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Review by Richard Dewsbery
13th December 1997

You can probably tell already, but I really like this game. I'm going to go further than that, and forecast that Euphrat & Tigris will be the 1998 Spiel Des Jahres. You may think that I'm being a bit precipitous in making such a prediction at this stage, with the 1997 prize only awarded a few months ago, and with more new games being released at the Nuremberg Fair in March, but the game really is that good. (Additionally, the award went to a simple family game in 1997; 1998 will probably reward a more complicated gamers' game if the jury follows the pattern established over the past few years.)

The game is all about establishing the Old Testament Kingdom and Empires at a time when the human race is beginning to take the important steps along the road of technology. There are important advances to be made in writing, religion, agriculture, trade and warfare which helped to shape and define the period in which the game is set.

How Reiner chooses to portray the struggle of civilization is by the placing of two different types of piece on the board: leaders and tiles. Tiles in four different colours represent areas of land given over to farming, trade, religion and population. Once laid, they don't "belong" to any particular player, but instead make up kingdoms - a group of tiles which are all adjacent to other tiles in the kingdom. Leaders however belong to the different players, and are the really important pieces. Every tile placed scores a victory point in its corresponding colour, if it is placed in a kingdom with a leader of the same colour which belongs to the player. The more leaders you have on the board, the easier it is to score points. Conflicts arise when there are two leaders of the same colour, belonging to different players, in the same kingdom. Otherwise, leaders in different colours belonging to different players will quite happily co-exist in the same kingdom. Conflict occurs in two ways, by placing a leader in a kingdom already occupied by a rival, or by joining two kingdoms together in such a way that there are two rival leaders trying to share the new, unified kingdom. As an example, if you place your farming leader in a kingdom where my farming leader is already established there will be a conflict. Alternatively if two rival kingdoms, each containing a trade leader, are joined together there would be a conflict between those two competing traders. In either event, the conflicts are fought out in a simple way using the tiles both on the board and hidden behind the players' screens, without any dice or cards. The winner is left in place picking up extra victory points, while the loser flees the board with his tail between his legs.

One of the neatest touches to the game is the criteria for deciding the winner. As the aim is to build a civilization which is balanced, flourishing in all areas rather than excelling in just 1 or 2, at the end of the game it is a player's weakest colour that is counted up as his score - if I have 16 green points, 21 black, 18 red and only 11 blue, my final score is 11.

In addition, players can pick up bonus points by building monuments. You know the sort of thing favoured by the ancients, large triumphal arches of marble-faced sandstone which remain in place for thousands of years. In the game, once built a monument is a regular source of victory points, and controlling 2 or 3 for a few turns can really help the final score. The trade-off for these extra points is that building a monument can weaken the support available to your leaders in any future conflict. The more I play the more I realize that building and controlling monuments is the key to victory in many games as they make it possible to score more than 2 points per turn. The game is not simple, and the way that the two different types of conflict are resolved is an added confusion, but it is logical and works extremely well. If I have to find fault with it, I'd say that the game is if anything a little short at 90 minutes to play - an extra 2 dozen tiles in the bag would be ideal in my little corner of the universe. The random element of chance is provided by the requirement to draw tiles "blind" from the bag, but for the most part any ill-effects of a poor draw can be mitigated by spending part of one turn in changing any or all of the tiles.

Overall, I'd say that this game is in a very similar league to El Grande, with the added advantage that there are no cards with German text. All right, the player screens do have quite a lot of German on them, but they serve only as an aide memoir to the rules - by the second game, you'll be remembering them all anyway. The mechanism of laying tiles on a board has been used before by Reiner in Auf Heller und Pfennig, but here it feels less mathematical and more involving.

Like most German board games, it has excellent components of the highest quality and clear and well-illustrated rules. As a further welcome break from the norm, Hans im Gluck are having an English translation of the rule book printed which will incorporate all of the artwork and examples of play. This game comes with the highest possible recommendation.

Reviewed by Richard Dewsbery, 13th December 1997