Tigris & Enlightenment & Euphrates
Posted by Rob Herman at June 16th, 2007
There are a lot of gaming blogs out there but Yehuda says a lot of interesting things and says them well. There are plenty of good articles there, with the highlights nicely noted for your convenience. The same author some time ago compiled a list of koans from the ancient gaming masters.
I played Tigris & Euphrates again last night. This time at least I felt like I understood what was going on, even though I didn’t do very well. The game is certainly more exciting with four players than two–there are more opportunities for conflict and if you start losing on one front, it’s more reasonable to go somewhere else.
Reader Fuleng posted a link to an annotated game of T&E in the suggestion box. I’ve moved the text here:
For an annotated games of Tigris and Euphrates, check out http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/170187
and http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/170597.
T&E is one of my favorite Eurogames, but I’ll admit that while extremely deep. it’s not very accessible to new players. While the rules are relatively simple, there are just enough exceptions to be confusing, and the strategy is ‘emergent’ - ie, not immediately obvious from reading the rules. It took me a few games with the online version before I started to ‘get it.’ The annotated game does a decent job at getting some of the basic principles across, I recommend it to any one interested in or frustrated with T&E.
He’s very right about the “emergent” strategy. What’s frustrating is that nearly all of the strategy is emergent. This is unlike, say, Puerto Rico, which has a lot of very subtle strategy, but you can feel like you’re making progress all along, and the development patterns that winning players use are pretty clear.
Wow! Among Yehuda’s top ten games are
7. El Grande
6. Tigris and Euphrates
2. Puerto Rico
1. Go
These picks fit in with my gaming priorities perfectly, so this year at Origins, I’m going to be looking for the following of the games on the list that I’ve never played, since it’s probably safe to assume that I’ll like them too:
10. Santiago
9. Princes of Florence
3. Cosmic Encounters
I managed to actually get a fairly complete grasp of the rules and scoring from reading through the annotated game without actually knowing the game. Having confirmed with a published rule set, I may go back and read the game through again knowing the mechanics in some detail from the start. The commentary seems quite enlightening.
What sort of madman hides accumulated scores in a scoring system that is entirely visible as it occurs? Madness!
That is all.
Alatar: I don’t have a good answer regarding the secret scoring but I’ve discussed it in what was possibly my most contentious article ever, this one: http://www.rule0.com/archives/149 as well as its followup. As a Knizia apologist the best reason I can come up for it in T&E is that inexperienced players might be too-easily coerced to attack a player with a high score but mediocre position, leaving a slower-developing experienced player to take an easy win.
Also, I would point out that although I am generally mildly opposed to house rules (for reasons that I plan to discuss in a full-length article reasonably soon) switching between secret and open scoring is particularly innocuous.