1832: Five Tribes

I got a belated Christmas present the other day: a new Days of Wonder board game called Five Tribes.

Days of Wonder games are always a pleasure to behold. They include high-quality components, look great on the table and, more often than not, feature a nice balance between simple, straightforward rules that anyone can understand and some complex strategy that will get your brain chugging away. Five Tribes appears to be no exception.

Unfolding on a randomly-generated map of a fictional sultanate in the lands of the 1,001 Nights, Five Tribes tasks you with taking control of as much of the map as possible, perhaps with a little supernatural assistance. This is achieved through an interesting mechanic slightly akin to how you move armies around in Risk.

Each tile begins with a few coloured meeples on it. These are drawn from a bag at the start of the game, so the arrangement of both the tiles that make up the map and the meeples on them is different each time you play. On your turn — the order for which is determined by a simple bidding system — you can grab a whole tile’s worth of meeples and then move one tile at a time, dropping one meeple on each tile you pass through. The last tile you land on has to have at least one meeple of the colour you’re trying to put on it already, and you then claim all meeples of that colour from the tile. If this empties the tile, you take control of it with a natty little wooden camel game piece.

That’s the basic mechanic, and by itself this would make an interesting and strategic game. But things get interesting when you throw the different colours’ special abilities into the mix. Yellow meeples can be kept and scored for points at the end of the game, for example; white meeples can either be kept for scoring at the end or spent on certain benefits throughout the game; red meeples allow you to either assassinate a meeple a certain number of tiles away (potentially allowing you to take control of another tile in your turn); blue meeples allow you to score points immediately according to how many specially marked spaces are surrounding the tile you finished on; green meeples allow you to take cards from the “market”, which are either slaves (which can be expended in much the same way as the white meeples) or various luxury goods.

Then each space has a special ability that you use if that’s where you finished your move: some force you to place a palm tree or palace marker on that space, making it worth additional points at the game’s end for whoever ends up controlling the space, if anyone; others allow you to acquire the services of one of several different djinni, each of whom has their own active or passive abilities to further your own plans for domination.

The aim of the game is to score more points than anyone else; a nice twist on this is that your points is also how much money you have on hand to do things. There isn’t a lot to spend your money on — it’s mostly used on bidding for turn order at the start of each round — but there are plenty of means of acquiring more money as you progress. The cards depicting the luxury goods are particularly important here: selling a “suit” of these cards (a set where every card contained therein is different) allows you to earn amounts of money according to how many cards you get rid of at any one time. Some djinni can help you earn money, too; others provide a passive bonus that can make the difference between winning or losing.

It’s an interesting game. My first game with Andie saw us flailing around a bit to begin with as we had no real idea of how it worked or what we should be trying to do. But it became clear as the game progressed, and I’m looking forward to trying it again sometime now I have a better understanding of how it all works.