A board game factory. Named for Tigris & Euphrates (Knizia, 1997).
Claude Code-driven. Markdown-first. Euro tradition. TIGRIS reviews published games, designs new ones, and — most unusually — has built up an empirical map of what "design space" actually looks like by doing so at scale.
Review roles: This repo uses
ROLES, the .roles convention for
repository-local review panels.
Reviewed 150 games. Every review is a Parliament: eight designer personas (Knizia, Rosenberg, Feld, Lacerda, Chvátil, Kramer–Kiesling, Stegmaier, Vaccarino) plant incompatible stakes against the design, then a narrated playthrough attacks, defends, and collides them. 69 games went through the full three-phase pipeline; 81 more went through a faster variant to build out the corpus. TRACKER.md has every row.
Discovered TIGER BEAT — a coordinate system for board games. Once you have 150 games scored across 28 axes, you can ask: what are the real underlying dimensions? The corpus answers back with nine. Five big ones, four smaller ones. Every game now has a 9-number profile. That means you can plot games, find neighbors, find gaps, and design into the gaps on purpose.
TIGER — the five primary dimensions (72% of the variance in the corpus):
| Dim | What it measures | Corpus leader | |
|---|---|---|---|
| T | Tension | Stakes, pressure, fear of losing | Space Alert, Bridge (7.5–7.2) |
| I | Interaction | Direct conflict, hidden info, targeting | Letters from Whitechapel, Bridge (8.7) |
| G | Game-spectrum | Deep Architecture ↔ Elegant Minimalism (bipolar) | On Mars (7.8) ↔ Crokinole (0.3) |
| E | Experiential | Social contract, physical affordance, cognitive load | Secret Hitler, Hanabi, Codenames (5.7) |
| R | Range | Variability, replayability, strategic breadth | Welcome To, Sagrada, Qwixx, Crokinole (8.0) |
BEAT — the four secondary dimensions (the remaining 28%):
| Dim | What it measures | Corpus leader | |
|---|---|---|---|
| B | Breadth | Solo mode, player-count robustness, multi-mode flexibility | Crokinole (9.0) |
| EA | Emotional Arc | Narrative journey vs. pure mechanical replay | Pandemic Legacy S1 (9.0) |
| A | Accessibility | Onboarding ease, first-turn footprint, language independence | Pandemic Legacy S1 (9.0) |
| TX | Texture | Scarcity bite, pressure shape, floor mechanics | On Mars (7.7) |
The biggest single finding: G is bipolar. "Deep engine" and "elegant minimalism" aren't two different things you can score separately — they're opposite ends of the same axis. Lisboa is at 6.5. Crokinole is at 0.3. Nothing sits in the middle; the corpus bifurcates.
Here's what TIGER BEAT looks like for games you know. Every one of these was scored by TIGRIS through a full Parliament review:
| Game | T | I | G | E | R | Notable BEAT |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tigris & Euphrates | 7.2 | 5.7 | 3.5 | 3.0 | 5.7 | — |
| Catan | 3.0 | 3.3 | 2.2 | 4.0 | 6.7 | — |
| Dominion | 4.5 | 5.0 | 4.5 | 2.3 | 6.7 | — |
| Agricola | 5.8 | 4.3 | 5.0 | 3.0 | 5.3 | TX 6.3 |
| 7 Wonders | 4.2 | 4.7 | 3.7 | 3.0 | 6.0 | — |
| Azul | 3.5 | 4.3 | 1.3 | 3.0 | 7.7 | — |
| Wingspan | 4.2 | 4.0 | 3.8 | 2.7 | 6.7 | — |
| Brass: Birmingham | 5.2 | 5.3 | 6.0 | 3.3 | 4.7 | TX 6.7 · A 7.0 |
| Gloomhaven | 6.0 | 6.0 | 4.3 | 4.3 | 5.0 | EA 8.0 |
| Pandemic Legacy S1 | 6.2 | 7.0 | 3.7 | 3.7 | 5.0 | EA 9.0 · A 9.0 |
| Codenames | 4.8 | 7.3 | 1.2 | 5.7 | 6.7 | — |
| Crokinole | 3.0 | 4.3 | 0.3 | 4.7 | 8.0 | B 9.0 |
| Through the Ages | 6.8 | 5.3 | 5.3 | 3.3 | 5.3 | TX 6.3 |
| Lisboa | 6.0 | 6.7 | 6.5 | 3.3 | 5.0 | TX 6.3 |
Read those rows. Crokinole and Azul both live at low G, high R — elegant and replayable. Pandemic Legacy is a story game (EA 9.0) that nothing else in the corpus comes near. Brass and Lisboa occupy the deep-architecture corner that Azul deliberately avoids. Codenames' E score of 5.7 makes it one of three games in 150 that really do the social-contract thing.
Designed 31 original games. Including Parliament (the factory's self-model — mechanics that are the pipeline), CODEX (a Schools-of-Magic engine-builder, first game designed to attack an empty region of TIGER space), and RITE — the first TIGRIS game to land in Gap 1, a region previously empty across 150 games.
Found 5 design gaps. Empty regions where no game sits in the corpus. Each one is a real unsolved problem — with nearest neighbor, a design concept, and five meetup-crowd inspirations to prime a designer's intuition. Two entered this month (Gap 1 via RITE, Gap 5 via CODEX). Three still open.
Grew the rubric from 24 axes to 32. The rubric is forward-only: axes earn adoption through repeated Parliament evidence, or they get retired when they consistently fail. 29 adopted, 1 retired (C5 Anti-Catch-up Pressure), 3 live and gathering data, 144 consecutive games with zero silent retirements. Live state: personas/axis-pool.md.
Every evaluative claim in TIGRIS names (a) an axis from the Pool, (b) the persona making the claim, (c) a player count or moment anchor. "Fun," "well-designed," and "solid" are forbidden words. The factory's job is well-formed disagreement, not smoothed consensus.
The shape of a Parliament: eight designers draft 3 axes each from the Pool in snake order. Each plants stakes. A narrated playthrough attacks, defends, and collides those stakes on adjacent axes. Then deterministic amendment promotes, retires, or holds axes based on what happened — the rubric evolves from the play record, not by committee.
Open any game's panel/SUMMARY.md for a completed review. games/0001-parliament/tierA-stakes.md is a clean example of stakes-drafting.
- Explore the data.
docs/tiger-beat.md— the framework.docs/tiger-beat-gaps.md— the 5 open design problems.data/axis-matrix.csv— raw scores, 150 games × 28 axes. - Browse the games.
games/— one directory per game, originals and reviews interleaved. Parliament is 0001; High Society was the 150-game milestone. - Understand the axes.
personas/axis-pool.md— all 32 axis definitions plus the Rubric Ledger showing how each got adopted or retired. - Meet the personas.
personas/designers/(8 designers, each with drafting preferences).personas/player-lenses/(5 player perspectives). - Current state.
TRACKER.mdfor per-game history, or the newest file indocs/handoff/for a session resume point. - Run the factory.
CLAUDE.md(house rules), then the skills in.claude/skills/:tigris-ideate,tigris-concept,tigris-design,tigris-panel,tigris-amendment,tigris-handoff.
tools/tigris-sim/ is the RALLY-backed board-game simulation pilot. It starts
with Parliament and reports seeded axis-collision, adoption, and chair-activity
telemetry.
cd tools\tigris-sim
cargo run --quiet -- --seed parliament-smoke
cargo run --quiet -- --seed parliament-smoke --runs 20 --players 4
cargo run --quiet -- --seed parliament-smoke --compare-variants --runs 20 --players 4
cargo run --quiet -- --game upstage --seed upstage-smoke --players 8 --compare-variants --runs 24
cd tools\tigris-sim
cargo run --quiet --bin tigris-muddle-macroquadThe native MUDDLE/Macroquad launcher opens the Parliament AI table directly with
default save/transcript/import/export paths. The visual table now shows persona
seating, axis vocabulary, collision pressure, tiger markers, dissent tags, the
rubric ledger, amendment closeout, phase readouts, subject-card context, and
next-action guidance. The first visible table arc is:
choose persona, go board, draft axis, stake claim, reveal collision,
place tiger, end turn, challenge ai, go score, inspect ai,
score amendment, close parliament.
tools\tigris-sim also exposes Parliament as a COURT adoption fixture through
parliament_ai_court_snapshot() and
parliament_ai_court_validation_packet(). This proves COURT/RACKET can describe
a product-owned tabletop slice beyond escape rooms without moving TIGRIS rules
or RALLY simulation evidence into COURT.
Rubric v2.24.85 · 153 games · 32-axis Pool · latest: RITE #153 (Gap 1 entered) + UPSTAGE (PARLOR party-game pipeline launched). Resume point: docs/handoff/2026-04-23-post-rite-upstage.md. Full architecture spec: docs/specs/2026-04-19-tigris-v2.0-design.md.
Six papers document the TIGER BEAT framework and its corpus. LaTeX sources in research/publications/; build all PDFs with make -C research.
- TIGER: A Five-Dimensional Framework for Game Design Analysis — core framework
- The TIGRIS Corpus: Methodology for Multi-Axis Game Design Scoring
- Five Independent Dimensions of Game Design Space
- Design Fingerprinting: Within-Game Normalization
- Predicting Player Experience from TIGER Profiles
- Filling the Design Space: Using TIGER Profiles to Identify Gaps
TIGRIS shares its simulation and UX layer with the rest of the Games Design series:
- MUDDLE — shared room-command UX engine. TIGRIS hosts the Parliament AI table and UPSTAGE sessions through MUDDLE's adapter contracts, with CLI, browser-window, and native Macroquad clients.
- RALLY — shared simulation and validation substrate.
tools/tigris-sim/uses RALLY for seeded Parliament axis-collision, adoption, and chair-activity telemetry. - COURT / RACKET — scalable experience framework and engine adapter.
tools/tigris-sim/exposes Parliament as a COURT adoption fixture that RACKET consumes for compatibility diagnostics beyond escape rooms.
MIT — © 2026 Gio Della-Libera.