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Tigris & Euphrates: every award it has won

Deutscher Spiele Preis 1998

Box art for Tigris & Euphrates
Deutscher Spiele Preis

1997Reiner Knizia

7.7

Rating BoardGameGeek

30,115 ratings

Players
2–4
Duration
120 min60–120 min
Complexity
3.5/5Heavy
Age
14+
  • Abstract Strategy
  • Ancient
  • Civilization
  • Territory Building

1 award

All of its awards

BoardGameGeek

About the game

Regarded by many as Reiner Knizia's masterpiece, Tigris & Euphrates is set in the ancient fertile crescent with players building civilizations through tile placement. Players are given four different leaders: farming, trading, religion, and government. The leaders are used to collect victory points in these same categories. However, your score at the end of the game is the number of points in your weakest category, which encourages players not to get overly specialized. Conflict arises when civilizations connect on the board, i.e., external conflicts, with only one leader of each type surviving such a conflict. Leaders can also be replaced within a civilization through internal conflicts.

Starting in the Mayfair edition from 2008, Tigris & Euphrates included a double-sided game board and extra components for playing an advanced version of the game. This "ziggurat expansion", initially released as a separate item in Germany for those who already owned the base game, is a special monument that extends across five spaces of the board. The monument can be built if a player has a cross of five civilization tokens of the same color by discarding those five tokens and replacing them with the ziggurat markers, placing a ziggurat tower upon the middle tile. The five ziggurat markers cannot be destroyed. All rules regarding monuments apply to the ziggurat monument as well. If your king is inside the kingdom of the ziggurat, you will get one victory point in a color of your choice at the end of your turn.

Some versions of Tigris & Euphrates are listed as being for 2-4 players, while others incorrectly state that they're for 3-4 players. Tigris & Euphrates is part of what is sometimes called Reiner Knizia's tile-laying trilogy.

Mechanics

  • Area Majority / Influence
  • Chaining
  • Connections
  • Force Commitment
  • Hand Management
  • Hidden Victory Points
  • Highest-Lowest Scoring
  • Income
  • Set Collection
  • Square Grid
  • Take That
  • Tile Placement