Tigris & Euphrates is a tile-laying, area control game designed by the great Reiner Knizia.
The gridded board is centered around the eponymous rivers.
In this game, color has in-game meaning, so players are identified by symbol. Each player should be sure to grab his four Leaders, one in each color but having the same symbol. This is the most confusing part of the game as in most games that use color, the color identifies the player.
Here are all the leaders: one player is playing the potter, one is playing bulls, one is lions, and one is bows.
In the game, players will be trying to get Victory Points in four different colors: black, red, blue, and green. The catch is that a player's final score is the number of VPs for whichever color he has the least of. So, you have to spread your moves around to gather all four colors.
On the board, players will be laying tiles in all four colors as well as their Leader discs. If there are two or more orthogonally touching tiles, those tiles form a Region. If a Region has at least one Leader, it is called a Kingdom.
On a player's turn, he gets to perform two actions from a menu of four options. A player can perform the same action twice. The actions:
- Place a Tile
- Play a Catastrophe Tile
- Swap up to six tiles
- Position a Leader
Placing a Tile
Choose a tile from your hand and put it on an empty spot on the board! It's that easy! There are some rules, though. First off, blue tiles can go only on river spaces. No other color of tiles can go on rivers. The tile cannot be placed so that it would connect more than two Kingdoms (joining two Kingdoms is OK.) Finally, placement usually causes a Victory Point cube to be awarded to a player. The award is always the same color as the tile that was placed. Who gets it? If there is a Leader of the same color in that Kingdom, the controller of that Leader gets the cube. If there is no such Leader, but there is a King (black) then the controller of the King gets the cube. Otherwise, no one gets the cube.
Playing a Catastrophe Tile
Each player starts with two of these tiles. The tile can be played to an empty spot or on top of a regular tile. They can't be played on a Leader nor on a Monument (more below.) The catastrophe stays on the board for the whole game creating a blighted space. No tile or leader may ever be played there. With strategic placement, these tiles can break up a Kingdom and earn you power!
Swapping Tiles
Pretty simple, here; if a player doesn't like his hand of tiles, he can trade them in. The discarded tiles are out of the game. At the end of every player's turn, each player should have six tiles.
Positioning
This means Placing, Moving, or Removing one of your Leader discs. Each player has a Red Leader (a priest), a Green Leader (a merchant), a Black Leader (a king), and a Blue Leader (a farmer.) To place a leader, a player puts the Leader disc of his choice in a spot on the board which is next to a red tile (called a temple.) Leaders discs must always be next to a red tile, so if a catastrophe tile removes a temple, Leaders might have to leave the board. Also, Leaders cannot be placed on a river spot. Finally, Leaders cannot be placed in a spot that unites two or more Kingdoms. Moving a Leader is merely moving the Leader to a new, legal spot. Removing a Leader is taking it into your hand.
Let's talk about Conflict
An Internal Conflict takes place when a player places a Leader in a Kingdom that already has a Leader of the same color. There cannot be two Kings (or two High Priests, etc.) in the same Kingdom! We have Civil War! The new Leader is called the attacker and the old Leader is the defender. Both players count the number of red tiles (temples) next to their Leader in question. Each player secretly commits a number of red tiles from their hands. Higher total of red tiles wins! The defender wins ties. The loser removes his Leader from the board and the winner gets a red VP cube. All tiles added from player hands are discarded out of the game.
An External Conflict takes place when a regular tile placement joins two Kingdoms and the new merged Kingdom has two Leaders of the same color. All such pairs of same-colored Leaders have to fight it out! First of all, the joining tile issues no victory cube (which player would it go to?) rather, that tile is covered with the Unification Tile. Secondly, if there are multiple such conflicts, the active player (whose turn this is) chooses the order in which the fights take place. The attacker is the player involved in the fight who is the first player starting with the active player and going clockwise around the table until you find one. The defender is the other player.
Each player counts the number of tiles of the Leader's color in his Leader's original Kingdom. Then each player commits like-colored tiles from his hand. First the attacker adds tiles, then the defender adds tiles. Each adds tiles once. Highest total wins with defender winning ties. All tiles from the hands are out of the game.
The loser removes his leader and all of the supporter tiles in his original kingdom (with the exception of red tiles next to a Leader.) These tiles are out of the game. The winner gets one cube in the appropriate color for winning and one for each supporter tile removed from the loser's original kingdom.
Treasures
On each of the ten Sphinx spots on the
starting board, an uncolored treasure cube is placed. Whenever a Kingdom has two treasures and a Merchant Leader, that Leader's player gets to take one of the treasures. These count as wild cards, color-wise, when scoring.
Monuments
There are six Monuments in the game. These are wooden units that are bi-colored. If a player places a regular tile such that there is a 2x2 block of same-colored tiles, he can choose one of the Monuments featuring that color and putting it on that 2x2 block. Just flip over the four tiles and put the wooden unit on them! Why do you want Monuments? At the end of a player's turn, he should check to see if any of his Leaders are in the same Kingdom as a Monument with the same color. If they are, that player gets a cube of the corresponding color.
There are two end game conditions. The first is if there are only two treasures left on the board. The second is if there are no more tiles left in the draw bag and a player cannot refresh to six tiles.
Scoring
As I mentioned earlier, the players should count up the VP cubes in each color separately and determine which color provided the fewest VPs. The number of VPs in that color is their score. Don't forget the wild treasures!
Those were probably the most complicated rules write-up so far! This game is very analytical with a lot of depth and choices. So much to think about on every turn.
