u/Kang_54

Scholars of the South Tigris might be my new favorite games. It's in hard competition with Inventors of the South Tigris, a Feast for Odin and Mage Knight, but the excellent dice manipulation and bag building is just so good, I keep going back to it, even with two new games waiting.

Overall, the game is rather simple: you can hire translators for either immediate bonuses or long-term use, move scrolls from the map to the guild-libraries, translate those scrolls, move up reward tracks and rest. You use dice, "workers", gold and coins to do this. The workers influence dice to help manage the randomness, but are otherwise not what you'd call workers. There are a variety of dice: white, the three primary colors and the three secondary colors. What colors you use for an action dertermines what you can do and/or what bonuses you get. For example, you need a green die to translate from the green guild or to research the green reward track. Secondary dice are difficult to get, but you can use a blue and a yellow worker to temporarily turn two white dice into a green action.

Each round there's a lot of desirable actions, and a lot of things to consider: should you stop the bot from getting that Sanskrit scroll (yes you should, those are dangerous) or maybe translate a scroll, but wait, it's the only scroll in that guild, so if you take it, the bot could deliver a new scroll and get all the influence from filling the top spot. Or maybe you need more resources, so you could retire a translator but you could also use the action card that gives you resources but also an undesirable white dice to your bag.

While you're dependent on what dice you have drawn from your bag, there are a lot of ways to manage the randomness. I've found that I dislike games like Castles of Burgundy or Civolution where you need this exact dice combination to do something (I know Civolution has some dice manipulation, but it takes a whole action to get those, and there are so few actions in an era); in Scholars, there's always something you can do. The reward track, for example, lets you place a measly "1" white die for a few gains. A blue 4 would be better, blue 8 even better and blue 10 the best, but the point is, you're never without options.

As much as I love the game, I hate the rulebook, or at least the solo portion of it. The first time I played, I felt like throwing the game out the window. The bot uses much the same actions as the player, but for each action, there's a determinator: if the bot hires a translator, it places them from the left side, but if it pays them gold, it starts from the right side. There are so many tiny details to its every move, so you'll need to check the rulebook all the time for the first couple games. That would be ok, execpt for the fact that the rulebook does not actually show icons. For example, the section detailing how the bot travels and delivers scrolls is highlighted with blue text, but the travel icon is not shown, so you need to skim through each section to find the right one. There are also bot icons that are not shown anywhere in the rule book (the "bot employs a translator" icon). Then there's how the bot gains Victory points for its scrolls: in the rulebook, it says that "Sanskrit [scrolls] scores from Retired Neutral Translators". But no. If you look at the bot board, it scores a point for each set of two translators. If you don't spot that, the bot might gain 18 victory points instead of 9, and you'll lose the game.

After playing it four times, it now takes me about an hour (without setup) for a game and I no longer need to check the rules, but the first couple games were rough. I'm very glad that I persevered, but I knew how much I love dice manipulation. I have won two games, but lost the last one 93 to 97 (epic mode) with the bot on easy mode. But I now know to use my influence to stop it from using Sanskrit scrolls in my next game!