LogFAQs > #933975786

45. Five Tribes (2014)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Abstract, point-to-point movement, set collection, point salad
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 5
Game length: 60-90 minutes
Experience: 3-4 games over 3-4 sessions (2017-18) with 4-5 players (with expansion)
Previous ranks: NR/100 (2016), 26/80 (2018)

Summary - A rectangular board of tiles is laid out, each randomly populated with meeples of five different colors (the titular tribes). Each round, players bid victory points for turn order, then take their turn. On your turn, you pick up all the meeples of a tile and drop them, one at a time, on orthogonally adjacent tiles, thus moving around the board. The final meeple you drop must match one that is already on that tile - you collect the tile meeple you drop and all meeples of the same color on that tile, then perform an action specific to that color. These actions include "killing" other meeples, gaining VPs for the meeples themselves, collecting VP cards, building a tableau of special-power-cards, and gaining money. You can also build structures/claim tiles on the map. The game ends when there are no legal moves remaining.

Design - Five Tribes is nearly a pure abstract. Aside from card draws which affect the offers for markets you may visit with green or white meeples, there is zero randomness. Because of its spatial element, there are literally thousands of ways you can play each turn, especially at the beginning (albeit, some sub-choices, such as where to drop the meeples along the route, are seemingly redundant, while others are seemingly poor choices). In addition, a single meeple dropped onto the square you want can entirely change the parameters of the problem, as going from an odd number to an even number means you can no longer end on the same square you intended to. As a result, Five Tribes gets a reputation for being analysis-paralysis-inducing. Indeed, one of the major issues with Five Tribes is something of an inability to predict what the board state will look like on your turn, and the overwhelming number of possibilities available to you on a given turn.

That said, when it plays, it sings. One of the joys of a board game is its physical presence. Five Tribes has you physically doing something every turn. If you're ever played Mancala, the process of picking up meeples and dropping them off in consecutive squares, looking to claim meeples, should feel familiar - and really satisfying.

Aside from the physical element, taking the actions themselves feels rewarding. There are several very cool payoffs at the end of your turn that give you a nice sensation of payoff, since all of them contribute very directly to VPs. When you empty a square completely, you get endgame points, so the red assassins can give you a double-boost if you claim a territory when you drop the red, then claim another by killing the last meeple in a different territory. The blue builders give you coins, which are one-to-one with VP for endgame scoring. The yellow and green meeples become more valuable if you can get a lot of yellows (especially if they're not being taken by others) and/or the market offer for the set collection becomes useful. And the white tokens are of course really satisfying, because improving your powers is always nice... and they also give VPs. Sometimes, you wind up taking a suboptimal turn, and it hurts, but you bide your time hoping for more.

Turn order in Five Tribes is kind of interesting. There are slots on the turn order track you can bid for, but they cost you VP, and they are not an open auction - rather, each player chooses where they want to bid at according to a fixed track, and you're locked into paying that amount, even if several others leap you. It's a very interesting system, where sometimes you'll just throw down the 18 points to get the monster first move (the only choice with stability), and sometimes you'll meander paying 0 to 1 and just hope you can make a slightly profitable move.

This phase, alas, certainly does not help with the importance of analyzing the board state, resulting in more potential for AP. What's a little more disappointing is that the endgame of Five Tribes is less interesting and fun than the opening, for pretty much all players. At first, with all the meeples on board, you can be assured of taking a cool move no matter what, even if it's not strictly optimal. At the end of the game, when the legal moves are few, "hate-drafting," defensive placement, and countably optimal moves take over, and even the optimal move probably grants fewer points than the early-/mid-game moves that get the oohs and ahhs. As a result, the game's arc is a rise and then something of a sputter/drag as it finishes out.

Experience - Played this at a meetup and, in a rare moment, a friend decided to buy it based off that. Since have played it a few more times, and indeed have found that AP can be a bit agonizing. And yet, the game has always managed to fit that "arc of fun," where you get a few monster moves per game that make you feel great.

Future - There are so many middleweight euros out there that it's kind of hard to think of when this will be the #1 choice. I have heard it's best with two though...
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness