Tribes

About this board game

Tribes is a role-playing game for 4–8 players that simulates how our ancestors lived long ago, with an approximately 240-minute playing time. Each player takes the role of a cave man or woman leading a family through the challenges of early human society.

The central objective is simple: look after the children. Players hunt and gather food, respond to natural disasters, and do whatever they can to ensure their children survive to adulthood. Victory goes to the player with the most children, making survival and reproduction the key measures of success.

• Hunt and gather food for your family.
• Create tribal laws and social patterns.
• Deal with natural disasters.
• Choose when to cooperate and when to protect your own family.

Players can recreate—and change—the earliest human societies by instituting their own laws. The rules a tribe adopts affect its ability to survive and reproduce, creating a game about how social patterns shape a community’s future.

Cooperation is important, but it is not always possible to help everyone. Players must recognize when to work together, when to cut their losses, and when their own family must come first. This tension gives Tribes its distinctive focus on both communal decisions and personal survival.

With several copies of the game and a referee, multiple tribes can play at the same time. These tribes may compete, trade, exchange members, and even make war on one another, expanding the game beyond a single group and into interactions between societies.

Released in 1998, Tribes offers a broad simulation of early human life centered on family survival, changing laws, and the consequences of the society players create.