A New-to-Us-Game: Five Tribes

Between games on Meet-Up Saturday Game Day at Great Escape Games yesterday, my friend, Frank, and I went out to the store to browse around and look at games. After some discussion, Frank decided to purchase a game we had both been thinking about called Five Tribes designed by Bruno Cathala - who also designed a favorite game of ours - 7 Wonders Duel. Frank also bought the expansion for this game called Five Tribes: The Artisans of Naqala, but we did not include this in our game because none of us had ever played it before.

Mark, Frank, and David had played this game before. I never had. Frank quickly explained to me how to play and we began. It's a very simple game to understand how to play. Playing it is a bit of a brain burner.

If you have every played the ancient game of Mancala, you will understand the movement mechanic of this game. You pick up a handful of meeples and then drop one on each space as you move along the board to your destination. The twist is that the meeple you drop on the last space has to match one of the meeples that is already on that space. This takes careful planning. Once you drop that last meeple you get to pick up all of the meeples on that square of that color. If that means that you were able to clear that square, you are able to claim that square as your own and the points that it is worth. You can use the meeples to buy different things that are worth victory points at the end of the game: trade goods, Djinns that give you extra abilities, and viziers who provide extra victory points.

I could not seem to gain enough traction in this game to be able to collect board squares or Djinns, but I was able to collect the second most number of viziers (which earned me an extra 25 points) and turned in a collection of 7 trade goods which earned me another 70 points. Mark won this game, but I was able to tie Frank for second place. David, who ended the game by claiming the eighth square (the game-ending number), came in 4th but we all cleared 100 points. It was a very close game and we all had a good time! I think I can safely say that this game is going on the list of games that Mark and I want to add to our collection.