I like to usually start off these reviews with a funny segment about the game, or it’s theme, or anything at all really. But today I want to devote the whole review to the game, because Tigris and Euphrates is a tricky game to make an elevator pitch for. You can really only understand how good it is when you see the whole picture, and even then it might not seem that fun until you try it. And I have to respect that, because Tigris and Euphrates is not trying to sell itself, it’s trying to be a fun game. So why don’t I try to sell it to you.

Tigris and Euphrates uses a mechanic called tile placement. It involves, wouldn’t you know it: placing tiles. But Tigris and Euphrates isn’t a game just about placing tiles, it’s a game about war, resource management, coups, and weird bulls that look like horses. But the tiles are important because they are the soup base which you need to be able to add all the elements of delicious game design stew. You see, each of these tiles come in red, black, blue, or green. You will always have six of these tiles behind your screen. Each of these tiles will score it’s colour victory point when you place it down, if you have a same coloured leader in its kingdom.

“What is a leader?” you might ask. Well i’ll tell you: you get four leaders at the start of the game (one of each colour), each leader (regardless of colour) must be placed next to at least one red temple tile. Still with me? good, because I still have a bit more to tell you about leaders. If a leader is connected to a tile, that tile and all the tiles it’s connected to are called a kingdom, remember if you have a leader with the same colour as a tile placed in a kingdom you get a victory point of that tile’s colour. Why does victory point colour matter? Because you score at the end of the game isn’t how many victory points you have, it’s how many victory points you have in the colour you have the lowest victory points in. Sound confusing? Well in practice it’s actually quite intuitive. Now bare with me, I only have 3 more things to tell you and then I hope you can see why I like this game so much.

One very important mechanic is the war and revolt system. If you ever place your leader in a kingdom with the same coloured leader from a different player a revolt begins, if you connect two kingdoms with at least one same coloured leader in each a war happens. The player with the higher “strength” in a war or revolt wins the battle (with defenders winning ties). Strength in revolts is the amount of red tiles your leader is next to plus any amount of red tiles you would like to bid from behind your screen, strength in wars is the amount of tiles you have of the current leaders colour on the kingdom they are on plus any tiles you want to bid of the same colour from behind your screen. If you win a revolt you remove your opponents leader and gain a red victory point, when you win a war you remove your opponents leader and all their tiles they used in the war and you then get a point for each of their tiles you removed.

Next we need to talk about monuments, if you ever have 4 of the same colour tiles in a square shape, you turn it into a monument with it’s colour on it. Monuments will give the player with a matching leader a matching colour point every turn. But those 4 tiles turned into a monument will no longer help you in wars so do it at your own risk. Finally there are treasures, which can be any colour victory point you like at the end of the game. At the start of the game you place some red temple tiles on the board, each of these temple tiles start with a treasure on them. If a kingdom ever has 2 or more treasures in it then the player with a green leader in that kingdom gets all but one treasure. If only two treasures are left the game ends, but the treasures serve another very import purpose: they encourage war. Because if you have a treasure in your kingdom and so does your neighbouring kingdom, then you may want to start a war with it since you need 2 or more treasures in one kingdom to collect a treasure.

And that’s pretty much the game, I skipped a couple rules because it’s got quite a lot of rules and I didn’t want to bore you. But even though it has a lot of rules they all are pretty intuitive, because of the very visual nature of placing tiles all rules seemed to make sense to the people I played Tigris and Euphrates with naturally. So even though it might seem complex I would still give it a try if you can. I say if you can because there’s one big downside to Tigris and Euphrates, it’s out of print. I only got to play it because a friend of mine was nice enough to let me borrow it. I know I know, I shouldn’t of been hyping up this game just to drop the news that you can’t play it. But this games design was just too elegant for me to pass up the opportunity to review it. And I truly believe that Tigris and Euphrates is such a good game that there is no way it won’t be reprinted within a couple years.

I know all my reviews seem really positive, and that’s because i’m not a professional reviewer so I only buy games that I think I will like. And so far I have never bought a game I don’t like (doesn’t mean  haven’t played games I don’t like). But I want you to trust me on this one, because I am not overhyping Tigris and Euphrates. It really is a masterpiece of design. If you can find a board game cafe that has a copy you could trying playing I would recommend you set up and day to go because I feel like every one interested in game design, everyone interested in games should play this. Even if you don’t end up liking it you will have to admit the the design is so clean so polished so excellent. I think perhaps my favourite part of the design is the scoring, where your score is your lowest point colour. Because it forces you to make a well rounded civilisation, you can’t just keep placing the same colour tile and making you kingdom immune to wars of that colour, the game makes it so you have to really think “do I really need another red tile?”. Sure the art is nothing to write home about, sure the theme is abstract and barley even there. But I think anyone who loves games will love Tigris and Euphrates.