Negotiation is one of my all-time favorite ingredients in tabletop games.  It’s a mechanism that steps out of the way and lets the players do the talking, literally.  For me, one of the most satisfying elements of this hobby is the above-the-table interaction that happens between opponents and/or teammates, and negotiation offers this in spades.  Not only that, but it often allows individuals to bring their own personalities into the competitive experience.  

Are you the generous type who offers favors out like candy at Halloween, all the while earning good karma that will pay off in the long run?  Or are you a greedy wheeler and dealer who tries to milk your competition for all they are worth?  As long as participants are open to making deals and hearing offers, then you’re bound to have a blast with a good negotiation game.

With Bitewing Games soon launching a crowdfunding project for not one but two negotiation games, I’ve been playing and exploring many of the all-time greats in this genre.  We are finally ready to reveal our own publications, so in celebration of that reveal I’d like to share my personal Top 10 Negotiation Games.  Be sure to stick around after perusing my list, because I’ll have some exciting new details to reveal for fans of this mechanism.

Chinatown

What better way to start this list off than with the 1999 classic, Chinatown?  Chinatown has become one of my all time favorite games to introduce to anybody (gamers, non-gamers, family, friends, you name it) thanks to its smooth approachability and lively antics.  Players are seeking to establish the most profitable businesses on the block by acquiring connected lots and building certain businesses on those lots.

Negotiation is at the beating heart of this game, as each round you’ll secretly choose to acquire a few lots from the hand of cards that are dealt to you.  You’ll also draw business tiles from a bag that range from take-out to laundry to flowers and more.  Then, you’ll reveal your lots and tiles and let the wild rumpus begin!  In real time (no clockwise turn structure here!), players simultaneously make offers and negotiate trades of their lots, business tiles, and money.  The rules offer complete freedom in what you offer, how you trade, and how you earn the most money to win the game.  The real fun comes in figuring out how to wring lot 43 from an opponent’s grasp or in realizing how desperately your neighbor wants your dim sum tile and basking in their desperation.  Chinatown never fails to be a hit at our table.

The King’s Dilemma

From a decades-old classic to the second-newest release on this list, The King’s Dilemma features an exciting mix of legacy role-playing, epic kingdom politicking, and tense auction voting.  This one is admittedly not quite as easy to get to the table as Chinatown, as it requires (ideally) 5-players who are willing to assemble semi-regularly and play through roughly 12-20 sessions.  But if you have the right group for it, then you are certainly in for a romp!

This one sees players acting as influential advisory houses to the king.  Together, your council faces an endless stream of dilemmas that have long-term consequences on the military, culture, economy, and moral of your people.  You will use your power (through voting auctions), your money (through bribing), and your wit (through persuasive conversation) to decide the fate of the kingdom as you seek to fulfill your house’s secret agenda.

Cosmic Encounter

Might as well keep the time period whiplash going by jumping back to the oldest game on my list: the legendary Cosmic Encounter.  This is one that I’ve labeled “the pizza” of board gaming, and I stand by that comparison.  The real draw of Cosmic Encounter, and the reason why it has stayed relevant and seen updated versions since its 1977 release, is the fact that it offers an infinite combination of wacky alien powers for players to explore.

Yet the element that keeps its old gears greased is undoubtedly the opportunity for negotiation.  It doesn’t matter that one player’s alien ability is infinitely more powerful than any other, because that simply means the opponents must team up to overcome the galaxy’s Goliath.  While it’s a competitive game at its core, Cosmic Encounter allows its players to collectively dictate who crosses the finish line and victoriously colonizes five planets—resulting in one or multiple winners.

Sidereal Confluence

Let’s continue along the space theme with my next pick, Sidereal Confluence.  While this one also features asymmetric alien powers, like Cosmic Encounter, its gameplay is actually much closer to Chinatown.  If Chinatown is the simultaneous negotiation game made for anyone and everyone, then Sidereal Confluence is the hardcore hobbyist version.

This one is so outlandishly ambitious that I still can’t believe how well it comes together.  I’ll tell you what: the first time I heard about this game I was immediately running in the opposite direction.  Featuring 268 cubes, 9 alien factions whose names simulate a spelling stroke, and multiple hours of resource conversion.  No thank you.  Yet beneath this rough exterior hides one of the greatest negotiation games ever designed.

Here, you’ll find all the chaotic fun of Chinatown with infinitely more layers of strategic possibilities.  All deals are binding and virtually nothing is off limits—you can promise a share of the profits from your convertor to the player who helps you fuel it, or even lend the convertor itself to a neighbor when you find it useless to your needs.  You can exchange planets for ships, ships for food, food for protection, protection for research—the list goes on!  While this sprawling game initially appears alien and unwieldy, it’s surprisingly straightforward, laser-focused, and entirely engaging once the rounds get going.

Quo Vadis?

From the new hotness to another old classic, let’s now examine Quo Vadis.  I never try to hide my biases on any post, but fair warning, I’m definitely biased and personally tied to this game (more on that later).  But even if Quo Vadis was completely unrelated to Bitewing Games, it would still be on my Top 10 Negotiation Games list.  That’s because this one is a playground of pure, zesty politics from one of my favorite designers, Reiner Knizia.

Believe it or not, Quo Vadis is now over 30 years old and among the very first notable releases from Dr. Knizia.  It is certainly starting to look its age in board game years, yet the core experience is as spicy as ever.  The game is a race to squeeze one or more of your senators into the Inner Sanctum before it fills up, because only those who have reached the Inner Sanctum qualify for victory.  The only problem is that it is extremely hard to get there without the help of your opponents.  Through bribing, voting, exchanging favors, and sometimes even backstabbing, only the most cunning players will rise to the top of the Roman Senate.  But you can be the last to cross the finish line—getting in by the skin of your teeth—and still claim the victory for yourself!  That’s because the winner will be the Inner Sanctum player who earns the most laurels from successful campaigns and lucrative deals along the way.  It’s simple, it’s fast, and it is incredibly thrilling.  One must balance the pressing urgency of reaching the Inner Sanctum with the lucrative opportunities to hang back and milk your opponents and the game board for laurels.

As much as I love this game, I’ll be the first to admit that has a few flaws.  Most notably, the board loses some of its tightness and the table some of its tension if you’re playing with 3 people instead of 4 or ideally 5.  And if those people are new to the game, then getting them excited about this grungy old box and bone-dry board is usually a challenge.  Finally, those who enjoy a broader trading sandbox from games like Sidereal Confluence will obviously feel a bit more restricted here.  It’s understandable for some players to come away from the relatively dry Quo Vadis being thirsty for a little more juice in their negotiations.  To that end, I’m thrilled to share that Bitewing Games and Reiner Knizia have worked to address every major flaw in this classic game—so stick around to hear about Quo Vadis evolved.  But for now, let’s pay our respects to the original Quo Vadis and continue on to my next pick…

Root

Root is one of a few picks on my list that features negotiation as a secondary or supplemental mechanism to the core experience.  In fact, the best place you’ll find negotiation in this game is actually within the first expansion thanks to the Riverfolk Company faction of profit-seeking otters.  This commercial crew offers their services to the other woodland critters by displaying their hand at all times and setting prices on their offerings.  Not only can opponents buy cards from your public hand, but they can also use your riverboats to get around the board easier and utilize your mercenaries to bully their targets more effectively.

Being a good merchant otter is not only about setting the right prices for your services, but it’s also about keeping your finger on the woodland’s pulse and enticing your opponents with offers they can’t refuse.  Yet negotiation can even be found outside of the Riverfolk Company as players can form an alliance with the Vagabond or collaborate with enemies to destabilize an even bigger threat.  Designer Cole Wehrle is known for embracing the memorable meta that can arise from a board game, and Root is all about gaming the players.

Oath: Chronicles of Empire and Exile

If gaming the players is the kind of thing you are looking for, then Mr. Wehrle’s later design, Oath, might be an even better fit for you.  Oath was my favorite release from last year—I’m now 11 meaty plays into it and still having a blast.  But that doesn’t mean it’s for everyone.  Nooooooo way, you better know what you’re getting into with Oath before you take the plunge.

If you too want to have a blast with Oath, then you ideally need a regular group of 3-5 players.  Your group needs to be totally okay with a lengthy rules explanation, a cloudy first play (or more), an unwieldy labyrinth of strategic possibilities, a wide range of emotional highs and lows, and the ever present possibility of kingmaking looming over each game’s outcome.  In many ways, Oath is less about reaching a competitive conclusion and more about charting a civilization’s journey.  But if you’re here for the negotiations and politicking, then you’ll find plenty to love.

Each result of a play of Oath has a direct effect on the setup of the next—like a pseudo legacy game that is constantly morphing and never ending.  The winner of one game always becomes crowned (or continues) as Chancellor in the next.  This Chancellor’s goal is to hold their new oath (a unique victory objective) while keeping the Exiles of the kingdom in check.  Often, the Exiles and their followers can become so dangerous and unwieldy that the Chancellor may be compelled to offer citizenship to a lowly Exile in a desperate attempt to retain control.  The problem is that this Exile-turned-Citizen will do everything in their power to succeed the Chancellor as they cooperate together.  

One of my most recent plays of this game saw one exiled player forcing his citizenship upon me, the Chancellor of the session, and convincing me to share my war bands and power with him to help maintain order in my Empire.  And each time I trusted him with my resources, he immediately stabbed me in the back by revealing secret plans and motives of his own.  Fortunately, the other exiles proved to be a large enough threat that he was compelled to concede his ulterior motives for the next era and help my Empire maintain its grasp on the land.

Inis

Interestingly, Cole has cited that one of his main inspirations for Oath was in fact Inis, by Christian Martinez.  That’s more due to the fact that Inis and Oath both feature multiple paths to victory within a tumultuous power struggle—yet they both possess elements of negotiation as well!  Ironically, the only place that you’ll really find negotiation in Inis is within the conflicts between warring players.

The thing I love about conflict in Inis is that it is completely devoid of things like combat dice and power cards.  These tropes are replaced by a simple question: “Would you like to stop fighting?”  If the answer is no, then players will continue to slap valuable troops out of each other’s armies or precious cards out of each other’s hands until one retreats or is wiped out.  But if the answer is yes—and both players can agree to stop before one or both are virtually annihilated—then the conflict is over.  Simple as that.  The different bands will simply coexist on the same board space.

Inis remains a brilliant game of political power grabbing that is further improved by several of the modules in its expansion.  I’m all ears for the recently announced second installment in this “political trilogy” from designer Martinez and publisher Matagot titled Galactic Renaissance.

Lords of Vegas

Speaking of one game being the inspiration for another, Lords of Vegas actually owes some of its DNA to the previously listed Chinatown according to the designers of this next game on my list.  It certainly makes sense when you look closely enough.  Both games see players taking control of lots on a square grid and seeking to erect businesses across connected lots in order to gain the most profits.  Yet where Chinatown is pure, unadulterated negotiation, Lords of Vegas is a game of cutthroat casinos ripe with entrepreneurial gambling and sprinkled with the opportunity for trading and negotiation.

In this 12-year-old fan favorite, players are constantly risking their hard-earned cash on ambitious endeavors.  These pursuits include everything from building, upgrading, and spreading owned casinos to hostile takeovers of the competition or even high-stakes gambling to steal each other’s cash.  With all of these thrillingly thematic possibilities, it can be easy to forget the advantageous opportunity to trade at any time.  The ability to trade most anything—including money, lots, dice in casinos, and actions—can really help tip the scales of luck in your favor.

Bohnanza

We’re going to close this Top 10 out with another classic trading game that has long been a favorite of many gamers across the world.  Apparently the gateway to becoming a legendary German game designer is by starting with a simple negotiation game.  As Reiner Knizia began his design journey with Quo Vadis (among others) so Uwe Rosenberg started his ludography with the bean-trading card game, Bohnanza. Many frown upon the garish art style of this game, but I personally find it to be quite charming and iconic.

While I personally gravitate toward games that offer more strategy and flexibly in their negotiation possibilities, Bohnanza remains a worthwhile and amusing classic thanks to its unique locked hand card play.  Here, you are not allowed to rearrange any cards in your hand, and you must play them into your fields in order.  This forces players to give up beans to their opponents in hopes of receiving others, as you’ll score more points if you are able to play multiple beans of a single type in a row.  For those who are curious, Bohnanza sits as the most family-friendly negotiation game on this list. If you’re wanting to get gamers or non-gamers hooked on this genre, then Bohnanza, Chinatown, and Quo Vadis are the three best entry points.

Honorable Mentions

No top 10 list is any good without a handful of honorable mentions, right?  At the very least, these mentions help to dampen the outrage of passionate fans who saw their favorite negotiation game shafted on my list.  So let’s get into them!

• John Company: Honestly, I have no doubt that the second edition of this game was merely a few months away from making my Top 10 list and pushing off another title listed above.  Cole Wehrle is a favorite designer of mine (if you didn’t notice from Root and Oath being mentioned above), and John Company is his most negotiation-focused game of all.  I can’t wait to dive into this one when it finally releases in Q3!
• Rising Sun: I’ve heard two main things about Rising Sun.  1) It claims to be a negotiation game but many detractors say that’s a weak claim at best.  2) Many folks also say that this is the weakest design of the Eric Lang / CMON trilogy (Blood Rage, Rising Sun, Ankh).  So will I ever get the chance to try it?  Who knows.  But here it is.
• Twilight Imperium: These next two games are probably the ones that will get me in the most trouble with negotiation fans (because they are on my honorable mentions rather than my Top 10).  I’m still not sure whether I would enjoy this 8-hour extravaganza or simply be annoyed that I didn’t spend an entire day playing 4-10 other games that I know I love instead.  But from the sound of it, those who enjoy TI are hooked from their first play and ever hungry for more plays.
• Diplomacy: Another beast of a game (roughly 6 hours) that apparently must be played at exactly 6 or 7 players who will likely enter as friends and leave as mortal enemies.  Diplomacy apparently takes the back-stabbing part of negotiation and makes it a glorified feature in this epic game of military might.
• Dune: Dune, like TI and Diplomacy, has been around for decades, although it recently received a facelift.  These games also share the common problem of possessing many barriers to entry and requiring the perfect group (in this case 6 players hungry for a heavy 3-hour game).  Dune features deeply asymmetric factions, shakey alliances, and secret treachery.
• Pax Pamir: While Pax Pamir is one of my all-time favorite board games, I couldn’t justify fitting it onto my Top 10 list when negotiation is such a light feature compared to the other games in contention.  The most negotiation you’ll find here is mostly in the table talk—convincing others to join or support your faction and work against opponents.  Of course, you can also waive the forced bribes present in the game if a player is seeking to help your cause—but most often those bribes are enforced because the economy is so tight here.
• Genoa: I’ve come close to tracking down a copy of Genoa, and perhaps that’ll happen before too long.  This one seems to be a bit more polarizing—either you love the dynamic gameplay that Genoa provides, or you hate it for being too long and dry.
• Moonrakers: This is undoubtedly the hottest negotiation game at the moment as Moonrakers is currently having its second smash-hit Kickstarter campaign featuring all kinds of expansion content. What happens when you combine negotiation with deck-building in space? Only Moonrakers can answer that question.
• Panic on Wall Street: I rarely hear about this 2011 game, but it still has its fans.  This one is about loudly negotiating and trading stocks for 3-11 players in only 30 minutes.
• Catan: “Two sheep for a wood?” How could I not mention one of the most popular trading games of all time?
• Spartacus: A Game of Blood and Treachery: Like Quo Vadis, Spartacus is also about competing for power in Ancient Rome.  Only the competition here plays out in gory gladiatorial arenas rather than dignified senatorial committees.  Apparently this one got a somewhat recent reskin as well.

Introducing Zoo Vadis and Gussy Gorillas

I started this post by sharing how negotiation is one of my all-time favorite ingredients in tabletop games.  So of course, as a publisher, I’m eager to keep this genre alive and contribute to the list of legends which include the games noted above.  For my tastes, this might be the most exciting project that we’ve had the privilege to work on.  Let’s dive into the next two releases coming from Bitewing Games… 

Zoo Vadis

When I reached out to Reiner regarding Quo Vadis, I had a vision for what the game could become.  We weren’t interested in simply painting over the cracks in the design.  Rather, I dug through over 30 years of data (thanks BGG) and presented my analysis to Reiner including several development goals for the game.  Then off he went with his decades-old design to give it new life—like a phoenix reborn from the flames.  I’ll be sharing a full publisher diary before too long on all the nitty gritty details behind the evolution of Quo Vadis to Zoo Vadis, but for now let me simply explain the end result, Zoo Vadis:

What if the animals were the ones who ran the zoo?  

…Presumably, this wild government would be built upon the support of fellow creatures and fueled by the fame, attention, and prestige of wide-eyed visitors.  Naturally, the most aspirational beasts would lobby for a position in the star exhibit, and the lead star would be elected Zoo Mascot.  

In order to join the star exhibit, each species must campaign its way up the hierarchy of enclosures with the majority support of animal voters.  And the lead star will be the species that has earned the most laurels from both raving fans and jealous rivals along the way.  

How does one gain support and earn laurels?  Through crafty politicking, clever negotiations, and ruthless schemes.  There can only be one Zoo Mascot, after all.

Where are you going?  That is the ultimate question of Zoo Vadis.

Zoo Vadis is an evolution of Reiner Knizia’s cult-classic negotiation game, Quo Vadis?.  It retains the elegant, political gameplay that fans have come to love while introducing many innovations and improvements by:

-Enhancing the 3-player game and tailoring the board to all player counts through neutral, bribable figures—roaming peacocks

-Widening the player count with a second game board for 6-7 players

-Expanding the possibilities for strategic negotiation with asymmetric animal abilities 

-Increasing tactical opportunities with new special laurel tokens

-Broadening the appeal of the theme and presentation with vibrant zoo art by Kwanchai Moriya and Brigette Indelicato

-Enlivening the production with chunky animal figures and functional player screens

Like the original design, the game ends immediately when the Star Exhibit is full.  Only the animals who have reached the Star Exhibit qualify for victory, and the winner is the player with the most laurels.

Gussy Gorillas

Before Bitewing Games had ever reached out to Reiner Knizia or Ryan Courtney, we had a couple designs of our own that had survived the gauntlet of playtesting and were games that we were eager to share with the community.  One of those is Gussy Gorillas, and we’re jazzed to finally be publishing it alongside Zoo Vadis in our upcoming negotiation games crowdfunding campaign…

Gussy Gorillas are a peculiar group of primates that strive to keep each other gussied up and well-groomed. Through social grooming, these apes remove dirt, insects, and debris from the difficult-to-reach and difficult-to-see places of each other’s fur. Reciprocation is expected and awarded in this kind of monkey business! The player who acquires the most diverse and exotic collection of groomed goods will earn the respect of their fellow primates and be awarded the golden banana of victory.

In Gussy Gorillas, players start out with a personal deck of face-down cards. Without looking at the card(s) in their hand, players simultaneously trade or keep their hand, one or two cards at a time, to form a personal collection. Once all cards have been traded or kept, players tally their collections and the highest score wins — but pairs can cancel out and special cards are not always helpful, so trade carefully!

Similar to the popular game Hanabi, in Gussy Gorillas players hold their cards facing away from themselves…but instead of being a co-operative memory game, this is a competitive negotiation and bluffing game. Things get even more interesting once players realize that every card can either be very good or very bad for one’s collection, depending on the context. You’ll have to convince your opponents to keep bad cards for themselves and give great cards to you if you want to swing away with the win…

There are still plenty more juicy details to share over the coming months and we hope to have your support when Zoo Vadis and Gussy Gorillas launch this January!  The best way to help Bitewing Games and not miss out on these upcoming releases is to subscribe to the Bitewing Games newsletter. Bitewing Games is only made possible and kept alive by the support of backers and fans of our published games.   Thanks for your support!

What is your favorite negotiation game?  Share in the comments below!

Article written by Nick Murray. Outside of practicing dentistry part-time, Nick has devoted his remaining work-time to collaborating with the world’s best designers, illustrators, and creators in producing classy board games that bite, including the upcoming Trailblazers by Ryan Courtney. He hopes you’ll join Bitewing Games in their quest to create and share experiences that, much like a bitewing x-ray, provide a unique perspective and refreshing interaction.

The post Top 10 Negotiation Board Games + A Bitewing Games Publication Reveal! appeared first on Bitewing Games.

Note: This written post features only my top 10 Spatial Puzzle games, but the podcast episode includes my picks plus 10 more picks from podcast guest, Ryan Flaherty. If you want twice the Spatial Puzzle gaming goodness via an audio discussion between friends, then check out our meaty episode!

Before one becomes a dentist, or even enters dental school, a prospective dental student in the US must take what is called the Dental Admissions Test.  This exam is an absolute beast of a hoop that one must successfully jump through if they wish keep their dental career dream alive.  Many folks (including myself) take off several weeks to spend 6-8 hours a day cramming biology, chemistry, mathematics, and more into our brains in preparation for the great spewing.  For a couple months or so, this pursuit essentially consumes your life as you cram, take practice exams, and cram some more as though you are trying to pour more knowledge fluid into an already overflowing brain bucket while patching up the leaky holes all over.

Oddly enough, there is one part of this exam that starts to feel like a game.  It is a section known as the Perceptual Ability Test, or PAT for short.  As the title describes, this section examines your ability to mentally visualize things such as 3D shapes, acute angles, and more.  The reason this feels like a game is that rather than solve problems or recall memorized information, you are challenged to rank angles, match keyholes, visualize folds, count cube surfaces, and more.  The reason for the PAT is because dentists are constantly using mirrors, x-rays, and models to visualize, shape, and diagnose teeth.  Thus, the PAT material is not so much something you can learn or memorize to be prepared.  Rather, it requires a spatially minded brain and a whole lot of practice to master the challenging types of questions you’ll encounter.  In a sort of sick and twisted way, this PAT practice becomes the “fun” part of your studying routine, and a great way to break up the monotony of the science subjects.  Over time, It’s quite satisfying to nail these questions with increasing competence.

Much like the PAT (but in a far more entertaining form), it is also very satisfying to take on spatial puzzles in tabletop games.  These puzzles usually take the form of cards and tiles which can be aligned, arranged, and overlapped in an open space of endless possibilities.  Typically, these games will punish you for poor spatial arrangements and reward you for clever planning.  While some games are pure spacial puzzling, others implement this mental challenge into a larger game packed with many more mechanisms.

We’ve had loads of fun exploring many games that include spatial puzzling in their repertoire.  Many titles in t  his genre have proven to be deliciously addicting and widely popular.  We’ve enjoyed them so much, that it is with great excitement that Bitewing Games here and now reveals our next published game to be… a meaty spatial puzzler.  That’s right!  We’ve been working hard these past several months to plan and prepare our next game for you.  You can find our grand reveal at the end of this post.  And in celebration of that reveal, today we’d like to share our Top 10 Spatial Puzzle games.  If you, like us, are a fan of many of these games and their puzzly goodness, then our next offering might just be up your alley.

But we’ll save the details for the end.  As for now, let’s talk about our favorite, highly recommended spatial puzzle games in no particular order…

Patchwork / New York Zoo

Might as well come clean right up front… there is definitely going to be some cheating involved on this Top 10 list.  It will actually consist of 13 games plus more honorable mentions at the end!  The reason for this dirty trick is simple: there are far more than 10 excellent spatial puzzle games out there.  Plus, some titles share so much in common that it’s too hard to mention one without mentioning the other.  Thus, with this first pick, we split the spotlight between Uwe Rosenberg’s Patchwork and New York Zoo.

Those of you who’ve seen my Battle of the Polyominoes article likely predicted that these games would end up here.  Polyominoes are to spatial puzzle games as dogs are to house pets.  They’re like a gamer’s best friend.  There is something about fitting various shapes together on a square grid that we gamers can’t get enough of.  This won’t be the only polyomino pick on this list—far from it—so let’s talk about what makes Patchwork and New York Zoo special.

Coming from the same designer, Patchwork and New York Zoo both feature an engaging rondel for tile drafting.  The former is all about an economy of spending and earning buttons while managing time to maximize positive points and cover up negative points to beat your single opponent.  The latter is instead an economy of breeding… that’s right… breeding animals in their exhibits at the zoo in a race to be the first to cover your board entirely before 1-4 opponents.  In both cases, you can enjoy pleasant themes mixed with compelling decisions from the polyomino connoisseur himself.  Which one is better is up for debate, but I say you can’t go wrong with either (or both).

Galaxy Trucker

While Patchwork and New York Zoo both contain elements of time economics or racing to the finish, neither of them are actual ‘real-time’ games where you are rushing your arrangements and burning your brain into overdrive.  But if that’s what you are looking for, Galaxy Trucker has you covered.  This wild, wacky game has been around for many years, but it recently received a new coat of paint with some minor tweaks to the formula.  Either version is dirt cheap and loads of fun, but you’ll need to have a group who can handle a bit of a rules dump up front.

While this one isn’t as family-friendly as it wants to be thanks to a few too many fiddly rules, it still has a major payoff for those who are fully invested.  The game consist of two acts: first, rush to reveal and arrange square tiles into a jumbled mess of a space ship that contains guns, thrusters, energy, shields, storage, and more.  The longer you take to arrange and nitpick your ship, the faster the best tiles will be claimed by other players because during this act you are scrambling to build your ships all at the same time and the tiles are first-come-first-serve.  The second act sees you laughing, cheering, and moaning as you send your ships on a risky voyage ripe with perilous dangers and delicious rewards.  Ship parts and sections get blasted and blown off, and all you can do is just hang on and hope you survive the journey.

Factory Funner

Speaking of rushing to grab tiles while cooking your brain, Factory Funner is also split into two phases: the first phase consists of brief real-time drafting, the second consists of crunchy spatial efficiency.  The cool thing here is that you are free to use connectors and other helpful tiles to your heart’s content, but each extra piece you use costs a dollar from your score.  As you have to add a new machine each round, you can also remove old pipes and tiles to establish new connections between the machine inputs and outputs.

The new version of this game (releasing within the next few months) comes to us from publisher BoardGameTables.com and features zesty new art, a non-real-time drafting variant for those who don’t like to be rushed, and the addition of a sixth player.

Pipeline / Curious Cargo

Since we’re on the subject of pipes, we might as well chat about the ultimate pipey games from designer Ryan Courtney: Pipeline and Curious Cargo.  Ryan burst into the board game industry with the critically acclaimed Pipeline, a slick economic brain burner about buying, refining, and selling oil.  While worker placement, loans, economics, engine building, and contract fulfillment are all major parts of this design, one of the standout features of this game is the pipe tiles where players must make long, winding connections of pipe of the same color to help refine their oil.  Purchasing and arranging these pipes is a compelling part of the challenge, and these different combinations of routes across dozens of domino tiles was something fresh and new in the spatial puzzle genre.

People loved it so much that the creators followed Pipeline up with another domino spatial puzzle game in Curious Cargo.  While many expected Curious Cargo to be a pure, simple distillation of the pipe element from Pipeline, in reality Ryan took this follow-up design as a challenge to cram as much complexity into a small box game as possible.  What resulted was a title that has perhaps been a little more polarizing in the industry.  This head-to-head shipping and receiving game contorts your brain with its even more difficult spatial challenges.  It demands much flexibility and adaptation from players as they draw tiles out the bag and must figure out how to best use those frequently less-than-ideal draws.  But I stand by my final statement in my review of this title: “Despite the emotional cuts, bruises, and occasional broken bones that this design doles out, I’ve found Curious Cargo to be one heck of a satisfying game.”

Azul

Let’s step away from the brain burning puzzles for a moment to talk about a few lighter options.  Azul mixes tile drafting with just a hint of spacial puzzling.  The sequence and location tiles added to your board is the core element of scoring, and it’s a challenge that comes into conflict with the dwindling drafting options of each round.  It’s just as important to be able to predict what tiles others will claim as it is to smartly plan your own moves.

Azul is one that ranks highly among our favorite 2-player games and 10 games everyone should try.  While there are now four versions of Azul out in the wild, I’m sticking with my guns and declaring that the original is the best.  At least that’s how things will remain until Azul: Queen’s Garden makes its way to the US for me to properly scrutinize it.

Carcassonne / Isle of Skye

If you’re looking to go even more classic and simple than Azul, then perhaps Carcassonne is the best candidate.  The procedure is dead simple: play the one tile in your hand anywhere into the growing arrangement of tiles and add a meeple on top of it if you’d like.  With the tiles, you’ll be accomplishing tasks as simple as growing, connecting, or enclosing fields, roads, or cities.  But the most important aspect is deciding when and where to add your meeples.  You see, these meeples are like investments in unfinished landscape features; the person with the most meeples in a feature when it becomes fully enclosed gets the big payout in points.  Things get extra spicy when opponents attempt to outcompete each other in the same region or when they try to sabotage the completion of a road or city.

Yet I can’t help but mention here another square tile game with an interesting twist.  In Isle of Skye, there is no shared, central region of growing tiles for players to add to like in Carcassonne.  Rather, you’ll be building up your own personal area as you’re pulled this way and that by the changing scoring criteria.  Each round, you’ll also be pulling 3 tiles out of the bag and deciding how to price them to either entice or deter your opponents.  Money is important here because you’ll desperately need it to be able to buy the best tile from a single opponent of your choice.  Plus, you’ll be using your own money to price your tiles, and if nobody bites, then you just bought them yourself for the price you set.

If you’re looking for a straightforward game that lets players dip their toes in the spatial puzzle waters by aligning and arranging matching features on square tiles, then you can’t go wrong with Carcassonne or Isle of Skye.

A Feast for Odin

For those of you who prefer your games sprawling and meaty, let’s now dive back into the deep end of spatial puzzle designs.  A Feast for Odin is a game that features a worker placement game board with over 60 possible spaces, hundreds of tiny polyomino tiles organized across several trays, and large player boards with supplemental island boards for you to arrange these many tiles over the course of a 2-3 hour playtime.  This is one big box game that will make you wish your table was at least… three times its size.

Yet, A Feast for Odin is one of the most satisfying Euros in existence thanks to Uwe Rosenberg’s steady design hand.  You’ll be hunting, raiding, farming, whaling, trading, and more to acquire viking goods that come in many shapes and sizes.  You’ll have to arrange these polyomino goods wisely in order to increase your income, surround and gain bonuses, and cover up negative points.  All the while, you’ll be feeding your vikings as they grow increasingly hungry throughout their many pursuits.  It’s a feast of game that is indeed worthy of Odin’s name.

Isle of Cats 

If you want to wrap your braintacles around one of the hottest polyomino games of the recent years, then Isle of Cats might just be what the doctor ordered.  You’ll be rescuing cats from the evil Lord Vesh by cramming them onto your boat board.  If that doesn’t already sound zesty enough for you, then consider that the other core mechanism of this game is card drafting similar to 7 Wonders or Sushi Go.

This game also has an easier, more family friendly mode for those who need it.  But either way, you’ll be playing a game that is currently ranked in the top 100 games on BGG and the BGG top 10 family games.  Need I say more?

Sprawlopolis

Those of you who are primarily solo or cooperative gamers, worry not, we haven’t forgotten about you!  Sprawlopolis is arguably the best wallet game that money can buy, and it is meant to be played solo or together.  It still blows my mind what the creators were able to pull off with only 18 cards:  The backs of these cards each have a unique scoring objective.  Your game will feature a random combination of 3 scoring objectives, and you’ll be using the remaining 15 card faces to arrange and layer a city of cards to try and achieve the scoring requirements.

You’ll lose points for each unique road, so it’s wise to try and connect them together to minimize damage.  Meanwhile, you’ll be trying to overlap and connect matching districts in all directions according to the tricky objectives of each individual play.  If the 3 objective cards are easy, then you’ll need a higher score to win.  This crunchy minimalist game comes highly acclaimed by many critics, and at such a low price you have no reason not to try it.

My City

Although this list was arranged in no particular order, we are going to end things off with my personal favorite spatial puzzle game.  While most of these games see players drafting or selecting tiles or cards to arrange in optimal orientations, My City makes its players fall victim to a bingo style draft.  A central deck with one card for each tile is shuffled at the start of the game.  Each round, the top card is revealed and players must decide where to place this building tile onto their city board.

One would surmise, as I once did, that such a system devoid of tile choice or player interaction would be aggressively dull.  Not so, dear reader.  Instead, this system creates an experience of suspense, risk, and anticipation as you plan and hope that the right tile will come out of the deck before you fill a suitable area in with something less ideal.  

A critical aspect of these rules is that you may spend a point to trash a tile rather than be forced to add it to your board.  And we haven’t even gotten to the real juicy part of the design:  My City is a legacy game where over the course of 24 sessions players will add stickers to their board, gain more tiles, encounter new challenges and objectives, and compete to be the ultimate city builder by tracking points earned during each play.  We’ve sung the praises of My City so much that our followers are undoubtedly now bleeding from all orifices and begging us to branch out to other games.  But alas, when one makes a Top 10 Spacial Puzzles list, one must listen to their heart and include the masterful My City among the champions.

Honorable Mentions

While there can only be thirteen games among the top 10 (our math is sound, don’t question it), the following are honorable mentions that we wish to list and celebrate so that we can minimize our chances of being flogged by spatial puzzle connoisseurs:

1. Blokus – classic, strategic goodness
2. Calico / Cascadia – hot new tile drafting and arranging games featuring animals
3. Arboretum – a tense cutthroat hand management game with a sprinkling of spatial arrangement
4. Railroad Ink – a solid roll & write of connecting highways and railroads
5. Barenpark – a favorite polyomino game for many… plus BEARS
6. On Tour – a roll & write about scheduling a tour by sequencing your route across the country
7. Sagrada – a popular game similar to Azul featuring gorgeous colorful token drafting (dice in this case) and arranging

A Bitewing Games Publication Reveal…

And here we have finally arrived… at the end of all things.  Or more accurately, at the end of all things yet published.  We are thrilled to finally unveil the next title that Bitewing Games will be publishing via a Kickstarter campaign in Q2 2022.  It is indeed a spatial puzzle game, but it is also a love letter to outdoor adventuring.  Introducing Trailblazers by designer Ryan Courtney:

Trailblazers are the gutsy folks who pave and brave the trails of the great outdoors.  Whether by hiking boots, cycling wheels, or river paddle, these tenacious travelers seek to feed their insatiable appetite for adventure.  With a scenic wilderness ever ahead and a freshly charted path upon the heels, one mustn’t forget to eventually find their way back to camp.  For there are always new environments to explore, further expeditions to undertake, and more trails to blaze.

In Trailblazers, players compete to earn the most points by building biking, hiking, and kayaking loops from their campsites of the matching trail type.  Each round, players are dealt eight trail cards where they’ll draft two cards, arrange those cards in their personal area, and pass their hand to the next player three times.  Cards must either be placed adjacent to or overlapping other cards.  While players can push their luck by aiming to construct long and elaborate trails, only closed loops that start and end at a matching campsite will score points.  Players also compete to fulfill “First To” and “End Game” goal cards.  After four rounds, the game ends and the player with the most points from closed loops and goal cards wins.

Compared to the travel edition for 1-4 players, the standard edition of Trailblazers features a second deck of trail & player cards so you can play with up to 8 players.  The box also contains two expansions (the Animals expansion and Adventurers expansion) that add another challenging layer of strategy and objectives to the experience.  

Trailblazers is the third spacial puzzle domino game by designer Ryan Courtney (the first two being Pipeline and Curious Cargo).  While they share a similar puzzly DNA that fans have come to know and love, Trailblazers differs by:

• Featuring simple, highly accessible rules in a 30 minute game for 1-8 players
• Boiling the gameplay down to pure spatial puzzling and card drafting with a dash of push-your-luck route building
• Using durable PVC cards that can easily be shuffled, dealt, drafted, and overlapped (found in the travel edition and deluxe edition)
• Including three challenging solo modes with a high skill-ceiling

Well there you have it!  We’re ecstatic to finally get that big news off our chest.  But we’re even more excited to launch this Kickstarter project next year!  For those of you who want to follow along or even try out the game early on Tabletop Simulator (once it is ready), simply subscribe to the Bitewing Games newsletter and join us for the ride!  In the meantime, keep on enjoying those spatial puzzlers!

Article written by Nick Murray. Outside of practicing dentistry part-time, Nick has devoted his remaining work-time to collaborating with the world’s best designers, illustrators, and creators in producing classy board games that bite. He hopes you’ll join Bitewing Games in their quest to create and share experiences that, much like a bitewing x-ray, provide a unique perspective and refreshing interaction.

The post Top 10 Spatial Puzzle Games + A Bitewing Games Publication Reveal! appeared first on Bitewing Games.

It’s been a hectic year and 8 months for us here at Bitewing Games!  What initially started out as a simple website with an infrequent blog from two dentists who love tabletop gaming has now sprawled into a Youtube channel, audio podcast, and publishing company.

While we’ve enjoyed creating and sharing content, discussing and recommending games, and building the hobby through various channels, our endgame has always been to create classy games that bite.  Now, with over 400 amazing backers helping us to fund the Criminal Capers Collection as this Kickstarter campaign comes to a close on Thursday, we are finally doing what we long ago set out to do.

The question now is, what’s next for Bitewing Games?  We hope this answer will be as exciting for you as it is for us.  We didn’t start this very time-consuming company as a desperate attempt to make a quick buck, so one successful Kickstarter campaign isn’t going to see us riding off into the sunset like a couple of victorious bandits.

Indeed, we are here for the long haul, and we’re just getting started.  Yet with our tasks, projects, and ambitions seemingly doubling with each passing month, we wish to maintain a quality output and laser focus on the things that bring us the most satisfaction and you the most value.

While I’ve enjoyed launching a weekly podcast this year which now features 36 episodes that have run parallel to the Bitewing Games blog, I must admit that maintaining a weekly blog and podcast requires far more hours than I currently have time for, especially now as our publishing responsibilities grow.  So it is here that I must announce that the Bitewing Games blog and podcast will be transitioning from a weekly release to a biweekly release.  In the timeless words of Gandalf the White, “I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.”

Speaking of biweekly, what’s the deal with that word?  Why the heck do we use the same word to mean twice a week and every two weeks?  Doesn’t that essentially make the word useless if we have to clarify which definition we mean every time we use it?  The English language just baffles me sometimes… Anyway, the biweekly I’m referring to in regards to the blog and podcast is every two weeks.

It’ll still be the same kind of content you’ve come to expect from us, just slightly less frequent because absence makes the heart grow fonder.  But worry not, we’ll be plenty busy publishing board games for you in the meantime, and I think we’d all rather be playing games than listening to others talk about games.

Over the next few weeks and months, we’ll be finalizing the Criminal Capers Collection with our artist and manufacturer to ensure that our first games come out swinging with bang-up productions that will knock your socks off and prove that we mean business in this industry.  Meanwhile, as Soda Smugglers, Pumafiosi, and Hot Lead are being assembled and shipped around the world, we’ll be cooking up more exciting projects to launch next year and beyond.

We already have four more games up our sleeve that are likely to be even more wild and ambitious than the Criminal Capers Collection.  What kinds of games, you ask?  They’ll obviously be the kinds of games that we love to evangelize on our channel and bring to our table.  They’ll be games with a spicy table presence and clever gameplay concept.  They’ll provide plenty of memorable player interaction and meaningful variety to ensure a long lifespan on your shelf.  They’ll aim to offer you a unique perspective and refreshing interaction, just as a good bitewing should.

I’m so thrilled with our vision for these four games that I wish I could just publish them all at once right now.  For some of them, we are already collaborating with popular designers, consulting with industry experts, and drawing up blueprints as we begin the early stage planning.  But we must of course pace ourselves and be smart with our marketing and budget plans to maintain a healthy company.  And the great folly of mankind is to take for granted the wonderful things we already possess.  Despite the board game industry being a place of fleeting hype and forgotten heaps, we plan to love, support, and celebrate the Criminal Capers Collection and its fans for years to come.

Some of you have been with us since Bitewing Games was born in January 2020, and others of you even before then.  Many of you have joined us more recently as Reiner Knizia’s Criminal Capers Collection has come to life and is making its initial splash in the world of tabletop games.

To all of you, we offer our deepest thanks for believing in Bitewing Games and helping us achieve our dreams.  We don’t have a Patreon or any form of advertisements on our website or across our content.  For those of you who appreciate our contributions to the hobby and would love to see it continue and grow, the best and only way you can support us is through our Kickstarter campaign which will close on Thursday, September 2.  Not only does your support allow us to continue to post useful and engaging articles, episodes, and videos, but you’ll also get one or more zesty card games out of it!  How’s that for a Patreon reward?

That’s all I have for today’s post, but don’t worry, I’ll be back next Monday with another first impressions episode featuring Kabuto Sumo, Summoner Wars, Coffee Traders, and more!  After that, we’ll be entering Act 2 of Bitewing Games featuring public biweekly episodes and private daily publishing pursuits!  We’ll have much to unveil in the coming year, so be sure to subscribe to our newsletter and buckle up for a wonderfully wild ride.

Article written by Nick Murray. Outside of practicing dentistry part-time, Nick has devoted his remaining work-time to collaborating with the world’s best designers, illustrators, and creators in producing classy board games that bite. He hopes you’ll join Bitewing Games in their quest to create and share experiences that, much like a bitewing x-ray, provide a unique perspective and refreshing interaction.

The post What’s Next for Bitewing Games? appeared first on Bitewing Games.

Nick is joined by artist and graphic designer, Paul Halkyon, to discuss the world, lore, and visual design behind Soda Smugglers, Pumafiosi, and Hot Lead.

Link to the Criminal Capers Collection on Kickstarter

Link to Paul Halkyon’s instagram page

Send us your questions for a Bitewing Games Q&A podcast episode!  Follow this link to submit your questions or email nick@bitewinggames.com

• Intro to Paul Halkyon – 0:53
• How Paul got into art and graphic design – 4:21
• How Paul and Nick met (screen printing apparel) – 11:40
• Designing the world behind the Criminal Capers Collection – 14:30
• The art and soda brands behind Soda Smugglers – 18:25
• The art and mafia families behind Pumafiosi – 22:14
• The lore behind the Boss Knife and Boss Rose – 25:38
• The impact of excellent art in board games – 30:48
• Counterbalancing the criminals with the investigators of Hot Lead – 32:19
• Unique art styles within a consistent universe – 34:15
• Paul’s favorite Soda Smugglers soda brand – 35:37
• Paul’s favorite Pumafiosi characters – 36:34
• Paul’s favorite Hot Lead character – 38:33
• The hardest parts of illustrating the Criminal Capers Collection – 40:30
• Paul’s entry and goals into the board game industry – 44:28
• How Paul broke his toe – 47:10
• Easter eggs in the art – 48:58
• Where you can find Paul – 52:30

The post Paul Halkyon Interview—Podcast Exclusive appeared first on Bitewing Games.

Nick is joined by internationally acclaimed designer Reiner Knizia for an epic interview exploring an entire spectrum of board game topics!  This is one episode you don’t want to miss…

Link to the Kickstarter campaign for Reiner Knizia’s Criminal Capers Collection

• Intro to Dr. Reiner Knizia – 1:49
• Inspiration behind Soda Smugglers, Pumafiosi, & Hot Lead – 2:50
• Reiner’s favorite animal – 10:08
• Designing different genres of games – 12:08
• Deck-builders & The Quest for El Dorado – 15:47
• The Siege of Runedar – 19:33
• Reiner’s future with legacy games; a sequel to My City? – 28:13
• Personal & career goals moving forward – 31:47
• Observations on international publishing – 36:10
• Reiner’s mysterious 2000+ game library – 40:13
• Current design projects that Reiner is excited about – 46:05
• How the pandemic has affected Reiner’s work – 48:58
• Reiner’s take on remixing his classic games (Tigris & Euphrates -> Yellow & Yangtze) – 50:10
• Advice to game designers – 53:33

The post Reiner Knizia Interview—Podcast Exclusive appeared first on Bitewing Games.

What does it take to publish a board game?  A LOT.  A whole, stinking lot.  The kind of lot that will eat up hours upon hours, months upon months of your free time like the eery No-Face of Spirited Away.  The kind of lot that will quickly and efficiently drain your bank account of tax returns and COVID relief funds and more before your game is even produced.  The kind of lot that you’re better off running away and hiding from… unless you are really passionate about that particular game.

And that game can’t just be any old design.  If you want it to spread far and wide—to earn it’s way into cozy mom-and-pop game shops or onto coveted Target store shelves—or if you want it to be loved and lauded—praised by critics and recommended by fans—then it needs to be something special.

So that’s a good place to start.  Find a game design or concoct a prototype that really sings.  Uncover an experience that people want to have again and again.  Craft a challenge that is novel, engaging, and dynamic.  That’s easier said than done, and there’s a whole universe of useful information out there about how to design a game that people love. But that’s not where we’ll swim in this particular post. 

We here at Bitewing Games did not have to cook up a mechanical meal of play for our debut publications.  Nor did we have to worry about another typical task of publishing—specifically the development and polishing of a design. That’s because we were provided a menu of fresh and fully developed entrees from a master chef, namely Reiner Knizia.  Our only dietary restrictions for menu options were to stay within the parameters of “a small-box game that is quick to teach, easy to get anybody into, fast to play, and addictively replayable.”  And the culinary card-game artist certainly provided on that front.

Dr. Knizia and his team presented us with seven card game prototypes that were a mixture of entirely new concepts and reimagined designs.  The presentation of each game was nothing fancy… simply a game title, a list of components, a paragraph or two describing the gameplay, and a handful of prototype images.  Yet this luxury buffet didn’t need any fancy dressings… the games speak for themselves.

That doesn’t mean we salivated at all of the proposals.   From the get-go, some designs felt like they were targeting the wrong audience for our brand.  Others had us skeptical of their potential.  Yet a few shined with a spark of promise within their descriptions.  We decided to try five of the seven prototypes, and away we went… printing off paper cards and tokens to test on willing guinea pigs including nearby family members and gaming friends.

From the depths of this intensive testing emerged three card games—loved by both casual and hobbyist gamer alike.  These prototypes were specifically:

Hot Goods: A newer bluffing and bribing game of alcohol smuggling only ever published in Germany and Japan in 2019

Mafiosi: a sharper, more strategic reimplementation of an older family game known as Rooster Booster

Hot Lead: a brand-new push-your-luck auctioning game from the designer of some of the best auctioning games in the world

Yet we couldn’t just love to play these designs…. We had to have a passionate vision for what they could become.  With my educational background in Business Administration, I’ve naturally found myself applying business tools and fundamentals to more abstract and creative processes including game design and development.  So of course, I couldn’t help but run a SWOT Analysis on Reiner’s most promising designs to see if we could chart a clear path to publishing these games through Kickstarter.  This analysis wasn’t just a right of passage… it became our publishing blueprint.

I’ve already delved deep into an explanation of the SWOT Analysis and how it applies to the board game industry on a recent episode of the Board Game Design Lab Podcast.  But to put it simply: SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats, and these four categories can be applied to even a Reiner Knizia prototype to evaluate internal and external factors that can determine its value and potential.  This tool is a great way to take a step back and get both a broad perspective and a laser focus on everything that matters most about the subject.

So to offer an example of how that all actually works, here is my SWOT analysis for the prototype called “Hot Goods:”

The strengths of this prototype included its wide player count (3-8 players), no downtime (everyone is always participating as either traveler or border guard), simple and engaging gameplay, and a solid smuggling and bribing theme that shines through the experience.

The weaknesses of this prototype included confusion from how the rules were explained (at least in the English translation of the German version), a muted look to the overall presentation, and a game length that had the potential of going up to 60 minutes which is way too far beyond our target of 20 minutes.

One major opportunity for this prototype was something that I had already stored in the back of my mind from my own game design brainstorming sessions: specifically a game featuring soda and bottle caps.  Despite the colorful inspiration and flavorful experiences that soda provides, despite the collectable clackitiness that comes with bottle caps, I had never encountered a soda-themed game that really stuck within the industry.  Another opportunity was certainly the stylish artist we had in mind, Paul Halkyon, who would obviously thrive best off of a theme with wide artistic potential.

Finally, some threats for this prototype included the need to differentiate it—or communicate the differences from other popular bluffing games including Sheriff of Nottingham and Skull.  Another threat unique to Bitewing Games is that many of our theoretical day-one backers would be friends and family who culturally don’t drink alcohol, thus making it harder to sell them on an alcohol smuggling game.

So, Hot Goods went into this furnace of analysis, and from it emerged Soda Smugglers, a 20 minute card game of fizzy contraband. The star of the production would be the soda brands, the table presence would be an explosion of colorful bottles and bottle caps, and the maximum possible number of rounds would be trimmed down from 16 to 8. I shared the results of our analysis with Reiner Knizia, and he didn’t just approve our vision for the design… he preferred it.  Dr Knizia agreed that our proposed production presented both the best artistic potential and the broadest appeal to the game’s target audience.

Likewise, the prototype Mafiosi evolved into a more potent Pumafiosi while Hot Lead ended up requiring minimal resculpting.  And it was once we had settled upon publishing these three games due to their individual merits and promising possibilities that they became more than just a convenient bundle.  Suddenly, we weren’t just publishing three 20-minute card games… we were publishing three games designed by the illustrious Reiner Knizia that were all related to criminal activities.  We were publishing Reiner Knizia’s Criminal Capers Collection.  In other words, we were publishing something special.

To make things even better, Reiner and his design chops weren’t the only ace up our sleeve.  We also had the dark horse illustrator, Paul Halkyon, who just so happens to have enough imagination, passion, and talent to craft an entire anthropomorphic Criminal Capers universe where these three games can intermingle and coexist.  As project managers, our task was simply to maximize both the functionality of Reiner’s mechanisms and the aesthetics of Paul’s art.  We had to plan a production that makes these card games pop in every possible way.  Now, how the heck do you make a game designed by Reiner Knizia and illustrated by Paul Halkyon pop even more?  I’m glad you asked…

Soda Smugglers:

• Step 1: Charge Paul with the duty of creating several soda brands that straddle the fence between nostalgic familiarity and mesmerizing peculiarity.
• Step 2: Make these fantastical soda brands the star of the production.  I’m talking large, loud, and in-your-face bottles on the cards.  Don’t forget to supplement them with matching life-size bottle caps as well.
• Step 3: Select components and materials that enhance the theme and supplement the fun.
• Etc.

Pumafiosi:

• Step 1:  Give players their own personal family tiles and tokens that have character and lore.  Make them feel an invested tie to their Pumafia family to strengthen the emotional range and potency of the game.
• Step 2:  Give the push-your-luck gameplay a physical form.  Rather than recording gained or lost points or simply earning and returning point tokens for successes and losses, give each player a wealth point card and penalty point card where their glorious triumphs and hilarious failures can be piled high and on full display for all to bask in or envy.
• Step 3:  When your artist displays an unexpected passion or shows intriguing promise within their concept art, fuel that fire with everything you’ve got.  They just might come up with some of their finest work ever.
• Etc.

Hot Lead:

• Step 1: Just step back and let Paul do his thing because he is on a freaking roll now.
• Step 2:  Once the initial designs are in, look at every card and component from a readability perspective.  If anything has the potential to be unclear, make tweaks to the components as needed.  (Good example here: the font of the numbers in Hot Lead has been changed since our latest prototypes.  So the final cards will be even easier to read than what the cards on our Kickstarter campaign page show).
• Step 3: Don’t be afraid to make late improvements to the production.  Our initial deluxe version plans for this game featured metallic foil cards, but with enough time to mull it over we decided that there was too much of a risk of this card material being problematic.  That’s when we came up with an even better idea to turn the promotion tiles into sheriff stars and have the deluxe version feature thick wooden stars that you can proudly stand up on the table and display when earned.
• Etc.

Of course, planning the art direction and components is merely one task covered by a publisher.  We’ve also had to track down a manufacturer who is capable of making these games at top quality and a reasonable price.  Likewise, we’ve scouted out reliable fulfillment and shipping partners amid these hectic COVID shortages.  And crafting the Kickstarter campaign page with a strong marketing message have been monumental efforts unto themselves.  It helps to possess or acquire secondary skills such as graphic design, photography, videography, writing, podcasting, communication, branding, scheduling, budgeting, and more.

If you have the time and drive for the Herculean task of publishing, great!  There are plenty of helpful tools and resources out there to get you the skills you need.  But one aspect that may prove even more difficult is the money.  Years ago, it used to be that you could slap a rough concept on a crowdfunding site and wait until you’ve funded to invest significant money into the project.  Nowadays, there is simply too much competition to thrive with low-effort or low-investment campaigns. Of course, you can skip the crowdfunding route all-together and try your hand at online or direct-to-retail sales, but the minimized risks and maximized marketability of crowdfunding is usually too good to ignore.

From the beginning, we knew we wanted to make a big splash with our first campaign.  Time is too precious for us to simply inch-worm our way through the early publishing years before we can ramp up to more ambitious publications.  We’ve already got 7 total games lined up to publish with a hunger to add even more to our plans!  From game 1, we want our backers and customers to understand that we mean business when it comes to publishing gorgeous, fantastic games.  

Thus, we’ve invested nearly the cost of our funding goal to get this business and this first project up and running.  If you intend to assemble a team of experts to design and develop exceptional games, bring them to life with stunning art, engineer custom plastic components, find interested gamers across the World Wide Web, produce the games with premium precision, and deliver them to doorsteps around the world, then you better be ready to invest the finances required to enlist this team plus the time required to direct them.

It’s a rollercoaster, to say the least.  And tomorrow, we finally reach the starting line.

The Kickstarter Campaign for Reiner Knizia’s Criminal Capers Collection runs from August 10th through September 2nd! We need your help to make these games a reality. Please consider pledging your support so we can 1) send you these excellent games once they are manufactured, 2) continue to provide you with juicy board game content through our blog/podcast/Youtube/etc., and 3) publish even more exciting games in the future!

Article written by Nick Murray. Outside of practicing dentistry part-time, Nick has devoted his remaining work-time to collaborating with the world’s best designers, illustrators, and creators in producing classy board games that bite. He hopes you’ll join Bitewing Games in their quest to create and share experiences that, much like a bitewing x-ray, provide a unique perspective and refreshing interaction.

The post How to Publish a Board Game — A Criminal Capers Collection Publishing Diary appeared first on Bitewing Games.

These past few weeks, my family has been bracing ourselves for our cross-country move to sunny Arizona.  As everybody knows, July is the perfect time of year to move there… for anyone looking to be baked by Mother Nature.  

If there’s anything that is just as reliable as as a hot summer in Arizona, perhaps it would be my enjoyment of a solid auctioning game.  There are a surprising number of ways that bidding and auctions can be incorporated into a board game, and I’ve had a blast exploring this entire spectrum of possibilities over the years.

In celebration of our own auctioning games launching on Kickstarter next month that are designed by the master Auctioneer himself, Reiner Knizia, I thought it fitting to explore the many games which have fostered my love for this genre.  The notable titles below are huge reasons why we loved auctioning game Hot Lead and quasi-auctioning game Pumafiosi enough to publish them ourselves.

Rather than rank these bidding games in order from my most to least favorite, I decided it would be more fun to award my favorites by category and type.  Hopefully these categories help you to find a new great game that would fit in perfectly with your collection…

Meanest Auctioning Game

The Estates

The Estates wins this category by a country mile… or maybe a city block?  You can’t possibly prepare a newcomer for the lurking savagery of the colorful, blocky Estates.  What starts out as innocent one-time around auctions to place out pleasant building blocks onto city plots rapidly crumbles into nasty maneuvers and cold-blooded tactics. 

Players can have their hopes dashed when their tall, valuable tower is covered and reclaimed by another player.  But even worse is the calculated sabotage of an entire row that contains your most valuable investments.  When the game ends, any incomplete rows transform from positive points to negative points.  And if I don’t have any personal investments on a particular row, then you better believe that’s my number one target. 

The Estates can go so far as to see the entire board fall into ruin with the player who earns the least negative points claiming the blood-soaked victory.

Honorable Mentions

• Age of Steam
• Tammany Hall

Best Large Group Auctioning Game

Medici

Auctioning games typically take a “the more, the merrier” approach, and perhaps nowhere is this more true than Reiner Knizia’s Medici.  Up to six players bid with their precious points on goods to fill their ships.  More players leads to more competition on the board and for the precious cargo, and navigating this wild journey is all kinds of fun, especially at a full table.  It’s these kinds of auctioning designs that often blur the line between strategy game and party game.

Honorable Mentions

• For Sale
• The Estates
• Skull

Best Small Group Auctioning Game

Biblios

There are quite a few auctioning games that play well at 3 players, but there are very few that play best at 3 and well at only 2.  I would argue that Reiner Knizia’s Hot Lead and Pumafiosi are strong upcoming contenders in this category, but for now Biblios is one of the few titles that excels within small game groups.  The reasons why it made my Top 10 Filler Games are the very same reasons why it’s such a great auctioning game.  And every time I’m with one or two other gamers looking for a fun, quick romp, Biblios is always an easy pick.

Best Game with just a Hint of Auctioning

Oath, Sidereal Confluence

These two mammoth games are like melting pots of all kinds of tasty mechanisms, and one of their shared flavors is that of auctioning.  

In Oath, these auctions take the form of claimed banners with either favor or secrets that pile high on them.  Both banners are frequently critical to the victor’s success, and the main way to reclaim them is through outbidding the current stack that the owner used to claim them.  Of course, you can also just simply sidestep the auctioning all together and bring in your war bands to steal them by force, but that can often be an even trickier route to take.

Sidereal Confluence’s auctions are one of the few mechanisms that breaks up the loud, lively simultaneous negotiation that makes up core of this game.  Yet, like Oath, this mechanism is not to be dismissed, as earning the right research or technology card with a strong bid of ship tokens can mean the difference between victory and defeat.

Best Looking Auctioning Game

Modern Art

Huh.  A game about buying and selling art is the best looking auctioning game.  Go figure.  Of course, I’m not counting Oath as an official auctioning game for most of these categories or it would just win everything, including this one.  I’m just surprised that this category wasn’t more contested.  Going through all of the possible options, it seems that most auctioning games are pretty average looking, or the art is nice but the generic theme brings it down, but at least there are a few notably exceptional box covers mixed in. At any rate, Modern Art is a pleasure to lay out and look at thanks to its large, diverse art cards and wooden gavel.

Honorable Mentions

• Irish Gauge
• Age of Steam: Deluxe Edition
• Skull

Best All-Around Auctioning Game

Modern Art

Back-to-back victories for Modern Art!  If you know anything about it, you should have seen this game being a strong performer on my list from a mile away.  That’s because Modern Art possesses FOUR different types of auctions that keep each session saturated with bombastic bidding from start to finish.  It’s also designed by Reiner Knizia himself, who practically has a trademark on auctioning mechanisms.  I’ve already spoken plenty about Modern Art, as this one earned a spot among my Top 10 Knizia Games and Top 50 Board Games of All Time lists.

Honorable Mentions

• Amun-Re
• For Sale

Most Unique Auctioning Game

Hibachi, Q.E., Cyclades, Downforce

That’s right, this one is a four-way tie for me!  Hibachi, Cyclades, and Downforce all earned their way onto this category because they mix auctioning with something else entirely to make a truly distinct experience.  

Hibachi (or the original version, Safranito) is a dexterity set-collection game of tossing your poker chips facedown onto a board.  Once the chips are out, they are flipped face up and function as bidding tokens for the actions spaces that they landed on.  I’m eager to try out the new Hibachi when the kickstarter fulfills soon.

Cyclades is a member of the classic Matagot area control trilogy composed of Kemet, Cyclades, and Inis.  This one mixes auctioning, in the form of offerings to the gods, with area control where the player who wins an auction for a particular god earns their blessing and executes their category of actions.

Downforce is a modernized version of a racing game originally designed by Wolfgang Kramer.  Players will place bets on cars as they seek to help give their own racers the edge.  But the way you earn a car is through bidding on them at the start of the game.  Whatever amount you pay for your winning bids will be subtracted from your score at the end.

The final auctioning game that feels refreshingly unique, Q.E., doesn’t need any fancy mechanical hybridization tricks to be here.  In fact, it even takes some inspiration from Reiner Knizia’s classic High Society in the way that its highest cumulative bidder is eliminated from victory at the end.  Yet the reason it still feels extremely unique is because players are allowed to bid any amount from zero to infinity.  If that piques your interest, then Kyle sums up the rest of the game nicely in his 6-minute review.

Best New(ish) Auctioning Game

Nidavellir

I recently shared how Nidavellir won me over with its novel coin bidding and upgrading system despite the rest of the design playing things a little too safe.  Yet as I looked back over the past few years, I was surprised to find that nothing else tops it among the newly released titles of this genre.  Most of my top picks are over 3 years old, and many are even decades old.  So if you’re looking for the freshest auctioning game around, you can’t go wrong with the dwarf-infused Nidavellir.  

Best Auctioning Game I Haven’t Played (Yet)

Keyflower, The Great Zimbabwe

On my shelf of opportunity and among my preorders are the legendary designs Keyflower and The Great Zimbabwe, respectively.  These are two games I anxiously await the chance to play, as Keyflower ranks highly across the board from the many trusted hobbyists I follow while The Great Zimbabwe appears to be a solid step up from our household favorite Splotter game, Bus.  I’m very much looking forward to bidding with workers in Keyflower and cows in The Great Zimbabwe.

Honorable Mentions

• Dream Factory
• Container

Most Regret-Filled Auctions

Age of Steam

No game makes you feel worse for over-spending in the auctions or under-spending with your bid than the legendary Age of Steam by Martin Wallace.  That’s because bidding determines the turn order for the rest of the round, and even going one turn too late can mean the difference between making a lucrative route or delivery and being royally screwed by your opponents.  To make matters worse, if you don’t plan and budget your money with the meticulous care of Ebenezer Scrooge, then you can quickly find yourself plummeting back down the income track to bankruptcy and elimination.

Honorable Mentions

• El Grande
• The Estates
• High Society

Best Auctioning Game of Chicken

Condottiere, Skull, Taj Mahal

We’ve got another multi-way tie here between Condottiere, Skull, and Taj Mahal.  If you’re not familiar with the term “game of chicken,” I typically imagine two drivers speeding their cars toward each other, waiting for the other to be the first to “chicken” out by veering off course before a deadly collision.  That’s basically what these three games feel like, and I love ‘em for it.

Condottiere is the perfect card game for feigning your intentions and bluffing your hand as you play in a series of battles over individual regions.  Yet if that’s not sneaky enough for you, then Skull is bluffing distilled down to its purest form.  It’s another one that earned a place among my top filler games as it perfectly blends bluffing and bidding into a hilarious romp.  Yet for those looking for a fully fledged, strategic board game, no big box game does chicken better than the tense auctions of Reiner Knizia’s Taj Mahal.  We can only hope that another publisher picks this one up and reprints soon.

Honorable Mentions

• High Society
• For Sale

Best Shared Incentive Auctioning Game

Irish Gauge, Chicago Express, Modern Art, The Estates

Auctioning mechanisms and shared incentive gameplay go together like peanut butter and jelly.  Except I’m allergic to peanuts, and I prefer my jelly on warm toast, not cold bread… 

Whatever, it’s fine.  Here we have four games that band players together as easily as they tear them apart across evil auctions and engaging gameplay.  Interestingly, all four of these games see players selecting the item to auction off on their turn from a range of options.  Typically, you want to see some of your opponents invested in the same things as you to help protect those investments for external colluders.  The key is to benefit more from all those shared investments than anyone else.

Best Overall Auctioning Game

Ra

This list would be automatically disqualified if it didn’t feature the legendary Ra among its rankings.  It’s difficult to describe exactly how Ra achieves the pinnacle of auctioning games, but perhaps that’s related to the fact that it’s also a difficult game to acquire (at least until its inevitable reprint). 

The thing that makes Ra stand above the rest is the dynamic tension it provides thanks to its irresistible push-your-luck + auctioning combo within Knizia’s signature set collection scoring.  This entrancing, unsolvable beast is light on its feet through its perfect pacing and emergent gameplay.  You almost have to play it to believe it.

Two New Auctioning Games Coming Fresh out of the Oven

Hot Lead, Pumafiosi

Believe it or not, master Auctioneer Reiner Knizia still isn’t finished riffing on one of his favorite mechanisms.  When he presented to us a wide variety of fresh, unpublished card games for our consideration, we were delighted to discover these particular designs.  Hot Lead and Pumafiosi both hit the spot as 20-minute capers perfect for a casual family gathering or a hobbyist filler activity.  Even after all the great auctioning games I’ve explored, I’ve found plenty of reasons to love the distinct auctioning twist that Knizia has given to these two games.

In Hot Lead, players participate in sealed bidding by using the 11 card hand they start with.  Similar to the second phase of For Sale, players select a card from their hand, place it face down on the table, reveal their cards simultaneously, and earn a specific reward from the middle depending on what everyone else bid.  Yet in Hot Lead, the low cards in your hand are just as valuable as the middle and high ones!  That’s because the highest bidder doesn’t lay claim the most valuable reward.  Rather, they simply lay claim to the card that is positioned closest to deck in the column of displayed cards.

Hot Lead also features the tasty combination of push-your-luck and auctioning that fans of Ra have come to love.  Of course players want to win the higher value cards on display for their inherent points, but the juicier prize lies within the formation of sets of exactly three cards of the same type.  You see, a set of three cards of the same type represents enough evidence collected on one criminal organization, perfect for convicting them for 10 bonus points at the end of the game.  The only problem is that once a fourth card of that type is collected, you’ve investigated too aggressively and scare the criminals underground, losing yourself all four cards of that type!

What results is a game of reading your opponents’ minds—predicting which evidence cards they are hungry for and what numbers they will bid with—in order to claim the right evidence for yourself and force the wrong evidence onto your opponents.  It’s a roller coaster of a game that punches way above its simple rules and zippy playtime, and we can’t wait for you to enjoy it as well.

While Hot Lead is unquestionably the auctioning game of Reiner Knizia’s Criminal Capers Collection, Pumafiosi offers its own interesting combination of quasi-bidding and quasi-trick taking.  I say quasi because each round sees participants playing one card from their hand face-up to the table in clockwise order with the second highest card winning the trick or auction or whatever you want to call it.  Why the second highest, you ask?  Because Pumafia members don’t want to stick their necks out too far or they’ll end up in prison or dead.

The winner of each round takes their winning card and uses it to claim a point-scoring step on the Pumafia Hierarchy.  The catch is that those points won’t be scored until the end of the game, and opponents can claim your spot and knock your card down by playing higher value cards on that same step.  The twist that really makes you second-guess where to stake your claim in the Hierarchy is the fact that every step you get knocked down earns you negative penalty points in addition to the shrinking Hierarchy points.

We are now less than a month away from launching the Kickstarter campaign for Reiner Knizia’s Criminal Capers Collection, and we need your help to bring these games to life.  We here at Bitewing Games do not currently have the luxury of bringing these games direct to retail.  Our only hope is that those who share in our passion for juicy auctioning games, for clever Knizia designs, for thoughtful productions and a striking table presence, will also share in our vision for the Criminal Capers Collection.

If you would like to support Bitewing Games for the meaningful content we share, for the refreshing games we are crafting, and for the exciting plans we have in store, then the best thing you can do is subscribe to our newsletter or social media channels of your preference, prepare for our August Kickstarter, and share this upcoming campaign with anyone and everyone who may be interested.

Thanks for your support.  And please share with us your favorite auctioning games, especially the ones that were left off this list!  I’m always hungry for more of that good stuff…

Article written by Nick Murray. Outside of practicing dentistry part-time, Nick has devoted his remaining work-time to collaborating with the world’s best designers, illustrators, and creators in producing classy board games that bite. He hopes you’ll join Bitewing Games in their quest to create and share experiences that, much like a bitewing x-ray, provide a unique perspective and refreshing interaction.

The post Top Auctioning Board Games appeared first on Bitewing Games.

Note: This post will be particularly engaging for those who are interested or involved in the creation of board games (publishing, designing, etc.), so if you’d rather just skip to the big Reiner Knizia news then feel free to jump down below!

It’s hard to resist the allure of a good bundle.  Whether it’s a $5 box from Taco Bell, Super Mario 3D All-Stars for Nintendo Switch, or an all-inclusive vacation on a cruise ship, the concept of getting everything you want or need all in one convenient, discounted place is a classic, universal marketing tool.  It can also be the world’s most annoying spam message when companies like Spectrum or AT&T can’t take a hint that I DON’T WANT YOUR OVERPRICED CABLE TV SERVICES WITH MY INTERNET, NO MATTER HOW MANY TIMES YOU SEND ME A FLIPPING LETTER ABOUT IT.  NOW GET OFF MY BACK!

Bundles also have their place in the board game industry, whether it’s the Big Box version of a game such as Hansa Teutonica with its expansions or a collection of packs that are part of game system like the Dice Throne Battle Chest featuring every fighter within a single container.  When done right, these types of bundles typically appeal to me thanks to the convenience and savings in cost and space that they provide.  Yet there is one type of bundle that I’ve been thinking about lately far more than any other.  This is the multi-product Kickstarter campaign.

Some notable examples of these types of bundles include campaigns such as BoardGameTables’ GPS, Sequoia, and Mountain Goats, or their more recent Factory Funner, Bear Raid, and Ghosts of Christmas.  Final Frontier Games recently wrapped up a pretty campaign of their own with games Solani + The Girl Who Made the Stars.  Grail Games just concluded their Reiner Knizia & Vincent Dutrait collaboration with Whale Riders the board game and Whale Riders the card game (stay tuned for my thoughts on those two next week).  Meanwhile, micro-game publishers including Oink Games and Button Shy have also run such campaigns featuring multiple of their small, charming productions in one place.

But the mere existence and seeming increase of these bundled campaigns hasn’t been the reason they’ve been on my mind.  Not even the fact that I’ve backed multiple of these very bundles is why we’re chatting about this today.  Rather, they’ve served as excellent case studies for my own publishing plans.  And while viewing these bundles through the lens of a customer, designer, and publisher, I’ve formed some strong opinions in the process that will serve to guide my own journey down this publishing path.  For those interested, we’ll be diving deeper into those opinions here and now.  Following that, I have some big and exciting changes to announce regarding our own upcoming bundle of three 20-minute games.

But first, let’s jump back to where this bundle all started for Bitewing Games, specifically with my design Social Grooming.  This title was born out of a fleeting thought: “What if there was a negotiation game where everybody but you knew what was on the card you were trying to trade away?”  The mechanism of negotiation typically features trading of fully known goods with somewhat opaque values.  For example, a single cube is only worth trading for in Sidereal Confluence if you can acquire all of the other cubes required to run a converter, and there’s no guarantee this can all be accomplished.  The value of a specific lot in Chinatown depends on who, if anyone, has ownership of adjacent lots and what businesses are established on them and how quickly those businesses can be developed.  Yet these cubes or lots or businesses are out in the open for all to see and consider, and the act of simultaneous negotiation is always a lively and engaging affair.  But we found through its development that Social Grooming offered a compelling twist to this formula by introducing trust, bluffing, and gut-valuations to the proceedings.

Over time, we had ourselves a consistently satisfying and widely crowd-pleasing game perfect for a quick entertainment snack in both small and large group settings.  Our next step was clear: Let’s get this gem published!  Yet that is much easier said than done, especially when games of this scale make a much smaller splash in the industry compared to sprawling, miniature-packed productions.

We found ourselves in a bit of a new publisher’s paradox: The smart thing to do is start with a small, low-risk project such as Social Grooming and ramp up the complexity of our campaigns from there, yet the value prospect and marketing noise of a single, small card game from an unknown publishing company is like a fart in the wind of the board game industry.  How’d you like to pay a stranger for a small game that you won’t receive for months and you can’t be sure you’ll enjoy until you actually receive it?  Oh, and by the way, we’ll need you to also pay nearly the cost of the game itself in shipping.  Sounds like a smart investment, right?

Well amid my marketing research, I noticed that small games and party games typically don’t perform as well as eye-catching plastic productions or complicated mechanical creations.  Our design is both small and party-ish, so not your typical great fit for Kickstarter.  A large gorgeous box brimming with challenging campaigns and chunky creatures is always going to make the biggest splash in crowdfunding.  So how to you provide value, attract attention, and establish credibility within a first-time creator’s campaign that features none of those things?

And here we circle back to the prospect of a bundle.  Shipping fees are much more palatable when the box contains two or three games instead of just one.  Party games and filler games make a bigger splash when combined into a harmonic chorus of discounted delight.  Unknown publishers are much more trustworthy when they collaborate with trusted brands.  This ultimately brought us to Three 20-Minute Games featuring two designs from Reiner Knizia and the illustrations of Paul K. Halkyon.  Yet there’s been much behind-the-scenes work involved to get us to this point…. Testing and evaluating many unpublished designs from Dr. Knizia, forming a production and marketing plan for each game, investing in licensing, marketing, illustration, and graphic design, building a pre-campaign crowd, finding the right manufacturer, and much more. 

I’ve seen some multi-product Kickstarter campaigns attempt to cobble completely unrelated titles together.  I’ve noticed some publishers attempt to spread a single marketing budget across multiple productions or shine a single spotlight on multiple games at once.  Overall, these campaigns and bundles have usually performed just fine based on the brand strength and fanbase of the company itself or the merits of each individual game, but one can’t help but wonder if these games didn’t reach their full personal potential.

We at Bitewing Games feel that each game in a bundle deserves its own spotlight and marketing plan.  Gamers have come to rely on previews, playthroughs, and more to learn about and get excited for each game they decide to add to their collection.  Nobody wants to clutter their shelves with more stuff simply because it was a good deal.  The challenge of running a bundled campaign is that a publisher must sell a single backer on two or three games rather than one.  The means twice or three times the campaign page content without losing attention or breeding impatience.  Just like in game design, the key is to cut the fluff, maintain the focal point, and streamline the encounter.

This becomes a much easier hurdle to clear if the bundled games share much in common.  Same price, same game length, similar complexity, similar player counts, similar themes, similar art styles, similar box sizes, similar design philoshophies, etc., etc.  Suddenly, I don’t have to firehose you with three versions of the same necessary information.  Rather, I can lay it all out at once and hit three birds with a single stone.  Yet, on the flip side, if the games are too similar, then what’s the point in owning all of them?  That’s where the big, bright spotlights come in: highlighting the unique and interesting features of each carefully selected game. 

The brand and messaging of our bundle up to this point has focused in on the commonalities of my own Social Grooming and Reiner Knizia’s Soda Smugglers and Pumafiosi.  We’ve emphasized that they are all 20-minute games with simple rules, clever depth, and gorgeous art from Paul Halkyon.  Things have gone great with this plan, but we recently received a news bombshell from the team over at Knizia Games.  To give you some context, back when we were evaluating all of the unpublished games that Reiner had pitched to us, there was a third design that we had also fallen in love with and wanted to publish alongside Social Grooming, Soda Smugglers, and Pumafiosi.  Before we had the chance to lock in to the licensing rights, we suddenly heard back that it was no longer up for grabs (another publisher had belatedly decided they wanted to make the game).  While we were disappointed with that news, we were thrilled to have these other three games to bring to life and share with the world.  Fast forward several months, and that’s when the bombshell arrived: Reiner’s third awesome game was dropped by the other publisher and is now back on the market.

So the answer was simple:  Just lump this fourth game into our upcoming bundle because “the more the merrier,” right?  Not so fast…  the leap from a 3-game bundle to a 4-game bundle is a much wider gap than it initially sounds.  That means increasing the bundle price by a whopping 33%.  That means juggling each potential backer’s attention with four games rather than three.  At some point you have to draw the line, and four games felt like we were crossing that line.  Yes, we had considered lumping all four of them together initially (back when Reiner first pitched his games to us), but a few months of thorough planning made it immediately clear that a 4-game bundle would do more harm than good.  But that didn’t mean we had to let the golden opportunity of Reiner’s third game pass us by…

There was another option we could consider… one of shifting things around a bit in the old publishing pipeline.  You see, our second Kickstarter campaign was always planned to feature a unique party game.  Despite the track record of party games on Kickstarter, we’ve always felt that this one had a little extra something special to stand out from the crowd.  But as I theorized earlier, party games can make a bigger splash when combined into a harmonic chorus of discounted delight.  And it just so happens that Social Grooming is a party-style game as well.  Plus it shares the same designer (myself), the same design philosophy, a wide player count, a similar complexity, similar light-hearted fun, and highly social interactions.  Most importantly, these games target the same audience, making them highly compatible for a Kickstarter bundle.  We must apologize to any who have been eagerly awaiting the chance to play Social Grooming, but please stay tuned for its debut in the Bitewing Games Party Pack Kickstarter campaign coming in 2022.

Perhaps the even bigger benefit to this change would be the strengthened branding and focus of our first Kickstarter campaign.  Not only do we get to publish another fantastic game, but now these titles would share the same designer and a similar theme.  No longer is this bundle simply “Three 20-Minute Games,” it is now Reiner Knizia’s Criminal Capers Collection.

Big News: Introducing Reiner Knizia’s Criminal Capers Collection

The post Lessons Learned About Kickstarter Bundles + Big Reiner Knizia News! appeared first on Bitewing Games.

10 Games, 2 Saturdays, 1 Mission: Play until our brains are fried. Nick shares his experiences and impressions of these 10 games hand-picked for maximum entertainment and played over the course of two gaming marathons.

These past two Saturdays consisted of birthday celebrations of the best kind, where I and another friend chose to forgo physical birthday presents in favor of something even better…. TIME.  Time to step away from the responsibilities of life and do nothing but play tabletop games all day long.  Fortunately for us, our small gaming group had time as well, and thus we dove headfirst into two meaty Saturdays of seemingly endless fun.

The first Saturday started with one of my top 15 games of 2020, Beyond the Sun.  Despite me sitting at the table with the board facing the opposite direction, something that is usually relentlessly annoying for a very wordy game board, I was able to manage just fine.  

Beyond the Sun was perhaps the favorite game of most players that entire day.  The area control board of planets was hotly contested, more so than I’ve ever seen.  Some planets with a colonization requirement of only 3 ships were seeing massive armadas (multiple ships tallying up to 7 or 8 or even more) occupying their territory with a fierce death grip.

It was difficult to ignore the allure of that half of the game and focus heavily on the tech tree because most of the public objectives and many great bonuses incentivized colonization and control.  It made for a thrilling and intense game where all came away fully satisfied with the start of the day.

The next game on the menu was Reiner Knizia’s train game, Stephenson’s Rocket, featuring the Eastern US expansion map.  I’m usually a train station kind of guy, throwing them down generously and early to get a leg up on scoring points when locomotives connect to rail towns.  But with this map, there is an even higher scoring potential for industry investments, so I decided to mix up my primary strategy.

The center of the board quickly became crowded with my opponents moving locomotives, gaining stocks, and throwing down train stations.  I opted to stick to the perimeter of the board, but with less help from others to get things rolling, and my best rail company quickly getting rammed into an inescapable corner by a devious rival, I found myself falling behind in the early game.

I had to pivot my strategy if I wanted to salvage the slow start.  So I did what all the best train games let you do: I leeched the prized stocks from players who were in too deep to let me tank their rail companies.  The interesting thing about having a heavy station strategy—where you want to connect to your stations and towns for maximum scoring—is that opponents can take advantage of your obvious intentions.  

If I start steering a locomotive away from somebody else’s next big payday, they must begin burning off stock to veto my chosen direction and keep their plans from… derailing.  With only a few turns, I can overtake the lead for a company’s stock and then let my opponents handle the rest of my dirty work, because now every city and town they connect to will serve to score me massive points as well.  This strategy worked very well for me to the point where I made a huge point rush in the second half.  Though I didn’t win, I was satisfied with my diabolical takeover.

Speaking of hostile takeovers, our next game was old reliable Lords of Vegas.  This is a game that requires a higher luck tolerance than most plus a generous appreciation of the thematic intricacies of the design.  When I first realized that a game titled Lords of Vegas has inherent risk and gambling integrated into every action available to players, I discovered my undying love for this box of bombastic fun.  It had been seven months since my previous play, and this long-awaited reunion made our play all the sweeter.

Of course, I refuse to play this game with the provided Monopoly-like paper money, opting instead for Roxley’s Iron Clays.  While it looks and sounds like Monopoly, Lord of Vegas deserves to be held to higher standard thanks to its clever, cutthroat strategic space.  Our play was riddled with the usual casino dynasties and huge momentum swings, and it was an enjoyable ride to take with friends.  Despite our best efforts, we weren’t able to bring down the 7-tile mammoth controlled by the black color.

Next, we leaped from one end of the luck spectrum to the other by digging into Hansa Teutonica Big Box.  I can’t get enough of this classic, German-style Euro design.  It never ceases to amaze us how each play has an extremely different feel from the last.  This time, the most popular upgrade (gaining more actions per turn) was left wide open for me to exploit in the early game.  I quickly threw down a trading post at this site and milked it for all I could while leaping to the maximum 5 action upgrade surprisingly early in the game.

We also saw another player make a great run for the coast-to-coast connection that scored them 7 points in the late game.  I caught onto their intentions and did my best to be a thorn in their side by throwing down trading posts and merchants along their path.  It turned out to be a wise play on my part, as I ended up stealing away first place from that player by only one point.

We followed up this cube placing extravaganza with a game that is fresh out of the oven: Bristol 1350.  This is a plague-themed social deduction race from my friends over at Facade Games.  I previously playtested and wrote a preview for this game, and it’s great to see the final form that Bristol 1350 has taken.  A noteworthy change that I immediately noticed in the final rules is that nobody starts out with the plague during setup, as I remember that certain players could and did start with the plague in previous versions.

Yet with what felt like a rare stroke of chance, the very first cart mingle of the game resulted in myself and my cart-mates all contracting the plague, though we didn’t know at that time that all three of us had succumbed to the same fate .  From there, we fanned out and did our best to sabotage the innocent victims of the other two carts.  

Despite our best efforts, another cart of seemingly healthy passengers raced ahead of the rest and escaped town to our sadistic disappointment.  They each revealed their secrets… one was healthy, as was the second, as was the—NOPE!  The third passenger in the cart had contracted the plague during a seemingly harmless mingle long before the finish line, and he strung his teammates along the rest of the way before brutally stabbing them in the back!  It was quite the sight to behold.

At this point, the board game marathon was winding down, so we found it fitting to play one last quick, simple game…. and that game was Social Grooming.  Social Grooming is one of the three designs in our upcoming Kickstarter bundle launching later this year.  While the other two games were cooked up by master chef, Reiner Knizia, this one is our own in-house design.  

To play Social Grooming, I dealt out eleven cards to each player to form their own face-down deck.  Then, much like the popular card game, Hanabi, we each drew one card off the top of our decks and held them facing away from ourselves so we could see everybody’s cards except our own.  This is where the madness begins, as we immediately proceeded to offer the cards in our hands—something we knew absolutely nothing about—to others at the table.  

Similar to one of our family favorites, Chinatown, players participate in a simultaneous negotiation phase.  Yet negotiation becomes all the more tricky when you don’t know how valuable your own goods are.  The key is to pick up on subtle cues and reactions while downplaying other people’s cards.  When you see somebody’s eyes go as wide as flying saucers at the sight of your own card, you start to get a hunch for what you could be holding.  And the good news is that you are allowed to keep your card instead of trading it if you feel it is valuable.

Yet value is partially contextual in Social Grooming.  Everybody wants a 10 value card, as it is the highest point card in the game, but nobody wants two 10 value cards, because pairs will cancel each other out during scoring.  The same card can be both very good for one player and very bad for another.  And when you are able to keep tabs on what cards are currently bad for other players, there’s a whole nother layer to this tricky trading where you can bluff your reactions to an opponent’s card in an attempt to convince them to keep a bad one.

I’ll save further details for a future designer diary, but our session crowned two joint victors after three rounds of play.  I found it quite funny that one special card type plagued my collection at the end of one round yet it was the only card I so desperately wanted and could not attain in the next round.

The following Saturday’s marathon was kicked off with a game I received for Christmas and finally got around to playing for the first time: Galaxy Trucker.  In board game years, Galaxy Trucker is getting to be quite the old-timer, yet my first play of it proved that it still provides a highly unique and enjoyable experience.

The simultaneous, chaotic, real-time spatial puzzle of the first phase paired with a bombastic push-your-luck second phase makes for a perfect blend of entertainment.  I dig how the game ramps up in craziness over the course of three rounds and you’re not completely out of the game after a rough beginning or middle act.  I had always heard that this was a game about clinging on for dear life as your hodgepodge space ship gets blasted to smithereens, yet I got cocky after an easy two rounds where my ships suffered hardly a scratch.

Round three was where this wacky space game humbled me.  I quickly built out a flawless left half of my ship before realizing that I had nearly walled off the entire right half of my board.  The final minutes of building consisted of me scrambling to find the only piece that can fit into the one spot that I can even connect anything to, just so I could keep my hopes alive of filling in the many empty spaces still on my board. 

This messy right side of the building phase was merely a foreshadowing of the flight phase, where very early on some nasty pirates arrived and blew off the right side of my ship that I had clumsily cobbled together last-minute.  It’s as if they could see my weak point from a mile away and took a single pot shot to bring the whole thing down.  Needless to say, I had to give up before round three was over so I could recede into a black hole of shame and lick my many wounds.

Brass: Birmingham

Fortunately, I came storming back in our next play of none other than Brass Birmingham.  Brass is a game that never gets old for me, despite my many plays of it.  I’m typically the player who can’t resist the big point pottery tiles, and sure enough, I got two of them out on the board before game end.  In this particular game, the demand for coal far outweighed the supply, so players were frequently forking over five or ten pounds just to get a couple of those precious cubes.  Meanwhile, the beer was bounteous and plentiful until the very last round of the game, where it dried up in an instant, forcing a couple players to pivot on their final plans.  

The thing that gives Brass so much mileage play after play is just how interactive and dynamic the economy is.  My plan to feed the hungry iron market can be completely obliterated when the person right before me cranks out an iron producing tile or builds on the space I was planning to use or spends the coal that I so desperately needed for my turn. 

Designer Martin Wallace understands the importance of turn order, and he wields it with unapologetic brutality in Brass.  Yet a lost opportunity in one area of the market simply means an open door in another area.  Players must be as fluidly adaptive as they are cutthroat in order to thrive in Brass Birmingham.  My many previous experiences with Brass helped me to come out on top in this particular session, and I was able to score the most network and building points in the rail era.

Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy

Yet our group hadn’t quite had enough of that economic savagery, because we next decided to break out the grizzly bear of a box containing Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy.  My faction of choice for this session was the Descendants of Draco, who are buddy-buddy with the imposing ancients.  Ancients are gray ships that show up on the board and take on any player who trespasses on their property.  Yet the Descendants faction has the exclusive privilege of peacefully cohabitating with Ancients and even claiming control of their tiles.  

In the early stages of the game, it can be quite difficult to take out an Ancient, and I used that to my advantage by exploring and churning out as many ancients around me as possible.  I formed an early peace treaty with the Terran Alliance who were immediately to my left (left is a direction in space… right?); yet my insurance policy was the pile of Ancients he would have to bulldoze through if he wanted to reach my precious sectors with a later betrayal.

Meanwhile, I knew the Eridani Empire and the player who controlled them to my immediate right to be an overly aggressive bunch, so I constructed my explored tiles in a way that they didn’t have a single wormhole that would let them through into my territory.  Between a peaceful neighbor and an impenetrable wall, these cleverly constructed defenses quickly lost their coziness when I realized that I now had very few options for scoring points in this space-faring war game.

So I did what any reasonable person would do and bided my time as I piled my biggest and best ships onto the sector that was right next-door to the central GDCS (Galactic Defense Center System) that looks suspiciously similar to the Death Star.  This GDCS is known to Eclipse veterans as a lucrative opportunity for scoring big points and skyrocketing one’s economy.  One must spend several of the game’s 8 rounds preparing to take this centerpiece down.  Yet once a faction does all the hard work of taking out the GDCS and becoming the new occupant of the valuable central tile, they are now at their weakest, making themselves an easy target in the following round for anyone else to pile onto and perform cleanup crew. 

So while I was amassing my glorious space fleet on one side of the GDCS, two other factions—the Planta and the Eridani Empire—were doing the very same thing on other sides the central tile.  Judging by the gnarly blueprints on their ships, I knew I likely wouldn’t survive a showdown against either of them.  My best bet was to take the coward’s way out and backstab the Terran Alliance who had spent all game building 3-point Monoliths on SIX DIFFERENT TILES in their region!  Do not think less of me, for none can resist the allure of such an opportunity.

So with two rounds left to play out, I sent my fleet sprawling deep into Terran Alliance territory, squashing one starbase after another like ants under my space shoes.  And inn the final round, the Eridani Empire sniped both the Planta ships and the GDCS before the fight could even begin with some of the best missile rolls this side of the Lylat System.  They didn’t even break a sweat obliterating the central space and had earned three rare 4-point Reputation tokens by game end.  Yet it was my own Descendants who ultimately reigned supreme after being branded a traitor and stealing away over twenty points worth of tiles and Monoliths from the poor, gullible humans of the Terran Alliance.

Soda Smugglers

Despite Eclipse only being our third game of the day, we had nearly reached our limit for gaming that evening.  Yet the group was gracious enough to play one last 20-minute game that was in need of some playtesting as requested by the one and only Reiner Knizia. 

Like us, Reiner is quite excited to see his games, Soda Smugglers and Pumafiosi, be published with the help of Kickstarter backers, so he’s spent these past few weeks cooking up some stretch goal content for both games.  Due to COVID restrictions, Reiner’s legion of play testers are a bit more limited lately, so he suggested that some further testing on our end wouldn’t hurt.

For a Soda Smugglers stretch goal, Dr. Knizia has crafted an 8-card event deck that is most comparable to the event deck in Quacks of Quedlinburg.  At the start of each round, the Border Police Officer flips one event card and reveals the unique conditions of that turn.  These clever events range from the Police Officer being more lenient toward travelers because it’s their birthday and they are in a good mood, to having a sniffer dog who aids in the search for illegal suitcases because he’s a good boy.  In classic Knizian fashion, these event cards contain minor tweaks to the core gameplay that make for drastically different feeling rounds.  After playing and enjoying the base game many times now, this optional content was a welcome addition to mix up the core formula.  

I made a good run at smuggling my own suitcases of soda over our five rounds, but another crafty opponent adapted well to the different events.  She knew just when it was the right time to either pull the trigger and smuggle piles of soda or resist the temptation and cross with legal luggage, and thus she emerged the Soda Kingpin of the night.  As intended, Dr. Knizia’s upcoming game was a great way to wind our marathon down with some light, simple fun.

So there you have it… Two full Saturdays of board gaming bliss!  Should you find your own small group to safely gather with soon, I highly recommend a similar session of entertainment therapy.  And if you couldn’t tell from my experiences, I highly recommend all of the games mentioned above.  Hopefully you enjoyed these musings as much as I enjoyed sharing them.

Article written by Nick Murray. To follow the above mentioned Social Grooming and Soda Smugglers as they come to Kickstarter, subscribe to our newsletter and follow Bitewing Games on social media!

The post Board Game Birthday Marathon Musings appeared first on Bitewing Games.

Reiner Knizia is perhaps the most prolific board game designer of all time.  The doctor’s work has won so many awards and nominations that it requires a dedicated webpage of ever-growing titles just to keep track of everything.  These awards span a total of THIRTY YEARS now and represent only a small slice of the more than 700 games and books published worldwide.

Reiner’s work ranges from simple, colorful children’s games to sprawling, thinky strategy games, and everything in-between.  But if there’s any common thread that runs through all of his games, it is probably best described by the man himself: 

“What I want to achieve: Simple games, but then the people bring themselves into it. And you see out of the simplicity, a second level of depth. That keeps you playing.”  

Reiner Knizia

Dr. Knizia understands how to boil a game down to its simplest, purest essence while retaining a strong core of player influence and interaction.  In the world of Knizia Games, what often appears to be a shallow puddle from above quickly reveals itself to be a deep, dynamic well beneath the surface.  If there’s anything I’ve observed from the roughly 20 Knizia Games in my collection, it is that there is always more to unfold within even his most basic of designs.

Here at Bitewing Games, we are thrilled at the opportunity to publish and share with the world two more of Reiner’s brilliant designs.  When Dr. Knizia presented these games to us, we experienced firsthand how they fulfill his motto of “Bringing enjoyment to the people.”  As the publisher, we are currently hard a work making these clever games look, feel, and play as amazingly as possibly.  

In celebration of this recent development, I thought it appropriate to share my top 10 Reiner Knizia games.  At the end of this post, I’ll be revealing even more juicy details about the two Knizia Games that will part of our Kickstarter campaign later this year.  So let’s strap in and explore some of the best board games in the industry from the master designer himself…

10. High Society

Now almost 30 years old, High Society is a classic card game that belongs in everybody’s collection.  Players start out with the same hand of cards representing their heaping of wealth that they’ll use to acquire extravagant luxuries through bidding.  The catch is that at the end of the game, whoever spends the most wealth as they flaunt their prized vanities will be cast from High Society due to their relative poverty and eliminated from victory.

What really makes High Society unique is the card play.  Players starting hands of wealth are broken up into eleven cards of varying values–1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 20, and 25–and deciding which cards to play into the auction can be very tricky.  As opponents keep raising the bid on me, I can choose to inch my bid ahead of theirs with my low value cards, but if I win the bid then I won’t have those cards to use in future auctions!  You can very quickly find yourself forced to bid far higher than you want if your only remaining cards are 12, 15, 20, and 25. 

What exactly are you bidding for?  Points, to put it bluntly.  More specifically, there are luxury cards ranging from 1-10.  These are the most straightforward.  The prestige and disgrace cards are where things get hairy.  The three prestige cards will double your score for each one you have in your final winnings.  These cards also serve to trigger the end of the game as they are revealed from the draw pile of sequential auctions, which can often be far sooner or later than you’d like.

The disgrace cards are perhaps my favorite.  These are cards that nobody wants to take, and instead of the highest bidder paying to receive the card, the first person to pass must take it and everyone else pays whatever they have bid up to that point.  These cards either cut your final score in half, force you to trash a hard-earned luxury card, or give you negative 5 points.  

The 2018 version of High Society is perhaps the prettiest, and it can be acquired at a very reasonable price of $15-20.

9. Modern Art

Continuing on with Reiner’s auctioning classics, here we have a richly thematic game of bidding for art that is only as valuable as everybody else thinks it is.  Players act as museums and take turns auctioning off pieces of art by playing a card from their hand.  If another player buys the card, then the auctioneer receives all the money, yet the auctioneer can decide to buy it for themselves and lose that money to the bank.  And money here is the crux of the game, because whoever has the most at the end wins.  

The only reason you’ll want to buy art is if you expect to make a profit on it at the end of each of the four rounds.  But a specific artist’s work is only as valuable as the group determines them to be.  The more one artist’s work is auctioned off in a round, the more valuable their paintings become to own.

Modern Art is a highly interactive experience of players tossing burning matches into several haystacks of opportunity and then scrambling to douse certain stacks with gasoline while smothering others with water depending on personal incentives.  This clever yet simple premise never fails to entertain, and it’s made all the more fun by the fact that there are four different types of auctions that players participate in throughout the game.

8. Blue Lagoon / Through the Desert

This won’t be the last of my “this or that” games on this list, so I’ll prepare you with this caveat:  as a huge Knizia fan, I find all of these options to be must-owns in my collection.  Although they share some similar concepts and mechanisms, these games play out uniquely enough that I couldn’t bear the thought of keeping one and disposing of the other.  If you prefer a more trimmed-down collection, I’ll try to point out the key differences to help you decide which may be the better fit.

Through the Desert is a part of Dr. Knizia’s legendary “Tile-laying Trilogy.”  For those who love having a central, shared, interactive space where players contribute to building things up (usually with tiles) in interesting ways, Reiner’s work is arguably the greatest of all time within this genre.  

With Through the Desert, players are actually placing out plastic camels instead of tiles on the board, and it is sneakily brilliant.  Player turns are as quick and zippy as placing two camels onto empty spaces anywhere on the board.  Yet its the objectives and limitations that make this such a killer experience.

Players will compete to reach waterhole tokens first for exclusive points, touch oases for more points and cut off opponents from reaching the same privilege, build the longest trail of each camel color for end-game points, and section off entire areas for mega scoring.  With all of these juicy carrots dangling one or two spaces away from your camel routes, it becomes agonizing to decide where to send your next camels as you see your opponents snatching these carrots away first.  One must balance claiming short-term gains against telegraphing long-term strategies.

Due to my icy heart, my favorite aspect of this game is forcing opponents into torturous dilemmas like I’m the Joker.  When I see Opponent A telegraph an intention of stealing a token away from Opponent B, I know that Opponent B has every intention of pouncing on that token before Opponent A has the chance to seal the deal.  That’s the exact moment when I telegraph my intention of stealing a different valuable opportunity away from Opponent B.  Now Opponent B must decide which thing they love more, because they can only save one of them on their turn.  Let the writhing begin.  MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAA!!!

Everything I’ve just described about Through the Desert is also provided in the newer design, Blue Lagoon.  Except instead of using camels in the desert you are using native settlers, explorers, and huts in the pacific islands.  Claiming flat points from waterholes is replaced with collecting sets of goods tokens.  Reaching oases is replaced with connecting islands.  Sectioning off areas of sand is replaced with claiming area majorities on islands.  These subtle thematic and mechanical differences make for an equally compelling yet deliciously distinct game.

Both Through the Desert and Blue Lagoon are KILLER options as fast, simple strategy games.  They’re friendly enough to be accessible yet mean enough to be tense and interesting.  Perhaps the ultimate factor of which game you should choose (if not both) is that Blue Lagoon is much cheaper and easier to find in stores.  Either way, don’t pass these golden games up!

7. Lost Cities

Even 22 years on from its initial release, Lost Cities remains one of the absolute best 2-player games that money can buy.  Fast, slick, tense, and addicting, this card game has it all.  Players use a deck of cards containing five colors, each with values 2-10 and three special “handshake” cards.  Each turn they must play a card onto their side, thereby committing to an expedition of that color, or they can discard it onto a shared discard board, then they draw another card to end their turn.  But you can either draw from the deck or take a card that one of you discarded previously.

Committing to an expedition by playing the first card of that color onto your side means that you automatically lose 20 points at the end of the game (traveling isn’t free, you know!).  So you’ll be spending the rest of the game scrambling to add more cards of that color to get yourself out of the hole and into positive points.  The only problem is that you have the play the cards in ascending values, meaning that if you play an 8 on top of 3 then you’ve just given up the chance to play cards 4-7 of that color (that’s 22 points down the drain!).  Even worse, your opponent sees which colors you’ve committed to and knows exactly which cards you’re desperately seeking, so they’ll be clutching onto those cards for as long as humanly possible.

Reiner knows how to do hand management games, and Lost Cities is a textbook example.  With players being forced to play or discard 1 card and then draw 1 card every turn, they’ll quickly find themselves not wanting to play or discard any cards in their hand (yet).  It’s a game of taking calculated risks and making painful sacrifices.

Lost Cities is the chips and salsa of 2-player games.  It’s one that I can recommend to anybody as easily as I can pull it off my shelf for another round of fun.

6. Stephenson’s Rocket

This one feels like the Luna Lovegood of my list.  You know, that oddball game that many people quickly dismiss as awkward and off kilter.  I totally get the polarizing nature of Stephenson’s Rocket.  Harsh and unthematic vetoing, unintuitive scoring, opaque strategies, disrupted player turns, etc.  You’re either gonna love it or hate it.

I, for one, LOVE this game!  It’s got that trademark Knizia tension with a gorgeous production from Grail Games.  Stephenson’s Rocket combines the dynamic stocks and investments of rail games with a hint of Through the Desert tile laying, a dollop of Tigris & Euphrates drama, and a sprinkling of Modern Art auctioning.

Ian O’Toole’s graphic design helps hold it all together by assisting in scoring reminders which are frequently used in our plays of it.  Kudos to Mr. O’Toole for helping this brilliant design reach its full potential.

While I didn’t have the heart to put it higher on this particular list due to its wonky accessibility, I enjoy this one so much that it could easily sneak into my top 25 games of all time next time I rank them.  If you’re a Knizia fan or train game fan, this medium-weight game is a must-try in my book.  If you are looking for a smooth experience with a zippy pace, you may be better off looking into the good Doctor’s more popular games.

5. The Quest for El Dorado

Speaking of smooth experiences, The Quest for El Dorado is arguably the most approachable deck-building game ever designed.  Deck-building is a bit of a foreign ritual to those who aren’t in the know, and Quest for El Dorado makes it crisp as a cucumber.  Players are simply racing through the wilderness to get to El Dorado first.  Their machete cards allow them to pass through the jungle spaces, their paddle cards let them pass through the water spaces, and their money cards let them pass through the village spaces or allow them to buy better cards.

The mechanics and theme cleverly demonstrate the balance of deck building: you can get ahead now and hope to keep the lead with a meager deck, or you can fall behind a bit and invest in a better deck to rocket ahead later.  While it seems like it could get rather repetitive after a few plays (especially with all the cards being used every game), this one has only gotten more intense for us as the competition has become more cutthroat across increasingly trickier maps.

As Shut Up & Sit Down astutely points out in their recent podcast episode, the card market mechanism here brilliantly solves the common issue of unreliability seen in many other deck-builders.  It also injects the genre with far more player interaction thanks to explorers blocking each other’s paths and competing to cross a finish line.

The nearly infinite variety of unique map layouts and the cave bonuses provide for constantly new and engaging experiences.  The fact that this game is so easy to teach (all of the rules are basically on your player board or the cards) makes it even better to put in front of anybody.  I think I like it most at 2-players, where your personal options and strategies really open up between your two meeples.  But it is great fun at all counts from 2-4.

4. Babylonia / Samurai

We’re back with the another game in Knizia’s “Tile-laying Trilogy,” specifically Samurai.  Yet the newer and more widely available Babylonia shares enough in common that it’s worth deciding whether you want one or both.

Both games see all players starting with a hand of five tiles from their identical draw piles.  These tiles are kept face up behind your shield in Samurai or standing up facing you in Babylonia, and when your turn comes around you’ll have to decide which of these secret tiles to place out onto the board.  Generally, you are trying to surround pieces that started on the board with matching symbols from your supply.  So there is a bit of area majority in both games, where once a board piece is surrounded by player tiles, it is awarded to the player who committed the highest total strength of matching tiles.  But already this is where Samurai and Babylonia begin to diverge.

Samurai is a game of staking your claim and seizing opportunities.  Stake your claim on a rice (commerce) caste by committing a rice tile adjacent to it.  Whether you place a low value 2 or a big dog 4, you’ve made it known to all other players that you intend to take that rice caste piece.  If you happen to win more rice caste pieces than everyone else at the end of the game, then you claim one of the three leader tokens to put you in the runnings of winning the game.  As more player tiles go out onto the board, the key to victory becomes to swoop in last second and steal castes away from opponents who thought they had them on lockdown with their early tile majorities.  It’s important to track how many castes you earn relative to your opponents, because you ideally only want one more commerce or religion or military caste than anyone else to claim a leader token… any more and you’ve simply wasted your efforts chasing the wrong type of caste.

Meanwhile, Babylonia has a similar mechanism of claiming city tiles with surrounding tile majorities.  Except everything you do in Babylonia translates to points, and the objective becomes to seek out and steal away the highest scoring opportunities.  There are four main ways to score points in Babylonia, one of which is the Samurai way of claiming city tiles with surrounding majorities.  The others have more of a Through the Desert / Blue Lagoon vibe to them:  Spread out a network of your tiles that connect matching cities to your matching tiles.  Reach and claim crop fields by placing your farmer tokens on top of them.  Place your tiles on spaces that surround Ziggurat structures and score points every time you do so.  To add another layer to the strategy, the player with the majority of tiles surrounding a Ziggurat structure will get to select an exclusive special ability which can help swing the momentum in their favor.

With both of these games, you’ll find yourself endlessly surveying the entire board for the best opportunities to deny others and benefit yourself.  Your secret hand of tiles combined with the ever changing board state will keep you on your toes.  While Samurai keeps its winning leader concealed behind player shields, Babylonia puts them out in the open along a constantly flowing score track.  Samurai emphasizes localized momentum shifts while Babylonia magnifies generalized ripple effects.  Both games are masterclass designs within the tile-laying genre and well worth a play.

3. My City

I’ve already spoken plenty about My City…. How it overcomes my personal bias against low-interaction games.  How it’s one of the greatest polyomino games ever designed.  How it’s one of the slickest legacy games ever and top board games of 2020.  We’ve now completed our 24 episode campaign, and I’m more confident than ever that this is a perfect game for any couple, family, or friends who appreciate an evolving puzzly challenge in a quick-playing, streamlined package.  So go and check out my many thoughts on My City (linked above) to learn more about this 2020 hit.

2. Ra

Despite Reiner’s many excellent auction designs that have come before and since, Ra remains his absolute best.  This one combines constrained bidding with set collection and push-your-luck into a perfect blend of Egyptian joy.  

Sun tokens are dealt out to players and used to bid on valuable tiles.  On your turn, you can either force an auction on the current row of tiles or add another tile to the row by drawing from the huge bag.  When an auction is initiated, each player gets one chance to bid a higher sun token or pass, and the highest bidder spends their sun token and takes the row of tiles.

The hard part is deciding when to cash in and commit your best sun tokens before it’s too late.  Blow your sun tokens too soon and you’ve taken yourself out of the rest of the round’s auctions, and those could end up paying out much better than everything you payed for.  But clutch onto your sun tokens for too long and you may never get to use them!  That’s because certain tiles coming out of the bag will be Ra tiles, and those march the round closer to a premature ending.  

Like most of his designs, Knizia puts his mathematic expertise to good use here in the interesting balance of tile values and strategic options.  Nile tiles can be consistently lucrative, but they are worth nothing without a flood tile.  Civilization tiles will cost you points if you have none, but they won’t pay out at all until you get 3 or more types.  Pharaoh tiles only pay out to whoever has the most, but they cost points to anyone who has the least.  Gold tiles are simply worth 3 points each, while Monument tiles pay out when collected in large sets.

Thank goodness we have some new versions on the way, as I mentioned in my most anticipated games of 2021 post.  This one is currently as difficult to acquire as a gulp of water in the heart of the Sahara.

1. Tigris & Euphrates / Yellow & Yangtze

We’ve finally arrived at Reiner Knizia’s magnum opus!  The third game in his legendary tile-laying trilogy, this classic civilization game is known as Tigris & Euphrates.  Reiner somehow takes the epic scope of adjacent civilizations–their rise and prosperity, their conflicts and turmoil, their wars and rebellions, their acquisitions and downfalls–and boils these things down to cold, hard, cutthroat strategy.  Within the span of roughly an hour, T&E packs more theme and drama into its few pages of rules than any other game design could possibly dream of.

Your options for two actions on your turn are simple: place a tile, position a leader, flush out your hand for different tiles, or place a catastrophe tile.  The ramifications of these actions are what lead to frequent moments of sheer brilliance.  Positioning a leader into a kingdom which already has that type of leader (from another player) triggers a revolt.  Connecting two kingdoms that each have similar leader types triggers a war.  “This town ain’t big enough for the two of us” is the recurring motto of T&E’s kingdoms, and these dramatic conflicts born from calculated maneuvers with a sprinkling of luck and mystery are the magnificent crux of Tigris & Euphrates.

Folks don’t always foresee all the effects that a single tile placement can have.  Within a matter of moments, a mighty kingdom that players spent all game building up can be made desolate and broken, with the victors running off with a heaping pile of points of a single color.  But that’s the other essential component of T&E: the point tokens.  You see, your score will not be all of your point tokens combined together at the end of the game.  Nay, your score will only be the color that you have the least points in.  In order to be crowned the best, a civilization must display strength across all pillars of society–agriculture, trade, religion, and government.

So the challenge of Tigris and Euphrates is to earn points in all colors, even when your kingdoms are only strong in one or two or three of them.  Players will put targets on their backs by establishing lucrative kingdoms for a particular color that others desperately need.  The theme oozes through the smallest of details in this game as you find yourself understanding why one kingdom would seek to rule or overthrow another.  It’s a tense affair with enthralling conflicts that never fails to engage me.

Sadly, this one is also currently lost between publishers.  But fortunately, there is another option out there for those who can’t wait or for those who prefer something a little different: Yellow & Yangtze.  Y&Y is a game that I have not yet had the privilege to play (ask me again in a few weeks), but my research has led to these key differences: The map and tiles are hexagonal instead of T&E’s squares.  The conflicts are less brutal, dramatic, and chaotic, but the gameplay is more elegant and even-keeled.  The colors have different benefits and purposes, enough to throw off T&E veterans who try to approach it with their old reliable strategies.  It may or may not replace T&E, depending on who you talk to.  But either way, it’s an excellent iteration on a masterpiece design.

With Tigris & Euphrates (and Yellow & Yangtze), we see Dr. Knizia’s design chops on full display.  This is a game that has stood the test of time, and it will continue to do so long after today’s board game industry hotness is discarded and forgotten.

Unveiling the Reiner Knizia x Bitewing Games Collaboration

Finally, let’s talk about two more Reiner Knizia Games coming at you from our very own Bitewing Games Publishing Company!  If you’ve recently visited our website home page, then you’ve already noticed us teasing this collaboration.  All three games in this Kickstarter bundle will feature simple rules, a quick playtime of roughly 20 minutes, and the gorgeous illustrations of our partner, Uinta Alcyon.  Yet each one will feel distinctly delightful and uniquely clever, and today we want to give you a brief glimpse into Reiner’s two designs including the game titles and their descriptions!  

Soda Smugglers

Lawmakers are cracking down on soda, and tight regulation has made way for lucrative smuggling.  One bottle per person is the new law—thus bribes, suitcase inspections, and arrests are on the agenda.  Only one will emerge the Soda Kingpin.

Each round, one player takes a turn in the role of a Border Police Officer while the other players act as Travelers.  In a collective quest to earn bottle caps, the police officer tries to confiscate as many sodas as possible while only the cleverest travelers will sneak across with their fizzy contraband.  After each player has been the police officer (twice in a 3-4 player game, once in a 5-8 player game), the game ends and whoever has the most bottle caps wins!  

Bribing and bluffing has never tasted so sweet as it does here, in Reiner Knizia’s Soda Smugglers!

Pumafiosi

The Pumafiosi (Puma Mafiosi) operate in a strict hierarchy, from the family’s boss down to the lowest Picciotti. Everyone wants to reach the top, no-one wants to end up at the bottom or even beneath the soil.  Amongst these aspiring Pumafiosi, it is wise to keep your head out of the firing line.  Stand out too much and you’ll soon find yourself in prison, if not murdered by the rival families.

This clever card game is a refreshingly unique blend of trick-taking and push-your-luck.  Each trick, the person who plays the second-highest card winds the round, and they decide where to place that winning card into the hierarchy.  You can even choose to place your measly card at the top of the hierarchy to stake your claim on the big Boss points.  The catch is that these cards can be knocked down one or more steps on the hierarchy by higher value cards, and the owner of the dropping card takes penalty points!  

The deceptively simple Pumafiosi from the prolific Reiner Knizia will have you second-guessing your every decision.

So there you have it!  Our published bundle will feature the wily negotiations of Social Grooming (our own in-house design), the crafty bribing of Soda Smugglers, and the tricky scheming of Pumafiosi–the latter two designed by Reiner Knizia himself.  Be sure to subscribe to our monthly newsletter email so you don’t miss out on further reveals and the 2021 Kickstarter campaign of this killer filler bundle!  And for more juicy discussions on all things tabletop gaming—Reiner Knizia and beyond—stick around with your gaming friends here at Bitewing Games.

Article written by Nick Murray. To follow his designs as they come to fruition, subscribe to our newsletter and follow Bitewing Games on social media!

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