1835: More Five Tribes

Got the chance to break out my new board game acquisition Five Tribes at our fortnightly gaming evening tonight, and it seemed to go down pretty well. It’s also an intriguingly different experience when played with four people compared to just two.

One nice thing about the game is that there’s not really any randomness once you’re into the game itself — with the exception of the available cards — but the setup is totally random, making for a very different experience each time you play.

This time around, it just so happened that a couple of the tiles we laid out at the beginning of the game had three of the same coloured meeple on them right at the start, meaning these spaces could be immediately claimed for some early points. This made for a peculiar dynamic that was something of an inversion of what you might expect from your typical Euro-style game: normally, the early stages of a Eurogame see you building up and preparing for the mid-to-late game, where you’ll be scoring the majority of your points. This formula is clearly seen in everything from Settlers of Catan (early game: building roads; late game: building cities) to Agricola (early game: OMG HOW DO I FEED MY FAMILY; late game: OMG HOW DO I FEED MY FAMILY NOW IT’S EVEN BIGGER THAN IT WAS) but our playthrough of Five Tribes this evening proved to be the opposite: there was a lot of early point-scoring, and then things tailed off somewhat as “good” moves became harder and harder to spot, and play became a lot more strategic.

Five Tribes is apparently quite well known for inciting that perennial bugbear of board game gatherings, “analysis paralysis”, or certain players’ inability to take a turn without considering every possible option and all the potential consequences. Indeed, I can see how that would be the case — we saw a certain amount of it this evening — but at least the straightforward, simple game mechanics mean that actually taking your turn is quick and easy with minimal housekeeping required.

I like the game a lot. It’s interesting, simple to understand but strategically complex. I don’t think I’ve quite got my head around what winning strategies for it might look like, but I’m glad it went down well with the group, and I hope it hits the table again sometime soon. Its relatively short duration would seem to make it an ideal weeknight game, and everyone seemed to both pick it up quickly and enjoy themselves overall. So I call that a success.

I think I’m going to be seeing coloured meeples in my sleep tonight…