Whims of the Sultan: Five Tribes Exp

Description

Great news, Five Tribes fans! The Whims of the Sultan expansion is another feather in Bruno Cathala’s cap. It provides fantastic extra content to the base game for Five Tribes. The Sultan is a demanding man. Can you meet his needs and reap the rewards?

There’s six new tiles that you add to the base game’s modular set-up (so now the Naqala is a 6×6 grid). You can also add these in alongside The Artisans of Naqala expansion, which makes it a huge 7×6 grid!

Five of these tiles are Cities. Whims also comes with a deck of Sultan cards, and one sits on each City. If a player ends their turn on a City, tile action involves the Sultan card. If they can complete the Sultan’s demands on the card, they’ll earn coins. Remember, coins are points in Five Tribes! Requirements range from paying specific quotas of meeples, or goods cards. Others demand that you control one of the Naqala’s four corner tiles.

The Cities also promise mega-points if you control them at the end. Like goods cards, Cities net points in their own escalating set collection manner. If you control all five cities at the end, you score a whopping 125 points! The sixth tile, meanwhile, is The Great Lake. It doubles the value of palm trees (from 3VP to 6VP) and palaces (from 5VP to 10VP) that sit adjacent to it.

But that’s not all! The Whims of the Sultan also provides components for a fifth player to join in. To accommodate this, there’s a scoring sheet for that extra player, as well as additional coins. You want more? How about a new bidding track, with a fifth spot? It’s not just bidding zero that bumps minarets down in turn order now, but on the 1, 3 and 5 spaces, too.

Finally, it wouldn’t be a Five Tribes expansion without some new Djinn cards! One rewards the owner for bumping on the bidding track, and the other for landing on City tiles. There’s so much to enjoy in this wonderful addition to the Five Tribes family of games.

Player count: 2-5 players
Time: 40-90 minutes
Age: 13+