Five Tribes: Dropping meeples in the desert

By Meeple Lady | January 20, 2015 | Comments 1 comment

Hey folks! Let’s talk Five Tribes, a game I just received from Christmas. It’s a 2-4 player game that lasts about 60 mins. I swear though, it really should’ve been a 5-player game since it is called Five Tribes. But I digress. The tribes are actually the different colored meeples in play for the game.

The game is about controlling tiles on the board through bidding for turn order, and then picking up and dropping off meeples. The person with the most victory points at the end wins the game.

There's no board in Five Tribes. The playing area consists of tiles you randomly arrange each time you play. — There’s no board in Five Tribes. The playing area consists of tiles you randomly arrange each time you play.

To start playing Five Tribes, you randomly arrange the various tiles in a 5-by-6 formation. You then grab your bag of meeples and randomly place 3 meeples on each tile. Each player then starts with 50 coins. To go first, you have to bid on turn order. You can either bid zero, 1, 3, 5, 8, 12 or 18 coins to go first. If you bid zero, and then a player bids zero later, you get bumped back. Each round, only 3 players can bid zero. At least one player has to bid something. And once a spot has been bid on, another player can’t bid the same amount.

Here's the turn order. You can see that the turquoise player bid 5 coins to go first. — Here’s the turn order. You can see that the turquoise player bid 5 coins to go first.

On your turn, you pick up all the meeples on a certain tile and move orthogonally while dropping off a meeple, meaning you can’t move diagonal or backtrack to the tile you were just at. The tile you drop your last meeple at must have a meeple of the same color as the last one in your hand. When you drop that last meeple, you take that meeple and all the ones of the same color. If there are no more meeples on that tile, you add one of your camels to it. This means you claim the victory points on the tile to your total at the end.

You can see that the turquoise player has claimed that tile. Plus, she has a palm tree, which means 3 more victory points.

When you grab your meeples, their color represents what action you can take:

Yellow: Viziers score 1 VP per Vizier + 10 VPS per majority at game end.
White: Elders score 2 VPs at the end, or you can gain/use Djinns.
Green: Merchants allow you to draw as many resources per meeple, beginning at the start of the line.
Blue: Builders score times the number of blue tiles surrounding your final tile.
Red: Assassins can kill a meeple a tile away or killed 1 yellow or white meeple in front of an opponent.

After grabbing your meeples, you may do an action that’s shown on the tile you landed on. These actions are:

Place 1 palm tree on the tile.
Place 1 palace on this tile.
Pay 3 gold to take 1 of 3 resource cards showing.
Pay 6 gold to take 2 of 6 resource cards showing.
Pay to gain 1 djinn, or pay resources to invoke a djinn’s power.

After performing the action of the meeple tribe you picked up, you have the option to perform an action on the tile you landed. These are the five different actions available.

Palm trees and palaces give you victory points for tiles you control. Trees are worth 3, while palaces are worth 5. Collecting resources and gaining djinns will also give you victory points. Elsewhere on the table is a stack of resources where 9 cards are dealt face up each round. This represents the resources available for purchase if you land on a tile that allows you to do so. Collecting different resources gives you more bonus points at the end. This is where you can also pick up a slave card, which is necessary to gain djinns.

When you gain a djinn, you get victory points for that djinn. (You can see a djinn’s value on the top right of the card. ) You also can pay resources to use that djinn’s special ability. The game comes a well-written player’s guide for each person, which includes a guide on each djinn’s special ability.

These are the resource and djinn markets. They don't replenish until after the round, so if you're the last person going, you may not have a card available to you. — These are the resource and djinn markets. They don’t replenish until after the round, so if you’re the last person going, you may not have a card available to you.

The game ends when a player has placed all 8 of his or her camels onto the board, or when there are no more legal meeple movements. The person with the most victory points wins the game.

This game is pretty easy to grasp but it can be a total brain-burner sometimes because you’re trying to maximize your movement by picking up the correct color meeple and landing on the right tile as well. Plus, the bidding aspect of turn order gives the game an interesting dynamic. If you’re the second player to go, the meeples might have adjusted because of the first player’s movement, and then you’ll have to rethink your strategy.

Also, when this game first game out, there was some controversy on the Internet regarding the slave card, but that all seems to have died down since. The game has a lot of replay value to this game, since the tiles and meeple setup in the beginning is always random. Overall, it’s a good game to have. Who out there has played Five Tribes?