Wayfarers of the South Tigris

In this game set in the Abbasid Caliphate in 820AD, you are explorers, cartographers and astronomers, setting out from Baghdad to explore and map the land, the seas and the skies. As you explore and discover, you must also remember to report back to Baghdad regularly to journal your findings. You score points mostly from the many cards you collect - land, sea and skies. 

The main board looks like this. There are five types of cards along the edges you can buy. Some give you ongoing abilities. Some give you an additional dice placement spot, i.e. a new action you can perform. Some help you score points at game end. Along the top and bottom of the board there are tiles you can collect. These can be added to your player board to give you new abilities and points. The central part of the board is the journaling progress track. Every player has a pawn here, and you will move from left to right. Normally you get to advance when you perform a reset. You need to have fulfilled the criteria for advancement, which are on the black patches between spaces. Whenever you advance to a new space, you gain some benefit. The game ends when one player completes journaling, i.e. reaches one of the end spots on the right. The journaling progress keeps you on your toes. You have to plan ahead how to progress, and make sure you are able to fulfil the requirements when it is time to progress. 

This is a dice placement and worker placement game. You have your own set of dice. Most of the time on your turn you place one on your player board or on one of your cards, and then you perform the action indicated. Normally you do a reset when you use up all your dice or all but one. That means taking them back into your hand and rerolling them. Whenever you do a reset, you have the opportunity to do journaling, i.e. advancing on the journal progress track. Ideally you can make progress every time there is an opportunity, so there is time pressure for you to fulfil the progress conditions before you run out of dice. 

Workers don't belong to you like dice do. Workers can be used for powerful actions. When you use a worker, it is placed on a card. Whoever gains that card afterwards claims that worker too. 

As you collect cards, you add them to your player board like this. Land cards go to the left. Sea cards go to the right. Sky cards go above them. There's a kind of card called inspiration cards. They go on top of sky cards and if you fulfil their conditions, they double the point values of the sky cards. You can get townsfolk cards too. They give you various abilities and they are tucked below land or sea cards. 

There is a little 6x3 grid showing abilities you gain for each die face from 1 to 6. If you look at the die placement spots (white squares), you will notice some are empty and some have icons. The empty ones allow any die, but the ones with icons require that your die has the required ability. For example the die placement spot with a telescope icon means only 6's can be placed on them. In the little grid you can see a telescope under 6. When you roll a 6, it has the telescope ability. Actually by now I have added a telescope under 4, so 4 works too for me. 

Wayfarers of the South Tigris is a complex game. You want to earn resources and buy cards efficiently. You want to improve your abilities so that you are less restricted by die rolls. In some aspects you will compete with other players, for example if you have the most comets, you score more points for your comet cards. Sometimes you just want the same cards, so you will be rushing to grab the right cards. All this while you must keep an eye on your journaling progress. You need to plot your path and plan several rounds ahead how you will fulfil those upcoming conditions. 

My player board / tableau near game end

The dice placement and worker placement in this game is mostly solitaire. You place dice in your own playing area. When you place workers at the common board, they don't block others. So the player interaction is not so much the blocking type, but the racing to grab stuff type. When you are first to reach certain spots in the journaling progress track, you get a benefit. And then sometimes you fight over the same cards. I would say overall the gameplay feeling is low interaction. This is a complex game to digest and work out, and it is challenging. This is very much the kind of game for gamers who like heavy eurogames.