Five Tribes: For Those Who Like Meeples and Aladdin

Arabian Nights is a very catchy opening song from the Disney film Aladdin.

That has very little to do with anything.  It's just a fact.

Five Tribes was a game released around the time of our Gen Con trip, though we never test-played it because the table was always way too crowded and I didn't have a super great interest in it. But it looked fun anyway and I eventually received it as a birthday present, which was pretty cool.

The guy on the right is DEFINITELY the merchant guy from Aladdin who sings the song.

In the game, players take turns moving meeples around an Arabian desert-themed set of tiles by picking up all the meeples on a single tile and dropping them off along a path of adjacent tiles (mancala-style).  The only rules there are you can't go backwards and the last meeple you drop has to match in color with at least one other meeple on the tile you stop on.

Meeples meeples everywhere.

When you are done, you grab all the meeples of the same color on that tile as the last meeple you dropped there.

If your taking of the meeples clears a tile completely, you get to place you little camel dude on the tile.  That tile is yours.  You get its points and all the points associated with its palm trees or palaces built on it.  And no one else can ever claim it again.  It is yours.  Because your camel is sitting there.

Guard camel.

Camel meeple.  Cameeple.  Hangin' out at the market.

 Regardless of whether you claimed the tile or not, you then take the action associated with the tile AND the action associated with the colors of meeples you took.
Tile actions include buying treasure cards, summoning Djinns, and placing palm trees or palaces.

Royal cameeple chillin' in the shade of a palace.

As for the meeple "tribe" actions:
Yellow viziers you just get to keep (they are worth 1 point each and whoever has the most at the end gets bonus points).
White elders you also get to keep and can spend to buy or activate Djinns (also worth 2 points at endgame if you still have them).
Green merchants let you take treasure cards.
Blue builders let you get money for blue labeled tiles surrounding where he landed.
Red assassins kill meeples on other tiles or kill opponents viziers or elders.  If you want to be mean.

Most of these abilities are more powerful the more of the meeples you pick up.  More greens means more cards, for instance, or more reds mean longer killing range.

Treasure cards and worker cards (which are meeple substitutes, like tofu)

In this game, money is points.  Just like real life.
You want both things that score you points (like tiles and Djinns and certain meeples) but you also want lots of money which are also points.  Got it?  Money is good.  You got it.

At the end of the turn you always have the option to trade in sets of different treasure cards for money.  The more different types of cards you have, the more money you get and the scale rewards those who wait until they have them all rather then spending small sets early.

Another complication is turn order.  You bid for it.  With money-points.  Turn order is important, because sometimes there is just a great move sitting on the board and everybody wants to go first.  But you have to pay for it.  Going earlier means spending more money-points.  Hopefully it's worth it.

In a 3 or 4 player game everyone takes one turn per round.  The 2-player variant gives each player two turns per round, which introduces an extra bit of strategy into the bidding, as taking two turns in a row is incredibly powerful for using the first move to set up an amazing follow-up move.
The two-player tokens only come in "argue with my mom over whether it's green or blue"-teal and "bubblegum-flavored antiobiotic"-pink.

Bidding track.  Going first costs you money-points.

Finally, the Djinns.  If you land on a magic lamp tile, you can spend elders to buy Djinns, each worth some amount of points while also having some sort of Phenomenal Cosmic Power (and itty bitty living space) that is either ongoing or can be activated once a turn.

Hmm.  Which scary looking dude do I choose?

Less ripped Incredible Hulk Djinn

This Kumarbi guy above, for example, lets you spend a worker card during the bidding phase to pay less for a higher spot on the turn order track.  He's cool.  Saves you money-points with his menacing sword, creepy yellow eyes, and titanic tummy.

You play until one player runs out of camels or until there are no legal moves left on the board.  Then you tally up points on some really pretty score sheets.

I won this one.  By quite a bit.
There's a lot to be said about trying to make good solid moves in this game.  You want to help yourself or set yourself up but not leave anything good for you opponents.  That's really hard.  And if you try to consider all the possibilities, you are in for some serious analysis paralysis.  In the end though, it may just be more fun to not stress over it and just move.  There's too many possibilities and I'm not patient enough to look at all of them, especially having no idea what my opponent is going to do.

This game is a lot of fun.  Not a game I feel like I can ever "be good at" because it's just too hard to know what to do.  Maybe if I play it a ton.  But the mancala movement mechanic and the colorful components make this game pretty great even if it doesn't feel like any sort of heavy euro game of the type I prefer.