Writing a review of Tigris & Euphrates (T&E) feels like writing a review of chess—it’s indisputably great, and, to paraphrase a friend of mine: “any problem you have with chess is a problem with you.” The same goes for T&E. Entire branches of game design—including games by designer Reiner Knizia himself — have forked from this ur-text, yet none have quite managed to replicate it.
It has quirks, panache, personality, and, like a hoary tome full of forbidden arcana, it juices up its players with the hubristic promises of power. It’s a game where you will climb high, but if you don’t watch your feet, down you’ll go into a pit of punji sticks.
And if the promise of that drama wasn’t enough, T&E is the most sure-handed and obvious refutation of one of the dumbest tropes in contemporary game discourse—“games that tell stories.” Games don’t tell stories. Rivers and tiles don’t tell stories either. People do. And this is a game that can absorb all the storytelling you can throw at it.
What is it?
Tigris & Euphrates is the 3rd greatest Reiner Knizia game, behind Stephenson’s Rocket and The Quest for El Dorado—
—wait, what’s this a review of again?
Tigris & Euphrates is a tile-laying game with auction-based combat. Yeah, that sounds about right. It’s a game about power and the volatility of ancient empires. The object of the game, as is the object of most imperial squabbles, is to collect cubes. But not just any cubes, no, these cubes come in four colors. And, you only score points at the end of the game equal to the pile of cubes you have the LEAST of. Or, if I’m trying to explain this in a simpler way, each set of four different color cubes is 1 point.
Now, how do you get the cubes? Well, you must lay tiles. You will have six tiles to choose from. They’re hidden behind a player screen, and they come in four colors: blue, red, black, and green. Not coincidentally, these are the colors of the cubes you are collecting. Additionally, you have “leaders,” which are these wooden discs that come in those selfsame colors.
At the start of the game, there are 10 red tiles laid out on the board, each with a beige cube (I’ll get to these later) atop them. On your turn, you take two actions: lay a tile, place (or move) a leader, have a catastrophe, or discard tiles to get new tiles.
Leadership, AKA Temple Time
Your leaders are the primary way you control territory in T&E. They may only be placed orthogonally adjacent to red tiles (the temples), which form a “kingdom.” A kingdom is a group of connected tiles and leaders. There are a few stipulations. First, leaders cannot be placed in such a way that they connect two separate kingdoms. Second, and more importantly, leaders of the same color cannot share a kingdom. Whenever someone places a leader in a kingdom with another leader of the same color, they have a fight. I call it a “power struggle” when I teach the game. The attacker chooses a number of red tiles from behind their screen, and places them in front of themselves. The defender then does the same. Each player counts their played tiles plus the number of red tiles orthogonally adjacent to the leaders that are squabbling, and the attacker wins if they exceed the defender’s total. The loser’s leader is removed from the board, and the winner receives one measly red cube.
Power struggles are boring. Wars are what we are here for.
Tile Talk
Tile laying is where the money is. When you lay a tile, if there’s a leader of the same color in the kingdom, that player gets a cube of the matching color. So, if I place a red tile in a kingdom where I have the red leader, I get a red cube. Additional flavor: Blue tiles may only be placed on the river spaces on the board. Additional-additional flavor: Black leaders are wild, so if there isn’t a matching leader when a tile is placed, the black leader’s owner collects the cube. Ultimate flavor: if a square of four like-colored tiles are made, a bi-color “monument” gets made, which automatically generates 1 or 2 cubes for players with matching leaders in the kingdom at the end of a turn.
You may also start a mega war by placing a tile that joins two kingdoms. Sometimes nothing will happen, but if there are two leaders of the same color in these now joined kingdoms — you guessed it — WAR! You count up all the tiles of the warring leaders’ color on either side of the conflict, and the bidding proceeds like a civil war. Attacker first, playing tiles that are the color of the conflict, then defender. The loser must remove all the tiles of the losing leader’s color, and the winner gets a cube of the matching color for each tile removed. It is not uncommon for a player to receive 3-4 cubes from a single war.
Joining kingdoms can result in multiple conflicts, including ones that don’t even involve the player who placed the tile. There’s additional nuance to this, but that’s the idea.
Other Stuff
There are also catastrophe tiles, which let you make a space a dud for the rest of the game. Each player has two.
Then there’s the final action: you can discard and draw tiles with an action, which could push one of the game’s two endgame triggers: somebody needs to draw a tile and can’t.
Remember those beige cubes I mentioned earlier? If you have green leaders in a kingdom that’s connected to those beige cubes, you take all but one. They’re traders, and to collect the beige cubes, you need to build kingdoms that connect the cubes with trader leaders. These beige cubes are a wild color for endgame scoring, so they’re especially important. The game also ends when there are 1 or 2 of them left on the board.
Not a combinatorial game, not an abstract
Renier Knizia designs a lot of games. Many people have written about them, including many people who write for this website. I think he’s designed some of the greats, I mentioned two of them earlier. Stephenson’s Rocket, The Quest for El Dorado, Modern Art, Ra, High Society, Quandary, Babylonia — I’d say all of those are superlative games that ought to have a permanent place in any self-respecting hobbyist gamer’s collection. They also feature another common characteristic of what I view as a great game — they allow for personality and creativity.
Part of what enables this creativity is broadness of interpretation. I haven’t mentioned much in the way of strategy or how you “ought” to interpret T&E. Part of the beauty of the game is that it molds itself to the personalities of the players. You can have stable kingdoms where players generate points until trade ends the game, or you can have titanic power struggles with mighty kingdoms rising and falling. The game offers a real theory of conflict and asks players to engage with it. What you bring is up to you. It’s certainly not a “Star Trek” game where you push around circles and polyhedrons on a fractal grid (I’m looking at you, GIPF).
Unfortunately, the game is out of print, and I’m sure, like most good games, it will find its way back into print with an obnoxious new animal setting like Zoo Vadis got (stay tuned for my invective about how people think violence and conflict are suddenly magically palatable if anthropomorphic cute animals do it), but I prefer my old battered beige copy.If you’re looking for something that scratches a similar itch by Knizia, I heartily recommend HUANG, which is a reprint of Yellow & Yangtze, a T&E riff that ditches squares for hexagons, shared incentive battles, and more stable kingdoms. It is also brilliant, but functions in a surprisingly different way from T&E despite the shared DNA.
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