Tianxia Review – Prestigious times defending China

A review copy of Tianxia was kindly provided by Board & Dice. Thoughts & opinions are my own.

One of the last big Board & Dice releases for 2025, Tianxia throws the players into the roles of noble leaders, aiming to raise their standing with the leaders of the warring Seven Kingdoms. It’s a heavy Euro with a lot going on, lots of decisions to make, and at times even forcing players to work together. I like Tianxia a lot; it does things you rarely see in modern games. That said, there might be a bit too much going on for people who prefer their games at medium weight, and the setup is fiddly. Read on to find out if it’s for you.

And after all, you’re my…

Tianxia has you trying to juggle a lot of things at once. At its heart is a worker placement game, deploying action markers to different regions on the map to perform different actions. The difficulty is that you’ve only got three workers for each round, and resources to actually perform the actions are thin on the ground. With those same scarce resources, you’re expected to install governors, train soldiers, build walls and towers, and trade at ports.

You get the resources by sending workers to one of the three barges on the river, but space on the barges is limited, so as new workers get on a barge, they knock others off the other end. Getting knocked off a barge isn’t the end of the world, though, as the bumped workers go back to players’ boards to special action spaces which can be activated if and when they have enough people on them.

The first interesting thing the game does is to make you choose between gaining resources and placing workers, as both actions take one of your turns. If you want to use an action space that another player has already used in the round, you need to pay a coin per action marker already there. So you want to get to action spaces early because it’s cheaper, but you can’t use those action spaces unless you’ve got the resources to carry out the actions. It’s a real chicken-and-egg situation.

I mentioned walls above because defending the kingdoms is at the heart of the game. As the game progresses, the Nomad forces gather in strength and get closer to the northern edge of the board. You know at the start of each of the game’s four rounds which of the four regions will be attacked and which need defending. Defences come in the form of the towers you build and the soldiers you train.

You’ve got a vested interest in building the defences for a couple of reasons. Firstly, there are VPs up for grabs for the players who participate in the defence. Secondly, and more importantly, the very things you’re defending are your own buildings. Your buildings give you things like ongoing and income bonuses, so they’re pretty important when stuff is hard to come by. The biggest problem you’ve got, however, is that it’s nigh on impossible to defend a region by yourself.

Balance of power

Where Tianxia does things that you don’t normally see in Euro games is in the shared responsibility. If the Nomads break the walls they rampage down the board, following the printed paths. As they march, they remove governors as they go, and at times that’s not a bad thing – especially if it’s your opponents’ governors in the way. If you lose a governor, you lose the benefit of the building they were in.

It’s a double-edged sword, though, and you could find that in letting someone get trampled, you’re cutting off your nose to spite your own face, because the cost of putting governors in a once-ravaged building goes up, and up, each time it’s hit.

It’s an interesting little twist because it adds in this layer of indirect interaction between the players. It’s not like you’re directly targeting another player and doing something to them, but you can, through your own inaction and decisions, allow someone to take a bit of a walloping.

Of course, this being a Board & Dice game, there are a bunch of tracks on the board to climb, offering a nice little tasting platter of benefits along the way. It’s different to some games inasmuch as you can definitely climb up more than just one track. If you played the venerable Teotihuacan (read my old review here) you might remember the three tracks in the middle of the board, and you might remember the feeling of choosing one and going for it. In Tianxia, it’s perfectly plausible to do well on two or even three of the four tracks. What was the last game you could say that about?

It’s a funny feeling, though, playing a game where you’re trying to score big, build things, gather resources, while all the while the Nomads inch closer. The wolves are at the door, and you’re trying to balance your own machinations with those for the greater good.

What a fuss

No game is perfect, and Tianxia is not without its foibles. First of all, it’s a very fussy game to setup. There’s an abundance of stuff that needs to be sorted out and placed before the game starts. If you don’t even count the piles of resources (six different kinds, no less), there are around 130 pieces that need sorting and placing. Fortunately, the player boards and pieces are much more sedate affairs, but it’s still worth knowing that there’s a lot of things going on.

The abundance extends to learning and teaching Tianxia, too. Even if you didn’t have the looming Nomads each round, it’d be a pretty heavy game to teach. Understanding the way resources can be upgraded to goods, and how those are used to pay for other actions, how to trade at the ports, the way bumped traders can be invested in future bonus actions, the decision of when to pass to determine turn order – all of these have a level of mental overhead.

When you then factor in understanding Nomad strength vs defence, the drawbacks and benefits to adding to a sections defenders (or not), and what the changing landscape might mean for you and the others – it’s a lot.

None of this is to say it’s necessarily bad because of everything going on. It just doesn’t feel particularly streamlined, and it’s a daunting prospect to teach it to anyone who isn’t overly keen to play it in the first place.

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Final thoughts

Tianxia is an odd duck. It didn’t have the fanfare of a lot of other games released in 2025, and it doesn’t feel like most of the other big board, component-heavy Euro games. In many ways, it feels like an older Euro, because of the level of interaction between the players, not just in the semi-coop defending of the realm, but also in the worker bumping mechanism on the barges.

For some people, it’s not going to be a hit. There’s a generation of gamers out there now who love their Euros full of stuff, but with a lack of interaction, which means they can optimise their mutliplayer solitaire strategy without worrying about getting their toes trodden on. Tianxia is not that game. It’s actually got quite a lot in common with The Great Wall (2021), with the shared, kinda-compulsory defending. Tower defence game fans will love that aspect.

If you don’t mind the sheer number of bits in the game, the time it takes to get the game ready and packed away, and enjoy the interaction, Tianxia is actually pretty awesome. I love the way the track climbing is linked to the action selection. I love how different every game can feel thanks to the randomised setup, and in a sadistic way, I really enjoy seeing the trail of destruction the rampaging nomads can leave on the map. Tianxia is a solid, heavy Euro, but probably best played with 3 or 4 players, so you don’t have to bolster the game with an (admittedly easy to run) automa player.