This is a guest post from Victoria Stefanelli
As a real-life scientist who is all too familiar with how long and arduous the process of scientific innovation can be, I was excited to see how many inventions I could bring from ideation to publication—all within the comparatively short playtime (compared to real life) of 90-180 minutes in Inventors of the South Tigris. For 1-4 players, this is the third game of the South Tigris Trilogy, and Garphill Games’ heaviest title to date. Players compete to contribute in meaningful ways to as many clever contraptions as possible in an effort to attain the ultimate prize for any scientist: the greatest number of victory points.
Gameplay Overview:
There is A LOT going on in this game, with the litany of elements including dice action selection, worker placement, area majority, engine building, and resource management. The thematic core, however, is bringing your inventive ideas to life through four basic dice-triggered “camel” actions: invent, build, test, and publish.
- Inventing is the first step for creating a new device. This requires playing a card from your hand that represents the idea for said device. Inventing is important for gaining influence that can be placed in the guilds and which is essential for worker placement element.
- Building, or making a physical device, requires paying money to a specific selection of three of your available craftspeople. The more you build, the more experience your craftspeople acquire, and the more costly they will become to hire in the future, though they become worth more points as well. Importantly, building a device makes you eligible for its specific end-game scoring condition.
- Publishing an invention requires that it has already been built and that you have the cash on hand to pay the original inventor as well as two craftspeople. Doing so confers eligibility for the invention’s end-game scoring condition.
- Testing helps make inventions better and requires the sacrifice of difficult-to-acquire colored dice. This provides end-game points to the builders and publishers of the tested devices—hopefully, that’s yourself. Nonetheless, the immediate reward of testing is moving your boat up the South Tigris river track, which is the only way to acquire new engine-building tiles for your workshop and provides access to research tiles that give powerful engine-building or one-time effects.
Your workshop starts with 1-2 basic abilities in each of 3 rows that can be separately triggered via dice placement and which can each be upgraded by collecting additional tiles as you move your questionably-thematic boat along a river.
Worker placement across three distinct guilds is probably the least thematic game element. There is always a cost of influence to place a worker, but this is the primary way to claim those aforementioned research tiles. While the guild spots offer important rewards, spending too much influence decreases your competitiveness in the end-game area majority scoring.
Game Experience:
This game hurts your brain, but spoiler alert: it’s well worth it. This is a truly unique experience that manages to stay competitive while strategically encouraging competitors to work together. Sure, it is possible to invent, build, publish, and test a newfangled device without anyone else’s help, but it’s much more common for inventions to be collaborative efforts; it simply makes the most strategic sense, and helping your opponents in a minor way is part of the decision space.
Thus, players are usually happy when others bring their creations closer to the finish line. Inventors get in-game rewards when someone builds and publishes their device. Builders and publishers get points each time their devices are tested. Somebody else building a device—usually the most expensive step—allows others to swoop in afterwards and publish it for cheaper, providing access to the same end-game scoring condition.
Even in a two-player game, when you’re most incentivized to not help your opponent, it still happens regularly. I would happily test my opponent’s build because it’s the only blue spot allowing two boat movements, thus letting me snag a really powerful workshop tile. The strategic options also blossom with more players, as there is an overall greater number of inventions that need building, publishing, and testing at any given time.
Despite these collaborations, Inventors is also a tense game with multiple simultaneous races. Worker placement spots at the guilds are limited, and some are more affordable than others, so there’s a rush to choose first. Passing for the round early begets special tent bonuses, so efficiency in play is key. Some workshop tiles may be attractive to multiple players, and it’s a literal race of your boats to claim dibs. There’s also a hurry to collect the proper resources to build and publish inventions with lucrative scoring conditions before your opponents block you. Importantly, any blocking I’ve seen has been passive, rather than hateful. It almost never makes strategic sense to waste an action and tight resources to build an invention that doesn’t benefit you.
With any heavy game, there’s the question of luck and player count. Despite the game’s reliance on dice, the luck factor doesn’t feel too bad. Each player starts with 6 active dice, and there are multiple ways to increase that number to a max of 14, as well as to increase pips.
As for player count, at 2 players, a dummy player requiring minimal maintenance at the start of each round is used; it effectively tightens the worker placement and area control aspects of the game. At 4 players, it can admittedly feel overlong, especially if there are AP-prone players, but so much of your non-turn time is spent analyzing options that it’s still enjoyable. This is probably why the designers created a shorter 3-round (versus 4) option, which includes objective cards that provide bonuses to boost your engine with fewer actions, and while this works well, players still end up inventing fewer inventions compared to a full game. My preference is the full-length game at 2 or 3 (haven’t tried solo).
My chief complaints for this game are the rules overhead and limitations in workshop tile selection. Crafting powerful workshops can fundamentally improve your strategic options in the game. Yet at any given time, you usually have only about 5 from which to choose, oftentimes fewer, and sometimes the tiles available don’t synergize with what you’ve already built. They also don’t turn over throughout the game. There have been multiple plays where I’ve raced down the river without taking many tiles because most just didn’t seem worth the slower journey, and as a lover of engine building, this made me a little sad; notably, it is still possible to do well without a fully built-up workshop, so this doesn’t ruin your game.
Finally, while the 35-page rule book is well-written, the teach for this game is intense, and there’s just so much to remember that even the seasoned heavy gamers in my group forgot or messed up several rules during our first two plays. Improved iconography in some key places could possibly have helped.
Final Thoughts:
Inventors of the South Tigris is a wonderfully interactive heavy Euro with a wide decision space that manages to weave the theme of scientific innovation into at least half of its many mechanisms. Granted, players may often be too focused on planning their next sequence of time-critical moves to truly appreciate the colorful art or the fact that they just contributed to the invention of a horse-powered flute, but for those willing to brave the rules teach, this one is definitely worth a try.
Final score: 4 stars – The crunchy decisions, meaningful player interaction, and inventive theme make this game shine, despite the few imperfections.
Hits:
• Crunchy decisions
• Meaningful player interaction
• Inventive theme
Misses:
• Heavy rules overhead
• Limited choice in workshop tiles
About the Author: Victoria Stefanelli is a scientist by day. Enthusiast for racket games, hiking, biking, theater, and reading in my spare time. I’m grateful to have discovered the joys tabletop gaming as a worthwhile social endeavor for both times of good health and when I inevitably succumb to yet another sports injury.
Source: Board Game Quest
