Tribal game review by jamie cramb

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Hey, this is Jamie Cramb back with another blog, and for this blog (as I am writing this), I, along with others, are going to be trying out a new tabletop game called Tribal: Honour is Everything. From what I have seen, Tribal looks like a tribal version of Dungeons & Dragons, so I am really looking forward to it. This is before gameplay begins, so it’s about to happen, and I’ll be back with the review of it soon, so read down below to see my thoughts on it.

“Leave your message after the beep”.

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After the game: I had great fun playing this game. I only had one go at it, but I really enjoyed it, so here’s what happened:

Ryan and I were waiting patiently in the studio, then the game designer came in. The main man, who put this all together, Dr Aramiha, and he brought all the equipment for this intense game. Now, there was also another person he brought with him named Dale, and they set up the table, putting a grass-covered sheet on it along with a bowl. Now, when they were setting it up, I had a feeling that the game was going to be about which tribe was going to get up there first, almost like a capture the flag game, but soon to realise I was a bit wrong.

As everyone else came along, they began to explain the rules and tribes you can play and the meaning of them. One tribe, which I sadly didn’t have the chance to play as or play against, was one tribe, DR Aramiha, based off his own ancestors. From what Aramiha told us, he really loved to chop down flag poles of his enemy. What a cool dude his ancestor must’ve been. He also explained that the game could be played in all sorts of ways, for an example say you want a big massive battle 50/50 on both sides then you can do that, say like I said just then where you need get up the hill first before you enemy does you can do that, it all just lands to what you want you in play and imagination.

The rules

The main rules for tribal: honour is everything is this, in DND the way you character normally moves is with dice but in this game it’s cards, the reason for this if you are wondering, is from I think mostly Aramiha prefers cards because of a higher or lower number chance of attack and defence and would have made the game a bit more complicated and I totally agree. The playing cards have to count as a higher number for which player has the highest they would start and decided what there tactic is, to see if go forward or retreat, and also there was also a currency also called Mana.

Mana is your “spiritual soul”, and if you lose a fight then you lose some them to the enemy, so it’s very important you keep your Mana. If you lose half of your army in a game, you can still win because you still had loads of currency left. Now, how you win, well, it’s very simple: you use your highest number card. If you beat your opponent, then you could move up and possibly attack using the highest black strike, but if the opposite side, you could have the chance to defend with a higher red card and before I forget, king, queen, and jester are special cards.

Right now that I have talked about the rules the best I can now let’s move on to the war between me and Aramiha, me vs the game designer. The big test.

The battle of the table

Now, one thing I forgot to mention is that some of your warriors’ weapons also matter in how long and deadly they are, and one thing I also like about the warrior models is that they weren’t light; they were quite a bit of weight to them, for they were made in metal. Anyways, back to the game. I was struggling a bit, obviously because this was my first time playing, but thank goodness Tribal Chief Jamie had his Wiseman Ryan Rocks. Ryan helped me out during this battle as it took a bit for me to fully understand the game so he directed me on which ones are the best options because I had serval options at some points, so me and Aramiha began are game against each other and was a bit worried I wasn’t going to win as I am legit playing against the designer of the game (who has played this numerous times). So, from your point of view, those are not great odds, but that’s where the deck of cards come into play: the higher the cards are, the more you get to start first, and as I am trying to remember, Aramiha started first and his infantry charged in against my army. Now, at this point I had several options: one, an act of cowardice and retreat or two, charge in as well and try not to die. I picked the second option, so our armies clashed into each other, and at this point we had to collect more cards and remember, reader, the higher you get, the more you get to make the move. I got higher and had a few black cards, so I got to attack and do quite amount of damage to Aramiha’s tribe, even taking one of them out, collecting a Manu in the process, and Aramiha was forced to back down.

Then we both decided to have both our chiefs square off while the rest of the army faced off, and not once but twice we actually tied with numbers on our cards, leaving us to do it again, but then things got really intense. Aramiha charged in when he won the deck and got go first, as we were going to see who got defence and attack. I managed to get a higher attack card, costing him his whole tribe apart from one spearman and his chief. The next turn, when I got the higher deck, I decided to charge in taking out the last spearman. It was now 4 vs 1, because when we first started it was so even 5 vs 5, so Aramiha had to retreat the best he could but my tribe was closing in. His chief was near the end of the table, and had nowhere to run. So, by this point we decided to take part in Diplomatic Negotiations, as in a peace treaty. I wanted all the tasty bananas from his side, and in return I would give him a monthly supply of Manu to survive, and we wanted all the bushes from his side cause they looked way better. The picture you see below is of us making that deal, and that handshake ended the war and brought peace forever.

I had loads fun play testing this, and I would absolutely love to play that again another time. So, I want to give a massive shout-out to Dr Aramiha for coming along and showing all of us how to play Tribal: Honour is Everything and wish nothing but the best for him and his team in the future. Abig thank you to the people who came along for the event, and thank you for reading this blog. I will be back with another one soon. Goodbye!

-Jamie.