RENEGADE GAMES Wayfarers of The South Tigris - Dice Placement Strategy Board Game, Ages 14+, 1-4 Players, 60-90 Min

Product Information

Wayfarers of the South Tigris is the first Garphill Games game that I’ve reviewed here at Nerds on Earth, despite there being a plethora of similar games like the games in the West Kingdom Trilogy. Wayfarers of the South Tigrisby Garphill Games and Renegade Games Studios is a tableau-builder that sprawls across your table in near-infinite splendor. All of the workers in the gain are player-agnostic; once placed on a card they are available for anyone to claim by acquiring that card. Only their color dictates where they can be placed. This creates a fun dynamic of people eyeing up cards where workers were placed, since having access to more actions is a huge benefit. In a way, it helps limit the choices on your turn, or at least persuade you to prioritize certain actions over others. Timings and content strategies will follow along the lines of the past trilogies, while also having some improvements based on things they have learned along the way (like having dice that work for those with color blindness). In case you are not familiar, the past two trilogies were THE NORTH SEA (Shipwrights, Raiders and Explorers) followed by THE WEST KINGDOMS (Architects, Paladins and Viscounts). Bonus, they confirmed that characters from past games will in fact be showing up in this game. End game points is determined by your cards. Set collection from land and water tags, space cards and achieved inspiration cards, tiles with points, and guild majorities. The player with the most points wins the game. The Verdict

I like Wayfarers of the South Tigris. It’s not what I was expecting, but it is a verystrong game. Where does it sit with the other games in the series? For me, I’d put Paladins of the West Kingdom at the top, then this and Viscounts of the West Kingdom at joint number two, followed by Architects of the West Kingdom as my least favourite but even so, it’s still a good game. October 31, 2021 – Wayfarers, Scholars and Inventors of the South Tigris announced as next Garphill Games trilogy. Meaning it focuses on the Tigris River. Designers Shem Phillips and Sam Macdonald announced the new lineup, timeline and some gameplay details via a live stream today. Place a Worker – Place a worker on one of the cards surrounding the board, losing the worker but gaining the action The workers who gain resources from the center board can be controlled by anyone, and the game will make use of an influence economy whereby players can charge each other money to use placed workers. The design will embrace a lot of random elements but also include plenty of ways for players to invest in mitigating that randomness as the session advances.For many people, October 31st represents a day of fun, dressing up in costume, and consuming their body’s weight in candy. Last year, as my wife and son were getting excited about Halloween, I was getting excited for an entirely different reason. Garphill Games had something big they were going to be announcing on a livestream later in the day. I’m pretty ambivalent about Halloween, but I’m definitely not ambivalent to Shem Phillips. I was dying to know what the hubbub was all about. This was a livestream I definitely was not going to miss. At the time, GOW pushed the PS2 hardware to its very limits. With groundbreaking graphics, stellar gameplay, and fantastic storyline, it was easy to become totally infatuated with the game. It was, hands down, the best video game I had ever played. I recall thinking at the time that it would take considerable effort to create a video game that completely captured me the way that GOW did. This game has not been designed yet. They have gone through 2 or 3 different prototypes, testing different ideas here and there. The biggest challenge is that most games are feeling abstract and not that meaty South Tigris game they want. Space cards provide end-of-game scoring bonuses. These can be modified by sliding Inspiration cards beneath them. Each Inspiration card has a requirement printed on it. If this requirement is met by the end of the game, then the Inspiration card will double the amount of points earned by the Space card it is attached to. And There’s Even More

When you take actions with your dice, the value of the die indicates which resources and tags that you can use towards your action. You simply refer to the top of your player board, which has a column for each value. There are also spaces that allow you to manipulate your dice values, giving you access to the resources you need on a given turn. As we start to discuss the theme of Wayfarers of the South Tigris, I’m of the opinion that for the most part things fall into place. Again, the primary thing that I’m concerned with as a player is the tableau-building in front of me, and adding cards to the panorama helps to make that thematic connection for me. The whole concept of the game is mapping out and exploring the surrounding world, and so I’m seeing tangible progress to that end as the game goes on. Currently (subject to change) it is a dice drafting, rondel game. They were thinking about how else they could use dice and this felt like a good option. There are three different colors of dice. Each turn you draft a die and then do a few things with that die. The idea, thematically, is that you are building these little devices to then demonstrate and hopefully have published in the house of wisdom. They still have the “influence” system to work on and make it that 60 – 90 minute euro style game for 1 – 4 players like the others.Acquiring cards and adding them to your tableau will not only potentially net you meeples, but they will also provide you with more powerful dice placement locations, bonus scoring potentials, and end-game scoring opportunities. Of course, there are various rules and limitations in place that dictate when, where, and how dice and workers can be used, but we’ll get to all of that shortly. Suffice to say, Wayfarers is a game with a great deal of options and having to weigh the costs and benefits of choosing one over the other is where the game’s challenge—and its fun—lies. Setup From a player relationship standpoint, there is definitely a lot of tension that takes place during your turn and between turns. Wayfarers of the South Tigris is a game where what happens on other players’ turns really has an impact on your own turn. They might place a worker that breaks the tie between two cards you were thinking of taking, or they could take your Journal location. The gamestate is always changing, making the experience a nail-biter all the way through. Wayfarers of the South Tigris: Journal Your Experiences! At the end of the day, the art that’s in front of the players most prominently – the panorama cards – help to elevate the game and make the aesthetics more appealing that they might be otherwise. There are also plenty of icons to learn, which creates a bit of a learning curve for newer Garphill players. Interest I absolutely love the art on the panorama cards, and how the water cards connect together with their additional instantaneous benefits. Although remember that you’ll need a decent-sized table to fit all of those gorgeous cards; between the central board and the individual panoramas, table real estate is going to be at a premium.

Initially, you’ll roll three dice. Let’s say, for example, that you get a 1, 2, and 6. Each number has tags associated with it. At the start of the game, 1 has the camel tag. This means that you can go to a dice placement spot with a camel on it, put your 1 down, and do that action. On the first turn, a 2 is pretty much useless apart from getting you 2 coins or 2 provisions. But by placing tiles you can upgrade the tags linked to each number. So, on turn one, you could buy an upgrade tile which means 2s will be associated with the ship tag. Now, on the next turn, you could place the 2 on a ship dice placement spot and do that action. Sweet. Overall, the components of Wayfarers of the South Tigris hold up. There are plenty of cardboard tiles that can be a bit fiddly when trying to take them out of the box insert, but that’s a minor quibble. As a whole, the insert has plenty of space, as the various card reservoirs are more than deep enough to hold their quarry. This is the first game they designed for the trilogy and the one that sparked the theme. At this time Sam went out and bought a bunch of books to read up on this particular time period. They had thought about Doctors, because there were so many with different trades. And they went into more of combat, but that didn’t feel right because they did so much of that with the Vikings in the West. But the idea of inventors felt so right. There were these three brothers in Baghdad in 850 AD that came up with these 1001 interesting devices and they published them in a book and this was before modern technology and electricity. That felt so spot on to what they were trying to do. This is the second game they designed for the trilogy. They decided to start with this one because it is a little more approachable and less of a brain burner than Scholars. In each trilogy, they try to use an element that ties all the games together, but then each one that does it in a unique way. So for this series, that element is that they want to use dice in different ways that are unique and interesting.If at the beginning of a turn, the AI has three scheme cards with the same colour revealed, the AI will rest instead and not draw a new scheme card. Don’t expect to win though. This game is incredibly tough. When I played, I lost to the AI by 40 points. I did make the mistake of playing against the Space AI though, which does mean they got a lot of 3-point cards. I enjoyed myself though, and I think the more I play, the better I’ll get at this game. If you have a couple of hours to kill and want to explore the game, I can recommend it.