Inventors of the South Tigris

Inventors of the South Tigris is a heavy strategy game set in Baghdad around 850 AD, when scholars, engineers, physicians, and artisans gathered under the Abbasid Caliphate. Players assemble workshops from interlocking tiles, recruit craftspeople, and build a personal pool of coloured workers and dice. Those dice are placed as workers to acquire resources, advance research, construct devices, test prototypes, publish completed inventions, and influence scientific guilds. A die’s colour and value matter, but values evolve as dice move through the system, so an action that is modest now can prepare a powerful worker for a later round. Craftspeople add tags and special abilities to the workshop, while ships and tents create positional races along the South Tigris and around the guilds. Devices progress from an idea through construction and testing to publication, with scoring opportunities at each stage and competition over who receives the credit. Scheme cards, research tiles, invention tiles, and changing workshop layouts make long-term planning highly variable. After four rounds, published devices, guild influence, completed objectives, workshop development, and remaining resources determine the most celebrated inventor. A dedicated automated rival supports solo play with the same core economy.