Scholars of the South Tigris

Welcome back to the Abbasid Caliphate, circa 830 AD, known as the Golden Age of wisdom and knowledge. The Caliph has called upon the keenest minds to acquire scientific manuscripts from all over the known world. Players will need to increase their influence in the House of Wisdom and hire skilled linguists to translate the foreign scrolls into Arabic.

This is the setting of the latest game in the South Tigris trilogy, Scholars of The South Tigris – published by Garphill Games and designed by Shem Phillips and SJ McDonald. If you’ve paid any attention to my blogging, you’ll know I’m a huge fan of this publisher. Two of the West Kingdom series, Architects and Paladins, ranked as one and two in my top 50 games of all time for a good while, and there’s eight games from Garphill in my current version of the list. I was excited to play Wayfarers of the South Tigris but unfortunately, it turned out not to be me. Undeterred though, I dived into Scholars and, boy, did I find a fantastic game. Let me take you through this game and why it might be my new favourite game.

A game of discovery

As a heads up, this won’t be a full explanation of how to play this game. I think there will need to be a how to play written in the future for that, so a brief overview it is! In Scholars, you’ll be taking a variable amount of turns, building a bag full of, and then rolling, dice, placing workers and attempting to translate the works of scholars from various different countries and disciplines. You achieve this by playing action cards and different coloured dice to your player board. Depending on the action you want to take, the colour and value of the dice will make a difference. But due to the nature of dice and bag building, things may not turn out the way you want. However, not to worry, because there are a few ways you can mitigate the dice to your advantage.

Firstly you play up to two dice per action card and then you can play up to two meeples per die. One the same colour as your die will make it a 6, and one of a primary colour will turn the die virtually into one of that colour. When you combine the two dice on the action card, the colours and values merge, so a red 4 and a white 3 becomes a red 7. Red 2 and a blue 4 is a purple 6, and any secondary colour of green, purple or orange overrides any primary colour. Being able to manipulate the dice in this way gives you a whole lot of flexibility.

The actions themselves are relatively straight forward so here’s a quick rundown:

Recruit: lets you hire a new translator or dismiss them. Only cares about the value of the dice.

Travel: move around a rondel, up to the value of your dice. Land on a black space, you can move a scroll to the House of Wisdom. A white space gives you resources. Crossing a path that matches your die colour also gives you some stuff.

Research: This action depends on the value and colour of your dice. This lets you move up one of the science tracks one or two spaces. Cross a white space, you get some resources. Land on a coloured space, that’s now your income for that track.

Translate: Needs a green, orange or purple die, but doesn’t care about value. This allows you to translate a scroll from the matching House of Wisdom and put gold onto the translators in the study, potentially retiring them.

Once you’ve taken all the actions you can, you take a rest turn, triggering a new scroll off the bottom of the deck, letting you cycle through the scrolls available or bringing out a new scoring card, called a caliph card. After that, you gain your income from the action cards you placed, which varies depending on which you chose, so ordering matters.

South Tigris ends when the last caliph card comes out. Finish the round and play a final round, then total up the scores.

Likes & Dislikes

Like: Lots of tracks to bump
Like: mitigation of dice
Like: bag building
Like: very variable game
Dislike: The flow of languages isn’t clear

Final Thoughts

Holy moly, I love this game. I think it’s so clever in the way it challenges you to come up with different strategies each game, but also giving you a slight steer at the beginning of the game for some mid-game objectives. Where I struggled with Wayfarers was the openness at the beginning. There was too much to try and do and not enough I could do to make things work for me. Scholars turns that on its head. The option to manipulate every die you place, and how some actions have different requirements for you to meet is so interesting to me. I could play this game repeatedly in a weekend, it’s that good and varied. The translators giving extra resources when dismissed is great, and something really missed in Wayfarers. I didn’t even get into what happens if you retire a translator!
There’s just so much you can do here. The six tracks all give something different, so you can try all sorts of different strategies that work best for you and see what you enjoy the most. I’m really intrigued to see how Scholars will evolve in the future. Garphill always seem to bring out at least one expansion for the games in their trilogies, so I’m looking forward to what comes next with my new favourite game of all time.