Tigris and Euphrates is a 1997 game by designer <PERSON> about rival dynasties living it up in the great fertile river basin of ancient Mesopotamia.
While the game covers the subject of early civilisation, the game mechanics arguably evoke more closely the kind of civilisation you'd find in a petri dish - or perhaps <PERSON>'s Game of Life - than the mechanics of an ancient society.
A Lost Sport
T&E is a strange and unique thing. In some ways, it is a modern eurogame. It has victory points and tiles, and "workers" that you can move around. But it plays like a kind of lost sport. Its complexities are slowly revealed; not piled on like more fiddly boardgames. The chunky wooden components and economic ruleset feel ancient, like the game itself was prised from under a ziggurat.
It accommodates up to four players and is played around a grid board. Each player holds six tiles, drawn from a bag, which are held secretly, scrabble-style. The tiles come in four colours, representing people in the four classes of Mesopotamian society.
Each player also get four pucks that represent their family power, their dynastical clout. Confusingly, players are not assigned a colour, but an emblem in four different colours. The emblems ooze significance - urns, lions, archers and bulls.
Influencing Agglomerations
The gameplay in Tigris and Euphrates moves swiftly. In your turn, you can do two actions 1) place a tile - representing peoples or disasters - on the board and 2) move your family around the fertile crescent exerting your influence on society. All the time you're getting points, building an empire and scheming endlessly to bring your opponents, like so many idle, corrupt dynasties, to their knees.
When you lay tiles, you're building a civilisation: setting up markets with your green tiles, crossing rivers with your blue tiles, building priestly enclaves to prop up your leaders and raising vast monuments. Truly speaking these aren't your people, but in general, leveraging your influence over these agglomerations is what will win you the game.
Angry Priests
T&E rewards excessive scheming and strategic attack. You will find yourself collecting red tiles to trigger revolutions and unseat your opponents. Mustering the priestly class will kick your opponent off the board and allow you to efficiently seize their lands. 84
Or you can initiate all out conflict between two kingdoms, sacking lands and causing deadly damage throughout. In addition, each player has two disaster tiles that they can use in the game, cutting opponents off from vital resources before a precision strike.
Wars can net the victor large amounts of points, and the game gives tactical advantage to the attacker. But conflict is also a gamble and because of the scoring system, never an end in itself. In the long term you will be compelled to balance your power; the game sends you points in one of the four different colours, but only the lowest scoring colour will count. To win the game, you must weigh up the benefits and costs of every encounter.
Sexy Cells
The game is initially opaque in the sense that the rules as written do not show you an obvious way to play. As a result, first time players might feel frustration that they are acting aimlessly, that there is too much chaos in the tile draw and the combat resolution - even that there is no game at all. I had combinations of all of these thoughts after my first games. Tigris and Euphrates was just so weird, in a bad way.
But I'm glad I persevered. Tigris and Euphrates is full of things to discover. Even though it is set in Syria, I feel like this game could be playing out inside some faraway gas giant. After a handful of games you might start seeing your tiles as cellular automata and kingdoms as kinds of tendrilled craft, eating treasure and subsuming their neighbours. You will awkwardly share power of these kingdoms with your opponents and rack your brain as you wrestle with twisted diplomatic conundrums. Plays start rippling across the board, and you slowly start being able to control conflicts to your advantage.
What is it like to "be" the hand of fate guiding a dynasty anyway?
Maybe it is like this. Exactly like this.
Tigris and Euphrates is a combination of crystalline balance and what I would politely call emergent psychedelic madness. It is not the easiest game to introduce to new players, and not to everyone's taste but, given some time, Tigris and Euphrates shows itself to be a formidable, rewarding and highly immersive board game. 237