Somewhat surprisingly, ‘Scholars’ is only the second title from Garphill Games to have graced my table. After this more than positive experience it certainly won’t be the last…
Scholars of the South Tigris
Publisher: Garphill Games
Designer: SJ Macdonald & Shem Phillips
2023
How to play:
Published by Garphill Games and designed by SJ Macdonald & Shem Phillips, Scholars of the South Tigris is set “during the height of the Abbasid Caliphate, circa 830 AD. 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.”
Despite being on the heavier side of mid-heavy, at its core Scholars has relatively few things going on. It’s certainly not a sprawling game filled with an overwhelming amount of disparate mechanisms - indeed, I could probably explain the entire game in only a couple of sentences: “You’re moving around one part of the board to obtain ‘manuscripts / scrolls’ of different languages. You’ll use coins to place them into a ‘House of Wisdom’ which will get you gold and see you compete for a little bit of area majority. Use your gold to translate those manuscripts into Arabic by employing and using various Translators.”
You start the game with dice drawn from your pre-filled bag– mostly white but some others based on primary and secondary colours. Up to two of your drawn dice can be placed into specific slots on your individual player board which then allows you to take one of the game’s main actions: discover a manuscript / employ a translator / translate a manuscript. Which dice will you use? How many do you even have left? Can you conjure up a reasonably high value so that your action becomes more powerful than if you played a lower value? Can you mix dice of different colours to blend them into a new third colour, which might let you take a better bonus, card, or action?
Another of the actions that you can use your dice for is to climb one or more of the six colourful tracks in the centre of the main board. These tracks will offer one-time bonuses as you climb them as well as end of round income and each track is very heavily focused on a specific set of bonuses. One track may see you rewarded with coins, one might give you some coloured workers that can be used to further manipulate your dice colours, one might let you get rid of your less powerful white dice in your bag and even gain some new coloured dice… and so on.
Once you have used up all of your actions and/or available dice for any given round, then you ‘rest’, which will see you gaining income based on both the actions that you took during the game as well as your position on those aforementioned tracks. Then off you go again - grabbing fresh dice from you bag, discovering more manuscripts, getting them in the House of Wisdom and attempting to translate them.
Each time you discover a scroll, any gaps are replaced using a separate draw pile. The game is over when the draw pile is fully depleted.
Victory Points come from a lot of different areas – predominantly though from the scrolls that you managed to translate, any strategic objectives that might have been displayed on those translated scrolls, your area majority tussling in the House of Wisdom and your final position on those colourful tracks that you will have undoubtedly been climbing.
Of course, there is a tonne of intricacies behind everything that you do in Scholars which pushes the weight of this game firmly northwards. I’ll touch on some of those intricacies later in the review, but do also take some time to look through the rulebook and watch some playthrough videos that will offer much more detail than my quite reductive overview!
Solo Headlines:
Similarly to the broader game experience, diving into the solo mode in Scholars of the South Tigris requires more than a fair amount of prior understanding. That said, once you’ve digested and understood those up front complexities, things quickly become straightforward – helped by a solo board that conveniently displays most, if not all, of the essential information that you’re likely to need. Additionally, there is also a refreshingly helpful solo player aid (other publishers, please take note).
I’m perhaps painting the solo mode as being overly complex – it genuinely isn’t. It's 6 cards. Flip one and try to take the top action, if you can’t then take the bottom action – actions that are quick, quick, quick and not particularly cumbersome or time consuming. But do be aware that there are wider rules that need to be understood in advance. For example – what happens when the solo opponent plays three cards of the same colour, how the solo mode interacts with the translators in the game, what it does during a ‘rest’ phase, how it prioritises the tussles for area majority in the towers, what bonus it might gain when X,Y or Z occurs during the game. Again, none of this is onerous or in any way ‘flow-charty’ whatsoever. It’s pretty simple stuff and on the handy player aid. But the solo mode is very much doing its own thing and that ‘own thing’ does need internalising and understanding up front, adding to an already heavy learn of an already heavy game.
Four levels of difficulty to choose from – and they felt like they were in the right ballpark for this average scoring solo player. It took me a few attempts to beat the first level, a few more to just about beat the second level and I suspect I might then be toiling for a good while before coming close to beating Level 3. I give up all hope (as I do with most games I play) of ever beating the hardest difficulty – I will instead leave that up to you scarily good Euro players out there!
I mentioned in the pre-amble to this review that Scholars of the South Tigris is only the second title from Garphill Games that I have played – the other being Paladins of the West Kingdom with its excellent City of Crowns expansion. I was so impressed with Paladins that I immediately grabbed a copy of Viscounts of the West Kingdom….which then lingered on the shelf of shame where it remains to this day. What stopped me from playing it and indeed any other Garphill Games despite enjoying Paladins so much? Probably the fact that Paladins played a fair amount longer than my usual 60-70 minute sweet spot– maybe closer to 120minutes? Every time I asked myself “what will I play next” I reached for something else, subconsciously assuming (most likely incorrectly) that every Garphill title ever from that point forth would also play just as long.
What grabbed my attention with Scholars (in addition to the theme and the dice manipulation mechanism) was the knowledge that it had both a ‘Casual’ length mode and an ‘Epic’ length mode. Perfect! Well, I say ‘perfect’ but let’s be honest – there is no ‘casual’ mode here. There is an ‘I need a lie down after that’ mode and an ‘I need a longer lie down after that mode’. Expect your first play or two of even the casual mode to take in excess of 120min as you muddle through learning the intricacies of the game. Even with a fair few casual games under the belt I was still finding myself in 90 minute territory – though I concede a very enjoyable 90 minute territory. I say all of that not to dissuade anyone but more to highlight something that solo players might overlook to their detriment - that is that the Epic mode in this game is excellent! I can see many players thinking “I will just stick to casual as it plays quite long as it is and Epic mode sounds even more erm, Epic”. Truth be told Epic mode is only a few turns longer than Casual but those extra turns see you getting a good amount more done and things feel much more satisfying as you reflect on everything you have achieved at the end of the game. You aren’t doing bucketloads more – just enough more to justify the small increase in game length.
All told, it’s a heavier game for sure, with an additional solo rules hurdle to jump to get that first game under the belt. However, once up and running it’s a quick to operate solo mode with little time if any spent away from your own turn, offers a good amount of challenge and despite those first few solo games running for a looonnnnnnggg time, things quickly start to feel intuitive enough for solo games to feel somewhat quicker, rewarding and very satisfying, particularly on Epic mode.
General Headlines:
I’ve mentioned the only other Garphill title that I have played – Paladins of the West Kingdom - and there are few similarities between the two games. Not just the length, the weight, and the use of coloured workers (though Scholars ramps this up to the max with the ability to ‘blend’ colours) - but also the fact that while on the face of it the main mechanisms of the game are pretty straightforward, the mechanisms are also so tightly interwoven and dependent on each other that you realise you are locked into something extraordinarily tight. In Paladins, it’s relatively easy to teach; “there are various worker placement spots, this is what each of them does, these are what the colours of the workers mean. Go.” Then comes the crushing realisation, approximately four turns in, that you can’t do the thing that you have been working towards because separately you haven’t focused at all on another key area of the game. Things in Paladins aren’t dependent on each other in a loose way. They are thoroughly welded together. Scholars feels very similar – on the face of it, the ‘discover scrolls, place scrolls in the House of Wisdom, translate scrolls’ central conceit is deceptively simple. In reality however things are just as tightly welded together as Paladins - if you don’t have coins, then you aren’t discovering anything, and if you don’t have any gold, then you aren’t translating anything. Even if you eventually get to the stage of being able to translate, are there even translators of the languages that you need available to use? If not, you need to then use your limited actions to employ the right translators – which of course means that you can’t now get coins, which means you can’t get gold. AAAAAARRRRRGGGHHH. For some, this tightness might feel a little too much - but the fans of utter brain burn (I count myself as one) are looking in the right place with Scholars.
It’s worth noting that Scholars is not a game of ‘next time I will do the X strategy, and then I will try the Y or Z strategy’. Each game follows the exact same flow - ‘find scrolls, place them in the House of Wisdom, translate scrolls’. Which might lead you to be asking “doesn’t that get boring after a few games”. The answer is a resounding “no”. While the core gameplay loop doesn’t change, how you approach each game does change making each game feel quite fresh. This is done in two ways. Firstly, climbing those coloured tracks in the centre of the board, each one offering unique types of bonuses. While you might be climbing more than one track, you are certainly aiming to reach the top of at least one, maybe two. The bonuses on these tracks will subtly, but significantly change your approach to the game. If you are finding yourself awash with coins having climbed the purple track all game then you are going to be finding the purchasing of scrolls rather easy – though perhaps everything else might feel tight! Perhaps you have climbed the track that lets you gain more dice at the start of each round? More dice = more actions = more chances to do good things. Perhaps you climbed the track that gives you coloured workers which let you do even more dice manipulation… and so on. Each of my games of Scholars felt fresh and distinct - helped too by a randomly assigned starting focus that which rewards you for moving up a particular track rather than simply relying on tried and tested methods of success.
Another element that brings some nice differences game to game are some of the strategic goals that you stumble across when you are finally able to translate a scroll and keep it in your collection. Each of those translated scrolls has a small objective that will reward you with even more VP at the end of the game – things like trying to get scrolls of a particular language from now on, or ending the game with as many purple dice as possible. They offer nice little twists and turns to shift your focus – nothing too binding but enough food for thought to bring about a freshness to each game.
Scholars of the South Tigris can feel punishing at times – deliciously so, but punishing nonetheless. You can frequently for example find yourself slowly grinding to get coins to get the gold to get the scroll translated only to find that that someone else (in this case your solo opponent) has already got their grubby hands on the exact same scroll or translator that you needed. Scholars doesn’t allow you to laugh it off and chuckle to yourself “that is ok, I will go and do that other equally fun thing all the way over there instead”. Your plan is ruined and the game is laughing in your face. You aren’t just having to pivot - you are having to pivot hard. Personally, I enjoyed this – I wouldn’t want every game in my collection to feel as tight and ‘turn sabotaging’ but there is just something about how well designed this game in that feels good in a self-flagellating kind of way (note: I am not usually prone to acts of self-flagellation). However, the game becomes all the more rewarding when you eventually do manage to pull yourself out of the quicksand and get a new plan up and running.
The bag building / dice manipulation on offer here is excellent. You are regularly finding yourself trying to rid yourself of bland white dice - really wanting, for example, to take a purple action by blending blue and red die but finding that you only pulled a yellow and a red out of the bag so might need to be thinking now about taking an orange action instead. I was reminded of a similarly enjoyable dice manipulation game - Woodcraft by Ross Arnold and Vladimir Suchy - which sees you cutting, splicing and melding colours and values of dice together. If you have played Scholars and are wanting a game with similar dice manipulation then you could certainly do a lot worse than Woodcraft.
The whole premise of Scholars is around translating scrolls and the mechanism of using translators is another puzzly joy. I may, for example, find myself wanting to translate a Chinese scroll - I therefore pay one translator gold to translate the scroll from Chinese to Hebrew and then another translator to translate from Hebrew to the target Arabic. Of course, that whole plan depends on whether the correct translators are even available in play?! If not then I am sharply needing to recruit new translators - which brings about an excellent wrinkle: after a certain amount of uses, the employed translators will ‘retire’ from the game giving you end game VP and a bonus. Make your choices wisely then – will you look to employ a translator for the long haul i.e. they retire after they are used three times so will be hanging about for a good while doing some splendid translation? Or perhaps you employ them for one use only – and deal with the fact that you won’t be able to use them again on future turns? A chin-stroking, lip licking consideration. You’re also able to use other player’s translators too (at a cost) which adds further to the brain burn - “I really need to translate using a Persian translator but the only one available is my opponents and if I use it then they are going to benefit”. If ‘thinky’ is a word, then I am using it here – its thinky, puzzly stuff where your translation timings are crucial.
Ok, Scholars plays a little longer than my usual tastes, has a bit of bumpy learning curve and has a hefty end game scoring phase on par with Great Western Trail… It is however an absolute (brain burning) pleasure to play and I’m really pleased I didn’t leave my Garphill adventure with only Paladins of the West Kingdom played.
At a Glance:
If a brain burning, restrictive, ‘my whole plan now needs to change because you took the exact thing that I wanted’ type game is what you are looking for then you are in the right place with Scholars of the South Tigris. The relative simplicity of the game's core conceit hides the fact that this is certainly a heavier game that may well feel like a rough and long ride for the first playthrough or two. However, it soon becomes crystal clear that it is an excellent and elegantly designed game full of tough and tight decisions. Its colour changing dice manipulation and the implementation of its ‘translation’ mechanism are both wonderful – two particular highlights of a game that does a heap other stuff extremely well.
I might not be playing games of this length and weight every night of the week but crikey with designs this good I could be convinced. Consider me a Garphill convert.
Final Score:
8.5 out 10 (Reviewed after 10 plays)
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