PhilBowles
Deity
- Joined
- Nov 20, 2011
- Messages
- 5,333
Tigris and Euphrates - I can see why this gets a lot of hype. The board is big enough that there's a lot of possible moves at work here, especially if you have 3-4 players. It's interesting because the game uses several different ways to read the board and puts them in conflict with each other. For example, I can try to connect as many tiles as I can to another temple in order to get that treasure, provided I have the right player piece next to one of the red tiles. If my opponent moves his player piece in, suddenly I have to worry about how many of a certain color of tile I have around that piece. If two tile chains meet, then I have to worry about how many of a certain color I have on that side of the connection. If you have several possible connections...uh oh. Another fascinating Reiner Knizia game, definitely one of his best.
Love the game, unfortunately the only opportunity I have to play it is online at GameTable, where I'm pitted against AIs that play predictably and my win rate is about 100% (no option for changing AI difficulty). I should probably invest in some 'tokens' so I can play vs. human opponents. I suppose I tend to play fairly rigidly myself (I rarely deploy the Priest, for instance).
For myself I've only recently played Civilization (the original board game on which Civ was modelled, not the one based on the computer game series based on a board game) Catan, Arkham Horror, and computerised versions of chess and of Talisman's current edition. Unfortunately the people I have available to play with are - inexplicably - not fans of the amazing Britannia, my all-time favourite board game and one I've not played since childhood.
The closest analogy in computer game terms would be to think of it as something akin to a pre-1066 board game version of Europa Universalis - rather than the freeform 'have a civ and develop it how you will' of the Civilization boardgame, Britannia gives you a fixed historical context with timed events (such as the Roman withdrawal, the Danish Great Army, the Saxon invasion and so forth), and your goal is to achieve specific tribe-specific victory conditions (mostly holding specific provinces in a particular time period, killing units of a particular faction, or killing a specific faction leader) to earn victory points; sometimes victory points mirror the historical achievements of a faction, and sometimes you get points for improving your faction's standing relative to its real-life counterpart. Because of the temporal scale of the game - the 600-odd years between Roman withdrawal from Britain and the Norwegian and Norman invasions of 1066 - and because certain groups vanish from history at specific points, each player controls multiple factions over the course of the game.