Reading through most of the negative reviews, it seems that the #1 complaint about Euphrates & Tigris is that it, well, isn't Tigris & Euphrates.

And fair enough. If you loved the original, I can see how you'd be let down if "little brother" doesn't match up.

But never having played T&E, and having picked E&T up on a crazy sale, I sat down with two friends and gave it three solid plays today.

The first time through was the "getting to know you" phase. I imagine that the game was designed for people approaching it with some solid ground in the original, because the concepts come fast and furious -- a compact eight-page manual that left our heads spinning, with tight rules descriptions and no space or verbiage spared for extra hand-holding. We worked through the rules in about half an hour, playing all of the examples on the table, and it was still about 20 minutes into our first one-hour game before the lights started coming on.

Once the game began to click, though, everyone enjoyed it. Well, two of us really enjoyed it -- it didn't exactly hit home for the third person until partway through the second game.

The GOOD:

Light and fun. The rules are a headache, and it takes a bit of brain-stretching to snag all of the concepts the first time through, and even the second. But once you've got the basics down, the game is surprisingly fast and fun. It's strategically heavier than a "standard" board game, but not as brain-burning as a serious strategy game -- I'd compare it in weight to Through the Desert or Metro, two of our other favourites, and also about on par with Settlers but with a much less social element.

Fast. By the third game we were breezing through our turns, playing with strategy but without agony. Once you've got the rules down, the game clicks along briskly, and analysis paralysis doesn't seem to set in too badly even once the depth starts making itself apparent.

Depth. There's a lot going on here under the surface that we probably still haven't scratched yet. In the first game, ships seemed to be the strategy of choice, in the latter two green leaders and treasure won the day. We shifted from building strengths and attacking each other to building kingdoms to force enemies to battle -- before building a second bridge for our own assault. Fascinating stuff.

Compact. It's a great little box that you can toss in your backpack, and even 2/3 of that is air. This game could compress into a large pencil case if you had a mind to do it.

The BAD:

Compact. I know I just said "good," but those teeny little cards are... annoying. Fiddly and hard to keep a handle on, especially when you're picking them up and putting them down and they're sliding back and forth across the board.

Big footprint. For a game with business-card sized playing cards, this sucker takes ROOM. We were amazed to find it sprawling across the kitchen table -- until now, Colossal Arena won the "small scale/large footprint" award, but E&T now takes the cake.

A headache to learn: We were about to give up halfway through the rules. Seriously. It was a rewarding experience once we slogged through and put the time in, but for the first fifteen minutes of rules-reading, we felt lost and a little frightened. And these are veteran players, who have negotiated the rules for FFG games with impunity.

Fiddly within fiddly: As the cards are tiny and finicky, so is some of the play structure. I don't know how much of this is just carryover from the board game, but every main function of the game seems to have some sort of subfunction that also has to be taken into account. Again, this compounded the "headache to learn" element -- we were looking at the rules even into the third game on occasion, trying to work out small subsets of the rules that sneak up to bite you.

On the whole: We all really enjoyed this one. It took some blood, sweat and tears to get it under your belt, but -- never having played T&E -- we enjoyed this immensely. Maybe we're thrilling to a buggy ride because we haven't discovered the car yet, but for a quick couple of games on a lazy Sunday afternoon, this fits the bill nicely. 7/10.