Wayfarers of the South Tigris Review

We’ve been to the north sea to go exploring and raiding. We’ve been to the west kingdom to visit the paladins and viscounts. Now Garphill Games are taking us to the South Tigris for their third trilogy of location-based games, starting with Wayfarers of the South Tigris. The biggest change to the fundamentals of the new set of games is the use of dice, and it’s a good change. A really good change. Wayfarers combines traditional worker-placement, dice-as-workers, and tableau-building and it does it brilliantly. Like, chef’s kiss good.

Every woman, every man, join the caravan…

One for The Housemartins fans there.

So you’ve got your starting board, a couple of workers, and you’ve thrown your handful of dice. What next? I guess the first thing to mention is that in Wayfarers the values of your dice don’t matter in the same way as in other games. Take Ping Yao: First Chinese Banks (review here) for example. In that game, you wanted low values. In Marco Polo II you might want high values. In Wayfarers the value only matters in the context of your caravan – the grid at the top of your player board. Each die face has a caravan column associated with it which will have one or more icons in it as the game goes on. Some of the actions you take demand that the dice you place in a spot have certain icons associated with them.

To get icons for your caravan you need to collect upgrade tiles through various in-game actions and then place them, tetris-style, into the grid on your board. It reminds me a bit of the tile-placement puzzle in Bonfire (review here), albeit less complicated. What’s especially nice about Wayfarers is the way Shem & Sam decided to make the Caravan layout different on each player board. They’re the same shape, but the bonuses you cover and gain when you place tiles are all different, which alleviates any early-game forced conflict between players, fighting over particular tiles. It’s a subtle, but welcome touch.

The little caravan area soon gets dwarfed by the rest of your city’s reaches, spreading east and west as you add card after card to your tableau. Lands go to the west, water cards to the right, while space cards can go above both. Then you’ve got townsfolk who can tuck under other cards to boost their features. Each has its own market around the main board, and each has its own costs and demands. It’s not just a case of buying any old thing that’s available, however. There are a lot of options available all of the time, and a lot of things to consider.

Layers.

Board games are like onions!

I love a game that gives me lots to think about at once, and Wayfarers is a fine example of just that. Just like Shrek, this game has layers. Finely woven layers that all need simultaneous consideration. Locations have tags that reward you with VPs for collecting sets of the same tag as well as simultaneously giving VPs for sets of different tags. Water cards have symbols on the left and right edges. As you expand eastwards if the two sides connect in the right way, you get rewards.

Space cards reward you with lots of ways to score end-of-game VPs, but they have to go above the other types of cards. You’ve got inspiration cards too, which, if fulfilled, double the rewards earned on the space cards they’re slotted behind.

The cards in the markets also line up with action spaces, each of which can earn you rewards. If you place a worker of a valid colour on a card, you get the action of the space for that card. Workers stay on the card they’re plonked on until someone buys that card, in which case they get the card and the worker(s). All of these things, and so many more, are the juicy niblets of corn adorning the cob of ‘roll some dice and place them to do stuff’.

I’ve painted the game with very broad brushstrokes here, and still haven’t touched on the heart of the game: the journal. The centre of the board – the journal – is a straightforward track with a couple of paths along it. Any time you take a journal action (often as a result of resting, which gets your dice back to use again) you can move to the next space if you meet the prerequisites for crossing the next line. Each space gives you more bonuses, more workers, more dice – just… more.

If at first, you don’t succeed…

Wayfarers of the South Tigris demands that you play it repeatedly. You can get a broad feel for how the game works in your first game or two, but it takes time and repetition to really get it. It’s very easy to just keep growing your tableau outwards, nudging your neighbour’s board further along the table, but it usually means you’re doing something inefficiently. You’ll end up with dice placement slots on your land cards that you never use. Granted, you can use the tags on those cards for other scoring opportunities, but you’ll always feel like there’s something better you could have done.

It means that you’ve got a game that’s deceptively heavy. Not complicated or complex, because learning and playing the game honestly isn’t that hard. The weight comes in the decision space. You can randomly do things, add cards, collect some stuff and make things happen, but you won’t do well. Wayfarers is another game from the Garphill stable with a player-driven end, which means you can’t just sit back and try to make things happen with a set number of rounds in mind. Your only cue for the end getting near is how close each player is to the last spaces on the Journal tracks, as that’s the trigger for final scoring.

Resting is the equivalent of a refresh / income phase, but you can take that action whenever you like, meaning players start to get out-of-sync really quickly. This effect is compounded by the way that the supply of worker meeples is a community pool. It’s possible, likely even, that one player ends up with a lot of workers while other players have none. Taking a turn means placing a dice or a meeple, so someone with a lot of meeples has a lot more choices before needing to take a rest.

If you’ve got the prerequisites for advancing to the next step of the journal though, maybe taking lots of rests and journal actions is a good thing, so you don’t want all of those workers anyway. Tricky, ain’t it?

Final thoughts

I’ve got a bit of a confession to make here. I backed Wayfarers of the South Tigris as a punter because I really like Garphill Games as a publisher and the games they make. When it arrived I punched it out, learned it, played it once, and then put it back on the shelf. It stayed there for months and months, and it shouldn’t have. My initial reaction after playing it for the first time was one of “Well, it’s okay, but nothing spectacular”. This was a mistake on my part. Some friends of mine were recently talking about it again which gave me the kick up the arse I needed to play it a bunch more and get this written.

You see, Wayfarers is good. Great even. I have a soft spot for their previous West Kingdom games (Architects (review here), Paladins (review here), and Viscounts (review here)), and I couldn’t see how they could hope to make something better. In all honesty, I’m not sure I’d call Wayfarers better as such. It’s just different. It’s a different take on worker placement and action selection, and the switch to using dice is very good. It’s an awesome game and one which just seems to get better with repeated play. I sit here writing this, and all my waxing lyrical just makes me want to turn around and put it on the table again.

It’s not a game for folks who don’t get on with heavier games, or those who want to feel like they’ve done something really clever after their first game. It’s a grower, not a shower, if you’ll pardon the expression. I also want to give a shout out to the outstanding solo mode. Playing Garphill’s games solo was one of the things that got me through lockdown, and Wayfarers just continues the lineage of easy-to-run, competitive AI partners. Having a low mental overhead is a must in a game like this, so having a bot which almost runs itself is a godsend.

The really crazy thing is that you can pick Wayfarers of the South Tigris up for less than £40! It’s a game with a ton of replay value and a great solo mode. There are many games of this weight and enjoyment you’ll pick up for this price. Highly recommended.

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