From: chercello@juno.com 
Subject: Steve Jackson's "Tribes": a review & variant 

        We were on vacation recently, and gravitated into a nice store, All
About Games, in Belfast, Maine.  They had "Tribes" on display, and it
looked like the sort of multiplayer game we needed: hunting, gathering,
reproducing, surviving....  So, without having seen any review, and
trusting in Steve Jackson's good name, I boldly rolled the dice on a
$9.95 investment.
        We had six players, half male and half female, ranging in age from 14 to
50-something.  Four of us played with opposite-gendered characters, which
the designer suggests - correctly - will be lots of fun.
        The rules are not long or difficult, and we encountered no glitches
(just some minor typos that www.sjgames.com covers).  The turns are
simple: work, eat, and reproduce.  Work can be hunting, gathering,
crafting tools, or guarding children.  Adults must eat four points of
food each turn, and children (from conception to age 12) require two. 
Reproducing is just a matter of consent and a die roll of 9 or more;
still, it's rather fun. At the end of each season, the tribe's leader
rolls on the Chance table.
We decided to use the optional rule for character strength, and by a
fluke of the die, half of us were "strong" at the outset, and none
"weak".  In retrospect, this probably helped our tribe quite a bit: the
cumulative effect of all those "+1"s when hunting and gathering was that
we were never close to starving, even when the turn's Chance event was a
loss of food.  (We also were lucky with Chance, because by the end, all
six of us had become "strong"!)
        After naming our characters, we chose specialty roles for them.  Two
male characters - both strong -- were hunters, and one female was a
gatherer.  Another female decided to be a craftswomen, which was the
lucrative, high-tech job in our tribe.  If you have at least six in your
tribe, having a crafts-person is very good for the group, because the
spearheads and baskets add a lot to your food supply.  One of the women,
a vegetarian playing the third male character, decided to be a gatherer. 
I had the third female character, and she was strong, so I decided
"Saquath" would be a hunter. The only gender rule in the game forbids a
pregnant character from hunting; I was curious to see how much of a
problem this was going to be. 
        We plunged right into hunting and gathering on the Veldt, and stayed
there for a while, raking in quite a lot of food and grain.  (The latter
is harder to come by, and only available to lucky gatherers, or the lucky
tribe that rolls "Jerky" on the Random Events table.  Unlike food, grain
cannot be spoiled.)  Our craftswoman was quite good at making spear
points and baskets, and took in a lot of food from those she equiped
under two payment plans: half the hunt's kill, or the lesser of the
gatherer's two harvest's, for the life of the tool.  She didn't get much
from the spearheads traded to me, however, because Saquath kept breaking
them!
        Hunting is a risky activity, in several ways.  You can get tremendous
hauls of game -- a buffalo is 80 food points! -- but you can also fail to
get any, particularly in winter.  Worse, you can be injured, and miss
your next turn's work.  Hunting is even riskier if you're an amateur (a
gatherer or crafter trying a new line of work).  Hunters can go out as a
group, making one die roll with bonuses.  This seemed like a good idea,
because you have a better chance at the really large game, but the
several times Saquath joined another hunter she was sorry.  A really bad
die roll on a group hunt means the whole tribe is short on food. 
Gathering is a steadier source of supply, since you will always bring
some food, even in winter, and can't hurt yourself.  There are no big
hauls, but you can find the indestructible grain.  Gathering never
depletes an area, but hunting gradually will.  Our tribe was a little
slower to exhaust the game on the veldt, because Saquath was pregnant
(and therefore not hunting) much of the time, but eventually we moved to
the marsh, and later tried the forest.  Moving provoked lots of
discussion, but we never had to resort to the Conflict rules.
        The object of the game is to have many offspring who reach adulthood, so
we got started baby-making on turn one.  Not surprisingly, Saquath mated
with the male gatherer, Ubusgu.  The idea was that he would gather and
babysit year-round; Saquath would hunt in the warm season, hope for a
good take, and then get pregnant for the following cold season, when
being forbidden from hunting wouldn't matter so much.  Unfortunately, one
stays pregnant for two turns, so the next warm-season hunt was lost too. 
Saquath tried to stay busy while pregnant, studying craftwork during the
winter, and gathering during the summer.  Neither of these activities was
very successful: she never learned how to make a spearhead (it's only a
1/6 chance, but we had a lot of laughs about her being a slow learner;
the third mother did pick up crafting, and increased supply drove down
the price of tools!).  And since hunters always are penalized when trying
to gather (and vice-versa), Saquath never brought in much more than a few
grubs.  At first, Saquath and Ubusgu did about as well as the other, more
conventional couples.  As the turns passed, though, they began to fall
behind in personal food stocks, and their rate of reproduction was
slower, as they spaced their children to allow Saquath to go back to
hunting occasionally.  This also put a strain on the relationship, since
Ubusgu wanted more children, and began propositioning the tribe's other
females!  Naturally, we had a lot of laughs over this, as well as the
difficulties some couples had conceiving (that sounds crueler than it was
at the time!)  
        Although the rules allow the players to make tribal laws, we never had
any.  Our characters rarely strayed from monogamy, and fathers usually
paid food support for their children.  On the few turns when food was
tight, those with larger stockpiles voluntarily shared.  I found
something interesting in observing the level of friction within each of
the three couples.  While Saquath & Ubusgu always had the least food, we
never had any trouble deciding who would who pay how much child support
each turn.  The others, though by our standards awash in food and grain,
were constantly bickering.   Mothers with plenty of surplus food demanded
support from fathers who had accumulated twice as much.  There were
complaints about how much the children were costing, how annoying it was
to have to look after them, how big their partner's stockpile was, etc. 
Coincidence?  I suppose one game is too small a sample to jump to any
conclusions....
        Once the other couples had four or five children, childcare began to be
a problem.  You cannot hunt while watching any children.  Gathering and
craftmaking can be done while guarding the kids, but there are penalties
to once the kids begin to multiply.  Of course, you don't have to guard
them, but a hyena will almost certainly visit a few times before they
reach adulthood (age 12).  But towards the end of the game, our older
children ran little risk by going unguarded because the other couples
were letting younger ones run loose (hyenas prefer the most tender). 
Saquath and Ubusgu then had two more babies; she could guard all their
children while pregnant, and later he could watch a few while gathering. 
Occasionally, one character would take a food payment in exchange for
babysitting another couple's kids.   
At the end of play, all of the players had between 5 and 7 offspring. 
The first born were by now young adults; the only question was whether
the rest would all survive to age 12.  The game has a quick mechanism to
check this, rolling for each child according to his age.  This was our
only moment of dissatisfaction with the game: projected survival seemed
much too difficult.  During regular play, only one of the 5 oldest
children who should have reached adulthood was lost (to a hyena, due to a
negligent mother!).  Yet the projected survival rolls killed off 5 of the
13 younger children!  Their real survival rate, given our healthy
stockpiles of grain and plentiful young adult babysitters, should have
been better than that of our firstborn.  Maybe, as several of us
suggested, regular play isn't tough enough; or we had been rather lucky
early and unlucky at the end.  In any case, despite the dubious losses
among the later-born, both the tribe as a whole and all individuals were
"extremely succesful".  
        We also deemed "Tribes" itself a great success, because we had an
extraordinary two evenings playing it, full of laughter.  The artwork in
the rule book is sure to get you grinning.  And in our experience, it
certainly qualifies as a role-playing game.  
One of my sayings is that no game is too good, or too bad, to tinker
with.  There were a couple of things that we questioned.  Conception
seems a little too difficult (28% chance per person per season; for a
couple, then, 48% per season).  Maybe it's my own faulty impression about
what happens in the absence of birth control, but I would change the dice
roll to ">=8", or use the Fertility rule (below).  Birth, on the other
hand, seemed too easy.  Perhaps delivery should require a 3d6 roll >= 7,
with a 3 or 4 killing the mother as well (or making her unable to have
more children).  And somehow the projected survival rolls need to be
modified.  Would bonuses for Strong parents, for each 12 Grain held by a
parent, and for young adult siblings be reasonable?    
        We also talked about a few additional rules that we'd like to try
sometime.     
        A new "specialty": Shaman.  During Work, this type can give a one-turn
+1 bonus to hunting, conception or birth die rolls for one character.  Or
it may heal an injury (like crafting, this could be done as the first
thing in a Work phase, freeing the cured character to work that season).
        Two new attributes, to go with the Strong-Average-Weak one: Fertility
and Intelligence.  Fertility gives a +1 bonus to conception (for males
and females), and a +1 to birth (for females).  Intelligence...well, I
have some misgivings here, because I don't really subscribe to the notion
of a "general intelligence" level that benefits (or hurts) someone in
every activity; but I also wouldn't want to make this too messy. 
Intelligence might give a +1 to rolls for Crafting and learning Crafting;
it could also be a benefit in Hunting, Gathering and Intimidation.  But
for any one character, you should choose just one of these uses ("My
character has a genius for Gathering", say).  Of course, a character
could also be Infertile, or Unintelligent, with -1 modifiers. 
Intelligence and Fertility would be rolled for in the same manner as
Strength. Probably no character should have more than two positive
attributes, and if two negative attributes are rolled, the third
attribute could be automatically positive.
(One could even roll for the attributes of children, applying modifiers
if their parents have non-average attributes.  But what effect would a
child's attributes have?)     
     
Richard Everill
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