victory point; whomever loses removes his leader back to his hand.

Note that the defender knows the exact attacking force before he decides what to commit.

Withdrawing or Moving Leaders: You can alternatively pull a leader off the board or move him to another place. These can be offensive (e.g., moving to a better kingdom) or defensive (e.g., fleeing before an opponent can attack your kingdom via an external conflict and earn lots of points).

Placing Tiles: You'll have six civilization tiles in your hand at the start of each turn drawn arbitrarily from the following four types: settlement (black), temple (red), farm (blue), and market (green). You can place them in any empty spaces, except that only blue tiles can be placed on river spaces (and blue tiles can only be placed on river spaces).

When a tile is placed it generates a victory point of the appropriate color for the player who has a leader of that color in that kingdom. If there is no such leader it generates a victory point for the king (black leader) in that kingdom. If there is no king, no victory point is generated.

The exception is if a tile is placed in such a way as to join two existing kingdoms. In this case a "unification" tile is temporarily placed over the joining tile, and the new joined kingdom is investigated to see if there are now two leaders of the same color in the kingdom. If there are, an external conflict occurs for each pair of like-colored leaders.

Placement of tiles can also lead to the building of monuments, discussed later.

External Conflicts. When a newly united kingdom has two leaders of the same color in it, an external conflict occurs. If there are multiple external conflicts (meaning that multiple colors have duplicate leaders), first the player who placed the unification tiles resolves his, in an order he chooses, then resolution continues clockwise around the table.

The attacker (who either placed the tile, or was the first person clockwise) counts all of the tiles of the same color as the involved leader in his half of the kingdom. He then adds a number from his hand. The defender does the same.

The player with the higher number of tiles committed wins the conflict, ties again going to the defender. The loser has to remove his leader and all his "supporters"--those colored tiles that he counted up a moment ago--with the exception that temples which are adjacent to leaders are not removed. The winner gets 1 victory point of the appropriate color for the leader and for each civilization tile that was removed. This is one of the two biggest ways to earn points in the game (monuments eing the other).

Note that the resolution of an external conflict can deunite two kingdoms, at which point no more external conflicts are resolved.

Collecting Treasures. There's one other result of uniting kingdoms: if, at the end of an action, there is more than one treasure box in a kingdom (which you'll recall were put on the initial 10 red temples), the trader (green leader) in the kingdom takes all but one of the treasures; if there is no trader, the treasure boxes sit around until there is one. Treasure boxes are very useful because they're wild card victory points.

Building Monuments. Whenever a civilization tile is placed in such a way as to form a square of four of the same color of civilization tile, the player may immediately decide to flip them all over and build a monument on top of them.

Each monument is two colors (e.g., blue/red), and one of the colors must match the tiles that were just flipped over.

At the end of each turn the player whose turn it was looks at the monuments on the board. He is awarded one victory point in the appropriate color for each leader of an appropriate color he has in the same kingdom as a matching monument.

Note that each monument can thus generate two victory points, in different colors, per turn.

Redrawing Tiles: The tiles introduce some luck element into T&E, thus one of the possible actions is to redraw as much of your hand as you see fit.

Causing Catastrophes: Castastrophe tiles can be played, as an action, to make a space unusable, destroying the tile on the space if there is one. This is typically done to break apart a kingdom into two parts.

Ending the Game: The game ends when there are only one or two treasure boxes left (meaning the civilization of the Fertile Crescent have largely been united) or when the civilization tiles run out. At this point, each player adds up his victory points in each color; treasure boxes act as wild cards and may be used as a victory point in whichever color is desired.

Each player's lowest victory point color is used as his final score.

For example if, at the end of a game, a player has 8 red, 13 blue, 13 green, 13 black, and 2 treasures, he'll count the two treasures as red, and his score will be "10".

Relationships to Other Games

Tigris & Euphrates is one of Reiner Knizia's best acclaimed and most serious games. It's generally considered to be one of his tile-laying games, along with Samurai and Through the Desert, but the categorization is somewhat specious, as the three don't have a lot in common, other than the fact that both Samurai and T&E depend on gaining control through the placement of certain numbers of tiles of a few types (here red, blue, black, and green; there religion, worker, or warrior).

Overall T&E is a non-edge-matching tile-laying game with control mechanics that could equally be explained as majority control or auction. Which is all really a way of saying that T&E is quite a unique game, and that's probably part of its success.

The Game Design

Overall T&E is a very replayable game with some serious strategic & tactical elements that results in an overall enjoyable game.

Some of the games best elements are:

Good Strategic Play: At first I couldn't see the strategy in T&E, because it feels like there is a lot of chaos in the game created by other players moves. However, in the long run you do definitely have to: figure out which fights you want to fight and build toward them; constantly balance your four types of victory points; and generally consider board position & the strengths and weaknesses of the other players. All of these provide strategy.

Superb Tactical Play: On a turn-by-turn basis, T&E allows for excellent tactical play, where each turn you can carefully examine the situation and make carefully calculated moves that will push you toward victory, via the acqusition of required victory points.

Victory Point Mechanism Original & Interesting: The core VP mechanism of Tigris & Euphrates is that you are gaining points in four different categories, but you actually win based on the category that you're doing worst in. This creates some nice, implicit balance, because if you get lucky in one sphere of influence that won't win you the game. In addition, it allows for some complex gameplay, where you can give a player Victory Points in a sphere that's worthless to him, in return for something advantage for yourself.

Multiple Paths to Victory: There are three different ways to acquire victory points: through playing tiles; through monuments; and through winning conflicts. This creates nice balance because if you don't have the resources to gain victory points in one particular way (e.g., none of the appropriate tile), you can still gain victory points in other ways (e.g., place a leader in a location with a monument).

Interesting Brinkmanship Play: The advantage given to defenders in this game is sufficient to often deter an attack, and this causes for some fairly interesting brinkmanship play, where civilizations hover near each other for an extended time before smashing together. This rewards good brinksman who guess at the exact right turn to attack.

Good Use of Hidden Information: The fact that each opponent holds six civilization tiles that you can't see makes nice use of hidden information in this game. You can never gauge exactly how an attack against a foe might go ... but at the same the effect of randomness on the game is much lower than in, say, a game that resolves conflict with die rolls.

Some of T&E's less endearing traits are:

Theme is Very Loose: I've seen one person comment that Tigris & Euphrates could have just as easily been called "Red, Green, Blue & Black", and that's a fairly apt comment. The theme of "building ancient civilizations" is really loose, because the gameplay is so abstract. That drains a little of the color out of the game. However, the way that civilizations can rise, then suddenly fall apart is a neat thematic element.

Red Tiles are Important: The red (temple) civilization tiles seem unbalanced with regard to the rest of the tiles because they serve multiple purposes: anchoring leaders, fighting internal conflicts, and gaining red victory points. An attempt is made to rebalance this by having more red tiles than any other tile color in the game, but in my experience, and that of other commentators on the net, it's insufficient.

Overall, I've continued to play T&E since I originally reviewed it a few years ago, and my enjoyment and appreciation of the game has only improved. I'm also less concerned about its abstractness now than I originally was because I've played so many more Eurogames, and this really is the norm. As a result I've given Tigris & Euphrates a full "5" out of "5" for Substance.

Conclusion

Tigris & Euphrates is usually considered Reiner Knizia's masterpiece. Although I wouldn't go quite that far (because I'd instead give that spot to Taj Mahal, Ra, or Through the Desert), I will agree that T&E is a very good game. It offers dense strategy and holds up well to replays which will only increase your appreciation for the game. Thus if you're looking for serious gaming fare, Tigris & Euphrates is a good option.