PnP Wednesday Four Tribes
Two weeks in a row! If we can keep this up maybe we will be worth your time again. Wait what am I saying? We are ALWAYS worth your time, just ask us, we’ll tell you! This week we bring another Kickstarter game to you, but with the files available for download. So even though we would never point you to a game that isn’t worth backing (and that we are probably backing as well) you can test this one out yourself and see if it deserves a spot in your collection. . Always remember that we are rating off a print and play copy of the game. Production versions are sure to be different/better. Without further ado let me introduce you to Four Tribes, a lovely two player game by Jason Glover.
The Playing
Four Tribes is a great two player strategy game with a lot of critical choices and expected value decisions. You and your opponent take on the role of two rival diplomats vying to win over support from four regional tribes to your side of a greater military conflict. You do this by offering supplies and aid in order to convince the village elders to join your cause. The winner is the person who convinces all of the elders of a single tribe, or at least one elder from every tribe to join your cause. Mechanically the game works by having a row of villages with markings to indicate what is to be placed on each village so that you know what kind of supplies and how many of them it takes to sway the elder there. You and your opponent abstract the process of bribing the villages by playing cards of one of 5 suits in order to match the needs of the village with the goal of having the most points once the village is fully supplied. The tricky bit comes in that you can only play one card per turn, some of the cards can be played on either side, and, while you have to color match the cards to the houses in the village, there are wild cards that all have additional special abilities. All in all it ends up being a bit fast paced to begin with but can get to some very thought inducing critical junctures pretty quickly because it is possible to set up a board state that would allow a player to cascade to victory.
The Good
This is a low skill but high cognition game. By low skill I mean there is very little in the way of complex planning that needs to be employed, so while you need to try to think two or three turns ahead and weigh the chances of your opponent having a specific card the actual skills required to play the game are basic color matching and counting skills. Most of the work is done in your head and by reading your opponent. The randomness in what you get in your hand acts as a great skill leveler and while I am still confident that a more skilled player will generally beat a less skilled player, the skill leveler aspect allows the game to be open to playing with many types of people. This game is HUGE on bluffing, or at least carefully timing your move; going too early will let your opponent control the board too much, and striking too late gives your opponent a window to either foil you, or put you into a reactionary position, neither of which is a good place to be in a competitive strategy game.
The last thing I wanted to note was how interactive the game is. It wouldn’t seem like that with the economy of actions but once you get going you will be, pleasantly, surprised at how often you are playing things to your opponents side of the board or messing with his plans.
The Bad
Four things stood out to us, and the players, for the bad. The first was the size of the cards for the village as compared to the cards for the supplies. Since they were the same size it caused some issues with placing the supplies so that they didn’t bleed over into another village, especially the villages that required 4 supplies. We solved this in our play testing by spreading the villages out more but it was a very unsatisfactory solution.
The second issue we ran into also had to do with card size, and this one may be only affecting the PNP, the supplies were a non-standard size that made them less pleasant aesthetically as they felt too tall, and also caused them to not really fit any card sleeves so it made for a much less attractive prototype.
The third issue is one that I have harped on repeatedly. This is not a vision impairment friendly game. Some effort was made to help with this on the cards but it was very easy to overlook, and here was no indication in the rules anywhere that there was any kind of solution for the houses. Since you are required to place specific colors in specific quantities at each village having nothing other than color to go by will make this a very frustrating game for certain types of color blind people.
The final issue has to do with the nod toward a color blind solution. The cards have values on only one side, but you put them on either side of the board. In order to be able to add up values in a quick manner it is necessary to orient the cards so that the values are all in the same place and not covered by the card on top of them. This makes playing on your opponent a little annoying since you either have to keep turning the cards you play on them before playing, or you have to keep fixing them after your opponent plays them the wrong way on you. Instead of putting the value in the bottom corner upside down so the cards could be placed in any orientation there is a suit symbol that helps delineate the colors. The problem with the placement there, aside from the issues of playing the cards upside down, is that you over that part of the card in a typical fanned hand, so it is still awkward for color blind people to tell the colors at a glance.
There is a fifth, very minor, issue that should be addressed. There is no rule for picking first player and no randomizer in the game to make it intuitive. As a player of Euros I just did the typical scoring piece method where you grab a color for each player, shake them up and drop one without looking to mark first.
The Ugly
This is a very short section as we only found one broken thing in the whole game. There is absolutely no rule that we could find to handle what happens if you get in a situation where you have a hand with no playable cards. We stopped a game for a good ten minutes and read the rules through twice looking for anything to give guidance and it was a no go. We hashed out a solution in order to move the game along, but it resulted in me getting the card I needed to win so it felt a bit like I was being rewarded. We decided to just discard the whole hand and draw 6 new cards. I have a few ideas on a better way to handle this, and it is not a very common issue I would think as it only came into play once in three games, but even once is enough to put a bad taste in someone’s mouth if it happens on their first game.
Wrap Up
The players loved this one. Some even went through multiple plays and we generated a lot of interest from passer byes as well. If the reception at our store for the prototype was any indication I would expect this to be a very successful game even beyond the funding campaign.
Designers Notes
The issues in the game that need to be addressed are, luckily, very easy, and completely tangential to the core game. There are no broken or over powered mechanics, and no dominant or linear strategies that need to be addressed. The only issues you will have is that players with bad decision making skills, usually referred to as analysis paralysis, will make the game a little unbearable to play against, but then again they tend to do that for any game that requires strategic thought. Also make sure the cards are a more standard ratio. They really did feel way too tall in the printed files.
To address the physical design issues take your cue from playing cards, make the upper left and lower right corners symmetric. Instead of putting the number in a small colored circle think of making it a bit bigger or coloring the whole corner in a fancy way and include the relevant symbol also, this way all of the information that is necessary for the card when it is in play will be easily seen no matter what side of the table or orientation. Make the villages square punch out pieces that are larger than the cards, or if you want them to be cards still then make them in a long format layout instead so that they are longer than the width of the resource cards. The second is an easier fix, but I think it is less appealing unless you absolutely want all of the cards in the game to fit in a single deck box. Considering the number of tokens included though I think that is a needless consideration here.
In order to address the color blind friendly aspect make sure that each token has the color symbol on it also. That way no matter what a person playing will be able to tell what village each house and elder belongs to. Basically imagine if you had to print the whole thing in grey scale. How would you still play the game. That is extreme as being that color blind is, as far as I know, nearly unheard of, but over engineering in a case like this is better that under.
The two rule issues are also easy fixes as it means adding one or two lines of text to the rule book. Just come up with some guideline for picking first player. It doesn’t matter how hokey it is, just as long as something is in there so they players don’t ask the inevitable, “Who goes first?” As for the what to do if you can’t play a card issue a simple easy rule needs to be added. As I said we used the discard the hand and draw 6 new ones rule, I felt it gave a bit too much of an advantage as if you have 6 stranded cards you pretty much want to get rid of them, but then again getting rid of all of them means you probably won’t run into that situation again. I prefer something like discard a card and reveal the top card of your deck, if it can be played play it then draw normally. This might be a bit too harsh though, so possibly something in the middle might work. Once again whatever rule you come up with is probably going to be fine as it is not a common issue I would presume, but a rule needs to be made.
Making the Game
Making this one was pretty easy, card fronts and backs were included in the files, but as I said in the playing portion the cards are rather odd sized. They are the normal 3 inches tall, but they are quite skinny in comparison, probably 1.25 inches if I had to estimate. This allowed for putting 9 cards per sheet, but also made them look a bit slapdash in the sleeves. We didn’t use the card backs, we tried, but found it easier to just use colored sleeves and save on paper, if all you have are penny sleeves, or you have a good card printing set up I would suggest using the card backs though. The only problem is that while the card fronts have guide lines the backs do not as they are intended to be double side printed. You will need to supply a significant number of tokens in 4 different colors and two styles for this one though, as well as two off color tokens to represent the wild card houses. The only down side is that, due to the blind draw mechanic, you can’t use tokens of different shapes for the different colors. That isn’t as much an issues if you play the advanced version since you split all the houses equally, but just know that token wise this one is intensive for a pnp.
As always thanks for reading, go check out the game, and you can follow us on twitter @blankwallgames or check out our website www.blankwallgames.com