Our friends, Val and Chris visited on Sunday for an
afternoon playing my new boardgame ‘Five Tribes’. 
There
has been a lot of hype about this game on forums such as BoardGame Geek (BGG)
etc. I was therefore keen to try it out for myself. We played twice, both four
player games and the final scores were very tight (I did not win though!). All
the players quickly picked up the Mancala style of moving the meeples. None of
the players were overly extravagant with their turn-order bidding, and were rarely
prepared to bid more than 3 or 5 coins. I can only think of a couple of
occasions where a bidding war happened, and in our second game my wife bid zero
every turn (and did better than me in the final scoring). In the second game I
did notice some differences in tactics employed by players; Chris focussed on
controlling the higher value tiles, whilst Val was buying as many Djinns as she
could. Val’s tactic proved most successful, but even so she only won by 9
points. The only colour of meeple we did not heavily utilise was the red
‘assassins’, which we should have used against Val to prevent her collecting
and utilising her Djinns. It is clear we were focussed on our own moves and
were not inclined to aggressively attack fellow players.
Looking at various gaming forums, a major
criticism of Five Tribes is the tendency to induce ‘analysis paralysis’. We
found that this can occur but was not a serious issue. Players did decide on
their moves quickly without analysing all possible permutations; the best move
appeared to be fairly obvious. The biggest problem was the downtime between each
player’s move; as a player you were only engaged when it was your own turn, only
being mildly interested when the player before you was moving. I certainly felt
that if I was the last player in a turn then I could walk away from the game
after the bidding process and only needed to return when I was due to take my
turn. I am sure there are intricacies within the game that we have yet to uncover,
particularly the differing effects of the various Djinns, and I am sure we will
return to playing Five Tribes soon. Of all the players, I think my wife was the
least keen on the game mainly because it lacked a strong theme.
There
has been a lot of hype about this game on forums such as BoardGame Geek (BGG)
etc. I was therefore keen to try it out for myself. We played twice, both four
player games and the final scores were very tight (I did not win though!). All
the players quickly picked up the Mancala style of moving the meeples. None of
the players were overly extravagant with their turn-order bidding, and were rarely
prepared to bid more than 3 or 5 coins. I can only think of a couple of
occasions where a bidding war happened, and in our second game my wife bid zero
every turn (and did better than me in the final scoring). In the second game I
did notice some differences in tactics employed by players; Chris focussed on
controlling the higher value tiles, whilst Val was buying as many Djinns as she
could. Val’s tactic proved most successful, but even so she only won by 9
points. The only colour of meeple we did not heavily utilise was the red
‘assassins’, which we should have used against Val to prevent her collecting
and utilising her Djinns. It is clear we were focussed on our own moves and
were not inclined to aggressively attack fellow players. 
No comments:
Post a Comment