First off, wasn’t it TableTopics before? Yes, it was, however, the guys who run The RPG Academy ran into a flimsy copyright attempt against them and their podcast called Table Topics. So preemptively we are going to be changing the name. The first try at it is going to be Triple T, or Table Top Takes. What is going to change? Nothing, we are just using a different name.

Five Tribes

Five Tribes is probably quintessential Euro Style board game. It focuses on victory points, and having lots and lots of ways to get them, in fact, you don’t know how many points you or anyone else has until the end. With all these different ways of getting victory points, it allows players to focus in on different areas where they are getting points.

Five Tribes uses the world of Alibaba and the 40 Thieves and 1001 Arabian Nights. You vie for workers in a town using a very unique mechanic where you take workers off of one tile and then move them around to other tiles, finally matching and removing the matched color of meeples from the tile. This is the part of the game that requires the most strategy as you look at the combination of meeples, what color you want to remove, and pull down victory points.

However, each round starts in by bidding for turn order. Different spots cost different amounts of gold, ranging from 18 at the highest, and 0 at the lowest. So if you have a move, worker, resource, or Djinn that you need to have, you can bid accordingly to get what you need. Or you can sit back, save up your gold coins, which are worth victory points, and hope to gain your points that way.

There are some other unique things, while some workers give you resources or money, there are others that just give you points at the end of the game, there are assassins who can kill meeples, and Elders who you can use to buy Djinn. However, there are only specific spots where you can buy Djinn, so they are a powerful but limited resource.

While there are a lot of different things going on, the rules are actually very short and very simple. Once you get a grasp of the rules, you can implement so many different strategies and hope that they work. The game really can get moving as you go as well, since it isn’t overly complex. Kristen and I, while learning to play the game and half watching the Olympics, were able to play the game in just over an hour, I would think with a group of people who know the game, you could get a four player game done in about that same amount of time.

I definitely want to play this game again, and it’ll probably get put into the rotation of games that we play just Kristen and myself, as well as bringing it to small group game nights.

Overall Grade: B+

Gamer Grade: B

Casual Grade: B+

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