PinkFae Archive #50: Board Game Review: Five Tribes

This week's entry is another one from the PinkFae Archives. It was originally published on 21 January 2017.

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 A couple of weeks ago, I was looking through the top 100 ranked games on Board Game Geek. I noticed, to my dismay, that I had only played about seventeen of them. That was when I decided I needed to fix that. So I made a new year's resolution for 2017. Before the end of this year, I want to, at some point, be able to say that I've played at least 80 of the games on BGG's top 100 list. This led to me playing Five Tribes with some friends last week.

I'll talk more about this resolution on my other blog, where I'll also keep track of how many I've played. But for now, I will use the opportunity to review a wonderful game. At first, I was hesitant to try it, based on the relevant episode of Tabletop. I have learned that I need to be less reliant on that series. Games that look uninteresting to me turn out to be a lot of fun. That was the case with Five Tribes; I really liked it. So let's see why, starting with the numbers:

PinkFae Archive #17: Board Game Review: Tsuro

This week, we have another PinkFae Archive (remember, the articles in this series are repostings of entries that I wrote during my time with PinkFae, which are being published here so as not to be lost). This time around, we have the review of the wonderful game Tsuro.

This article was originally posted on 16 May 2016. Enjoy!

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Another week, another board game review. This week, I'm going to talk about a simple but enjoyable game called Tsuro. It's a fun little spatial-awareness game with a bit of a zen theme. I first saw it played on Wil Wheaton's Tabletop, and got to play it myself a few months ago. I really enjoyed it, so I picked up a copy for myself. So let's take a look at this game now, shall we?

Mature themes

Don't be fooled by the title of this post. I'm not referring specifically to sexual topics. I'm going to be talking about anything that might be considered 'adult-oriented,' including violence, advanced social issues, and the like.

Before I go on, I want to mention something very quickly: I have noticed a continuation in the trend. My Board Game Review entries are still getting, by far, the most traffic. This week, the majority of my traffic seems to be coming from Russia. Fascinating...

Anyway, I'm going to talk about that more next week, but this week, I wanted to talk about something that I noticed whilst watching the latest episode of Wil Wheaton's Tabletop. The latest episode is about the game Five Tribes. The game is set in the world of 1,001 Arabian Nights, and so contains viziers, camels, palaces, assassins, djinns, and slaves.

Mr Wheaton started out the episode with a little speech, in which he points out that some people have an ethical objection to the concept of slavery being included in the game, and that the publishers chose to include it because, moral or not, it was part of the culture being depicted in the game, and they felt it was important to portray the setting accurately. But as Wil Wheaton personally objects to the concept of owning another human being, he was going to refer to the slave cards as 'assistants' throughout the game.