Gaming With Grandma - 72

Another Saturday morning gaming session with my mother (AKA Grandma). My wife was at work and Maddie and Georgia were having a play birthday party for one of Maddie's favourite stuffed animals.

As it would be just Mum and myself I decided to pull out a game I'd received a couple of months ago in the last math trade - Tigris and Euprhates. Tigris and Euphrates is a game by famous designer Reiner Knizia and is the highest ranked boardgame on Boardgamegeek that I currently own (ranked no. 5 as of today's date).

The game is set in the ancient fertile crescent of the land bounded by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers with players building civilizations through tile placement. Players are given four different leaders in four colours: farming (blue), trading (green), religion (red), and government (black). The leaders are used to collect victory points in these same categories. However, your score at the end of the game is the number of points in your weakest category, which encourages players not to get overly specialised. Conflict arises when civilizations connect on the board, i.e., external conflicts, with only one leader of each type surviving such a conflict. Leaders can also be replaced within a civilization through internal conflicts.

The board at game end

I've only played Tigris and Euphrates once before, and that was back on 26 April 2006 (and I didn't really know what I was doing). It certainly helps to sit down with the rule book and view the board and pieces prior to playing a game. I felt I had a fairly good understanding of the rules prior to explaining them to Mum.

Mum built the majority of the monuments and certainly benefited from that during the early to mid-point of the game. I was able to come in and take control of some valuable kingdoms by internal conflict and piggy-backed off the monument points from about the middle of the game. Monuments are certainly powerful when one has leaders in those kingdoms. I only used one catastrophe tile and Mum used none. I took an early lead in claiming treasures by linking regions but Mum soon caught on. Mum took the win with a score of 28 to my 24. We both enjoyed Tigris and Euphrates and plan on playing it again soon.