Is Expertise Overrated? – Era of Experts Review (Inventors of the South Tigris Expansion)

Era of Experts is the expansion for the really long and intricate, but still quite good Inventors of the South Tigris game from Garphill Games.

It has taken a while to actually get enough plays of this expansion in order to do a review.

That’s because the base game itself is quite long and has been difficult to get to the table since I was able to review it.

I had one play of the expansion last year and then…nothing.

I finally got a 3-player game going a couple of weeks ago and managed to get a second play in.

Thank God that this expansion forces you to play the short game.

I don’t think I’ll ever play the long game again, even without the expansion (a 3-player game of that took us 4 hours).

Before I go any further on this one, though, Era of Experts was designed by Shem Phillips and S J MacDonald and was published in 2025. It has artwork from the Mico (Mihajlo Dimitrievski).

After having played it a couple of times, I don’t think I ever want to play the base game without it.

It’s that good.

Is it enough to move the base game further up into my Top 50, or at least prevent it from falling off?

Time will tell.

If you want to read more about how the game plays, see my review of the base game.

This review will just be talking about the changes and additions.

This may be short because there isn’t a lot to this expansion as far as new mechanisms and the like go.

All of the new mechanisms are presented as abilities from the new asymmetric inventors that players can now be.

The addition of asymmetric powers to the game really makes it shine so much harder than the base game itself.

Laleh, for example, has two unique effects.

First, at the start of the game, she gets a free Research tile that is solely her own.

She doesn’t get any points for it, and it doesn’t count as a Research tile for any endgame benefits, but it’s still valuable.

In this picture, all of her Camel actions add +2 to the dice roll.

Right from the beginning of the game!

Also, her special ability is that when you have to pay to reach ahead on Research (because your ship isn’t far enough for the open space), she gets up to a 3 silver discount, and she also gets a 3 silver discount when placing workshop tiles ahead of finishing her column.

So she can have workshop tiles up to the 4th column without finishing her first column, all without paying for them.

That’s a great help.

Others, like Farnaz, add a new Craftsperson (the Musician) who you can pay instead of others (who might not be available) when trying to do something. You can discard a card to flip the Musician back over.

Also, when you collect income, you get the Progress effect of the tower tile the Musician is on, which could be good if you have bumped him up a bunch.

Each inventor also has goals that will give them cool effects.

The goals for the inventors are the same (do one of the invention actions twice, do the three invention actions one time each, and do three of the same invention actions), but the benefits are unique.

(Incidentally, you can also achieve these goals by researching from the indicated research tile stack).

Farnaz lets you get rid of an invention tile (potentially scoring you points or instituting the effect), but unlike most of the time when you just toss one, you actually get the effect on the invention tile.

Doing one of each will let him improve two of his craftspeople.

Each individual inventor has their own ability, which can help guide you into a strategy perhaps, or at least indicate a direction to go.

Azadi’s whole thing is that she has a Sponsorship token (a second Royalties marker) which will move along the Royalties track whenever you progress your tower, which means you’re trying to advance your craftspeople as fast as possible.

At the beginning of the round, when you take income, you take income from both your Royalties marker and the Sponsorship one as well.

She can be swimming in money if you do what I did and not progress as fast as you would like.

Vahid has a whole new worker (the Apprentice) that only he can use. He’s not blocked by other players’ workers for any placement spot.

He also has the Laboratory worker placement spot, which anybody can use. It costs one of each guild’s influence and lets you do one of the Invention actions (just not testing) with a 12 value!

However, if anybody other than Vahid uses the space, Vahid can flip over one of his craftspeople and gains a guild influence somewhere.

Kian brightens a die whenever he does a Research action for the ongoing effects (the leftmost).

Also, for the other two sections, he can research each space twice.

Not only does he get 4 points (3 plus 1) for that tile, but it also doubles the effect.

Finally, each round he can pick through one of the unused Pass tiles and get that bonus, then removes it from the game.

Quite powerful!

In addition to the asymmetric powers, each inventor also has their own unique starting workshop, in addition (not instead of) the starting workshop tile you get in the base game.

That can be huge! Starting with two workshop tiles can be very beneficial.

The top left workshop is amazing, though it does require using both a yellow (why is it orange on the workshops? I don’t know) die along with a blue die.

Spend a guild influence to clear off one of your camel actions?

Yes please!

Also discarding a card to move your ship a space is cool, though it does require both black and orange yellow dice.

Azadi (the one with the Sponsorship token who wants to improve her craftspeople as fast as possible) has a starting workshop where you can pay a craftsperson to increase the dice value on this workshop row by three.

That pairs very nicely with other workshops that require higher numbers, and it doesn’t require a coloured die!

Other workshops are pretty useful too.

Farnaz’s workshop lets you pay the Musician craftsperson to brighten two dice.

That means possibly getting two new dice out of Exhausted, and also raising your Musician.

Double bonus, though that will start costing a lot of money soon.

These new additions don’t seem like much, but they greatly enhance the game in ways that really benefit it.

I can tell you right now, though, that unless you have some kind of packing jiu jitsu, there is no way this is fitting in the base game box.

Each inventor, as you can see in the pictures above, has their own long tiles, and the base game box is already packed so much that you can’t even fit a thumbnail into it without a lot of box lift.

However, since there aren’t that many parts to integrate (no new invention cards, no new workshops/research tiles other than an inventors’ personal one), it’s easy to just keep them separate and bring the expansion box if you’re going to use the expansion.

That’s handy (though it does take up additional space in your bag, of course).

Era of Experts is almost a must-own expansion if you like Inventors of the South Tigris at all.

While the base game is good, it gets so much better with this expansion.

The only reason I could see for not wanting to play with it is if you, for some reason, don’t really like asymmetric powers or something like that.

The expansion could use more invention cards, which is kind of a missed opportunity.

But it doesn’t need them, really.

Pick this up as soon as you can if you like the base game.

(This review was written after two plays with the expansion)