Intense strategy game with every player able to change the gameplay at each turn. Very challenging, requiring flexible and agile playing.

Although board artwork is average you soon don't notice this once gameplay is underway.

Enjoying this game thoroughly!

Other games I have enjoyed - Settlers of Catan+expansions, El Grande, Carcassone and Elfenland.

Tigris and Euphrates languished on my game shelf for quite some time. Abstract games just aren't my cup of tea. Or so I thought. Then I played T&E, what a game. Definitely abstract, definitely fun.

T&E is easily the best game since Puerto Rico, granted it is older than PR, but I only recently discovered T&E. It is similar to Puerto Rico in the fact that it is a game where players gain only a couple points each turn, and games are generally quite close. Your final score is your smallest score in 4 areas of influence. So if a player is doing quite well in three areas they can lose by a large margin to a player that just plugged-along scoring only a few points but scoring evenly. It is not uncommon to have a surprise winner.

The tile laying mechanism is usually a boring mechanism as far as I am concerned. Tigris and Euphrates amps up the mechanism by providing the player with interesting tactical decisions, much more so than other tile games.

The downside of this game is the rule book. The writer of the rules assumed players would have a hard time understanding the conflict rules, so he over-explained the rules. The result has complicated the concept of conflict to the point absurdity. There are two types of conflict, those caused by placing a leader and those caused by placing a tile. It need not be any more complex than that. Unfortunately, it has been made more complicated than it needs to be.

Five enthusiastic stars but a warning: Choose your opponents well, it is a brain-burner. You might get bogged down with over-analysis.

I just want to correct an error made by a couple of the reviewers below. This game did NOT lose to Mississippi Queen in the Game of the Year voting -- it lost to Elfenland in 1998. In 1997, Mississippi Queen beat out the much superior Lowenherz for the title.

That notwithstanding, this game ranks #4 on my Top 300 Game list. (Lowenherz is #3.) This is Reiner Knizia's greatest masterpiece, out of many. Any serious game collector should have a copy of this -- preferably the German version, which has much better artwork than the American version.