Nancy, Paul and I played our first game of Tigris & Euphrates tonight. It took about 3 and a half hours (but I would expect that to drop to around 2 hours if we three played again).
The game was good fun, with Nancy romping home as a decisive winner. Her lowest scoring colour group were green markets, scoring her 22 points. Paul and I tied for second/last place, he with 6 blue farms and I with 6 red temples for our respectively lowest scoring colours. Nancy's dynasty settled into a well balanced and isolated mid sized kingdom whilst Paul (with a large kingdom) and Mark (with a smaller ephemeral set of kingdoms) got involved in minor dogfighting over influence in their regions. A total of three monumental ziguratts were built.
Paul stirred the pot once he realised his blue leader was going to have a hard time generating victory points, allegedly to drag me down low enough so that he wouldn't come last. I guess you could say he achieved his aim, by way of converting Nancy's likely victory into a steamroller as he handed her my head on a platter after formenting major external conflicts between her kingdom and my lesser principality.
At least, that's what it felt like.
It was great fun! For most of the game we were concentrating mainly on learning the game mechanism. The game drew to its sudden end when Nancy closed it out by trading in her unused tiles to drain the bag of those few that were left.
The game certainly has great replay value. I suspect it is likely to be more conflictual in future, especially when we play with four dynasties!
We are all looking forward to playing Axis and Allies tomorrow. I expect it will be quite a different experience!
PS - I have added the new category, 'Eurogames' to the blog index on the left sidebar.
1 hour ago