Five Tribes Board Game Review

Here is another game where the theme feels stuck on...

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Five Tribes is exactly the kind of game that most people here hate, but man I like it. I feel like, for the kind of game this is, a VP-salad abstract game of mechanical cogs interacting, that it's a really satisfying one. It doesn't really allow the player to chase down every possible point, but rather you need to find a niche that no one else is really going for. Some turns you'll use the trade goods and control the board, other times you'll use the djinns and some combination of the meeples. The expansions do add to the rules, but they mostly add new avenues for points without throwing the whole game out of whack.

Is it abstract? For sure. If you want a meaningful connection between theme, setting, and mechanics, this is not it. But it is a really nice production, certainly as nice as a heavyish eurogame usually looks. It's also got plenty of downtime, but I've gotten to the point in my life where downtime is usually filled with socializing and chit-chat, and threaded turns tend to get in the way of that.

Anyway, this is a favorite of mine.

A friend was hosting a day of boardgaming at his place back around the time that Five Tribes first came out. A guy set it up on one of the tables and started teaching the rules. I literally didn't like the looks of it, as it was a busy-looking clutter of parts, though nowhere near as bad as Argent: the Consortium. I learned the rules, and could immediately tell that this was going to suck due to analysis paralysis, boring worker placement, and lack of any sense of theme or setting. I declined to play, but watched the game for 20 minutes, just long enough to confirm my suspicions.