I’m coming to find that being a Reiner Knizia fan is much like being a fan of eating. You’re constantly hungry for more, and there’s always new & exciting flavors to explore. Today we’ll sandwich Nidavellir between these hunks of Reiner bread…

Whale Riders

3 Plays

Whale Riders is top-tier for Knizia family games.  Dead simple rules, gorgeous illustrations, a charming theme, speedy turns, and a tense tempo are the secret ingredients to this fantastic new game.

Like many of Knizia’s best, here you take two actions of your choice on your turn: 

• Sail forward one port
• Purchase one tile from your current port (with the oldest tiles being cheapest and newer tiles sliding down to replace what you purchase)
• Take a coin
• Discard any cards from your hand
• Fulfill any contracts in your hand

Keeping a rapid pace along the coast is just as important as using your actions efficiently, and those two urgent needs are usually at odds with each other.  Fulfilling contracts is obviously best performed when you can fulfill all three cards in your hand with one action, but those fulfillments also grant you more money which you’ll desperately need now to draft the best tiles before your opponents can claim them.  If you take the cheap tiles this turn, then the better tiles will slide into those cheap positions for you to claim next turn, but you can save an entire turn if you just pay a little extra for what you really want now.  

There is a deliciously relentless push and pull between the players and the mechanisms.  We’ve also found that the added variant of objective tiles (“The Clan’s Decree”) adds another layer of decisions to this space.  Alternatively, I’ve heard complaints about the variable powers variant (“The Magic of the Whales”) feeling unbalanced and strategically restrictive, so we have not tried that one yet.

One of the monumental achievements of this title is just how quickly it can be taught and played.  Of course, you have to keep in mind that Whale Riders features a player-driven tempo which widens the possible range of playtimes.  But my most recent session was setup, taught, played, and finished in under 25 minutes.  This is one of those contortionist designs that feels like a standard event game yet mystically folds itself into an itty-bitty chunk of time.  For how little it costs me in money, time, and shelf space, I almost feel like a board game bandit who has stolen far more value than he deserves.

Last year, I spent an article reflecting on all the Kickstarter projects I had backed and their marketing effectiveness on me and my fellow backers.  Whale Riders was one of those projects, yet I was puzzled how a gorgeous game with a solid pedigree underperformed compared to the many other games I had evaluated.  My conclusion was that Whale Riders simply lacked an obvious, standout hook.  Yet the thing that is important to understand about Whale Riders, and Knizia games in general, is that the hook is embedded and concealed within gameplay itself.  What appears to be a far-too-basic generic game of moving along a track, buying tiles, and fulfilling contracts is in reality an acrobatic battle of wits across a tight-rope of juicy decisions.  It’s the hidden interactions, decisions, and realizations—like a mystical whale that suddenly breaks through the water’s surface, emerging from the dark sea—that remind us again and again and again why we should never judge a Knizia design before we play it, and play it multiple times for good measure.

Current Rating: 8.5/10

Whale Riders: The Card Game

2 Plays

While they share the same name, theme, and art, Whale Riders: The Card Game is a very different beast from its bigger board game sibling.  In fact, this card game is actually the older of the two games in that it is a reimplementation of a card game from 2000 called “Trendy.”

Whale Riders: The Card Game is a simple deck of cards containing five types of goods (shells, kelp, meat, pots, and pearls… arranged from least to most valuable).  Each type also contains one bonus (double) card and one storm card.  So it’s a very easy game for players to grasp what is in the deck and track the general progress of played and unplayed cards.  

It’s a game of investing, where only one goods type will score at a time (the good that reaches its numerical threshold) and everything else that has been played in front of players will end up wasted in the discard pile.  So you obviously want to work with some opponents to play goods that score points for the cards you’ve invested in while ensuring that other opponents’ cards go to waste.  There is certainly an art to enticing others to join in on your risky pots or pearls by the way you lead a round with an intentional card and give off an air of confidence in your secret hand.  I may only have three pearl cards to put toward the required seven to score, but if I can get the ball rolling and sweet talk my neighbor into joining in on the fun then we’ve really got a shot at scoring big with the pearls.

This is where the heart of Whale Riders: The Card Game’s fun lies.  It’s not so much in clever hand management or thinky card play—both of which are strictly limited to their simplest forms here—rather, this is a card game all about nudging, enticing, scaring, and gaming your opponents in a breezy, light-hearted way.  That may not be enough for this game to satisfy some folks, but for me, this one stays fast (we’re talking 10 minutes per play) and fresh enough (the “advanced game” aka “full game” comes with event cards that change up the feel of each round) that I quite enjoyed the light, above-the-table meta it provides.

Admittedly, I think the original theme of Trendy fashion designers and original game length of playing to 100 points worked better for the design than this new Whale Rider’s theme of purchase consolidation and this new shorter game length of one time through the deck.  But Whale Riders absolutely has better art, it includes the new event cards (known as Ports), and it still suggests the 100 point version as a “long game variant,” so I think it’s a net positive reimplementation overall.  Just be aware that some people have minor gripes about the storm and bonus (double) cards being too visually subtle and thus occasionally flying under the brain’s radar as regular goods.

For a game as quick, simple, and accessible as this, I find that I’m happy to hold onto Whale Riders: The Card Game and break it out with the right folks who enjoy engaging each other as much as (or more than) the game.  Yet if I want to dive into a game of shared incentives and subtle screwage, I’m more likely to to opt for something even meatier like Irish Gauge or Modern Art.  Speaking of which…

Current Rating: 7/10

Modern Art Card Game

1 Play

Once again, we’re talking about an old Knizia card game made anew.  Only, instead of being a complete reimplementation, this one is simply an updated production featuring even more modern art.  

Those who are familiar with Modern Art the board game will find much of the same DNA here in its card game offspring.  There are still five artists whose work is represented on tarot sized cards which are played one at a time from players’ hands to end up in a personal collection.  Only, instead of using auctions to get these cards from any player’s hand to any player’s collection, the auctions are completely stripped away and your only option is to play these cards directly into your own collection.

With the focus being shifted from smorgasbord bidding to hand management, the cards also feature some more effects when played such as earning another card from the deck into your hand, adding a second card of the same artist to your collection, or playing a face-down card to your collection for an added dollop of mystery to the proceedings.  The key is to play cards from your hand in the round when they will be the most valuable, yet no value is set in stone until the sixth card of an artist is played and the top three played suits of the round are payed out.

The interesting scoring mechanism is still here in full force, where an artist’s work can increase in value over time as long as they continue to place in the top 3.  Likewise, the tricky decision of how long to save these works of art in your hand and when exactly to play them is alive and well.  Yet your hand seems to lose a lot of its impact compared to Modern Art the board game when these cards no longer present an opportunity for a profitable auction.

For what many people, including myself, consider to be a legendary auctioning game, it’s rather jarring to have the beating heart of that game ripped out and cast aside, where players are left with a lifeless corpse of a card game to explore.  To be fair, this is a Reiner Knizia card game, and his steady hand ensures that there is a solid design here to be enjoyed.  Yet its inspiration casts a long shadow over this small box that leaves me wondering when and why I would ever choose to play the card game over the board game.  The answer?  I wouldn’t.

Modern Art: The Card Game retains much of the clever cogs and pretty production of its heritage, yet loses the heart of the board game and struggles to stand out as a worthwhile card game among my collection.

Current Rating: 5.5/10

Nidavellir

2 Plays

While it’s not as accessible as Splendor, Nidavellir is significantly more interesting to me.  The five different types of cards and their scoring styles take some getting used to, and the heroes contain a whole bunch more unique symbols that are a lot to digest on first play.  But for a game that plays in under an hour, you’ll be up and running very quickly and likely have mastered all the symbology and need no reference sheet after only a few plays.

The core loop of Nidavellir—secret bidding with coins and upgrading unused coins—is where this one really stands out from the pack.  Splendor can keep its fancy plastic chips and Gizmos its magical marbles and Century its… cubes.  I’ll take Nidavellir and its cardboard bidding coins any day.

While the concept here is novel, I’d like to see auctions feel even more tense and meaningful.  After my first play, I had hoped that I would gain a better grasp of the relative values of each card.  While that did happen, I didn’t find my increased experience changing the feel or tension of the auctions by much.  I wonder if the strengths of the bidding mechanism are somewhat undercut by being paired with drafts that lack significant consequences.  

Between the three taverns of each round, it’s not uncommon for me to feel apathetic about the drafting options of one or two of the taverns.  Everything gets you points, and going for lots of the the same color can get you more points while going for a variety of colors can earn you hero cards, which also help generate points.  So the consequences of each auction range from good to great and vary rarely stray outside of that comfort zone.

Nidavellir certainly follows the tried and true path of being a safe game with an intriguing mechanism mixed in.  These games always catch an “ooo” or “ahh” when their singular clever concept is revealed during the rules explanation, but they also struggle to achieve poignantly memorable moments or a wide emotional range.  It’s an interesting balance that designers must face where making a broadly appealing game can lead to increased sales and popularity at the expense of the design’s dynamic personality and potent flavor.  The sharp edges of a design are often what keep a game from feeling dull (go figure).

While Nidavellir perhaps suffers from being tunnel-visioned on fun-optimization to some extent, it still comes together as a solid package and worthwhile experience for me.  The unanimously scowling dwarves across literally every single card in the deck may hint at the somewhat monotone gameplay lurking beneath, but the addictive loop of bidding and upgrading coins is strong enough on its own merits to disguise its shortcomings.  To their credit, the creators have released an expansion, Thingvellir, that promises to make the auctions more meaningful by awarding the highest bidder with an additional drafting option from a separate pool of cards known as the Camp. Once we’ve tried it, I’ll be sure to report back on how it changes the experience for me.

Current Rating: 7.5/10

Royal Visit

3 Plays

Just when I thought I already had plenty of great tug-of-war games—particularly 2-player ones including Blitzkrieg, Watergate, Mandala, and Battle Line—here comes Royal Visit busting open the saloon doors and demanding a place in my collection.  Iello thoroughly crushed the production here from the colorful cloth board to the chunky block figures, And Reiner crushed the concept within this design.

As their dense pieces suggest, every character has a weighty purpose… an incentive to pull it further in your direction along this track.  The guards are the boundaries for the king’s movement, and one must draw the king into the palace on their end of the board to win the game.  Yet, the other way to win is to move the crown token into your palace, and the crown moves toward you every turn that you have any other figure in your palace or the entire court (the king and his two guards) on your half of the board.

The jester and wizard have unique special abilities that can be used instead of playing cards on your turn, so it’s always beneficial to have them closer to you where they can do more damage with their abilities.  While you are limited to playing one type of card on your turn and moving the matching figure as many spaces as the numbers on the cards you play, the jester’s ability (when chosen) makes his cards wilds for any other single card suit of your choice, and he has the most movement-heavy numbers on his cards.  The problem is that the jester has to be between your end of the board and the king to use his ability, so you frequently have to play the very cards you wish to save for a massive wild movement just to get him into position.

Meanwhile, you can use the wizard’s ability to teleport any other figure (excluding the jester) to the wizard’s location.  But remember, the king must remain within the boundaries of the guards, so if you want to teleport the king then you’ll already have to have a guard past the wizard.

While the king’s cards feel like the weakest (they are only ever 1’s to move the king), you can also play two king cards to move the entire court one space (the king and his guards).  This is the only way to move two types of figures in one turn, and it can be super useful in the right moments.

The two guards have their own interesting wrinkle in that you can always split your movement cards between them (whether you play jester cards as wilds or guard cards).  It’s important to pull the guard on your side closer to increase your king movement potential while lassoing the opposite guard in to prevent massive king stealing plays from your opponent.

Aside from welcoming the King or the crown into your palace, the third way to win is in a tense tiebreaker that triggers the moment the deck has been depleted for the second time.  At that point, whoever has the king on their half of the board wins, and all other progress you made with the crown or other characters doesn’t matter.

For a game that takes 10-20 minutes to play and fits snuggly inside a small box with a useful insert, it doesn’t get much better than Royal Visit.

Current Rating: 8/10

Yellow & Yangtze

1 Play

Well it’s not exactly a “new release,” but 2018 isn’t too far behind us yet.  Plus, I think we can make an exception here considering this post is already riddled with Knizia game impressions, and I can’t resist talking about the sister game to my #3 favorite of all time.  

Yellow & Yangtze…. just wow.  What a freaking masterpiece.  You know the saying, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it?”  Or “Don’t spoil a good thing?”  Or how about “The grass is always greener on the other side?”  All the wisdom in the world should have stopped Reiner from touching his untouchable design.  Yet here we are, and thank goodness he didn’t listen to that wisdom.  

Yellow & Yangtze is the Tigris & Euphrates doppelgänger, alternate timeline, or long-lost twin.  It’s a modernization of Reiner’s greatest work, yet it’s not a replacement.  I wouldn’t put one above the other as they both share the same delicious core yet provide distinct flavors.  

Y&Y is definitely something you can’t approach with the same strategy as T&E, but the fundamental similarities make me naturally want to approach it in the same way.  With T&E, I love to plot and scheme my way into massively lucrative wars that swing the pendulum of momentum in my favor.  These huge wars are still present in Y&Y, yet they are significantly streamlined and overshadowed by the even more important and fleeting pagodas.  In T&E, the civilizations are like a slowly rising pile of snow that eventually collapse into an insane avalanche of tiles and points.  In Y&Y, the civilizations are more comparable to a winter parking lot that is blanketed with fresh snow every few hours but regularly shoveled and salted.

The thing to appreciate about Y&Y is how Reiner has infused every tile type with purpose outside of its universal use.  In fact, these tiles required more purpose when he also streamlined the wars down to using military (red) tiles only.  That’s probably one of the key takeaways here: Y&Y is undoubtedly the more streamlined version of the two games.  The trickiest thing for people to grasp and wrap their minds around and understand the ramifications for is the wars.  Yet wars have been reeled in here to a single battle between two kingdoms using their military might only.  And the fallout of wars is less destructive for the losing side and less rewarding for the winning side.  These tweaks serve to make the game a less strategic and more tactical affair. Not better, not worse… just refreshingly different.

Bouncing back from a heavy blow is much faster and easier, and the landscape of leaders across the board is more rapid, dynamic, and fluid.  Unused leaders are given purpose and unwanted tiles are given value.  Rather than flying low for many turns waiting to strike a single fatal blow, you’re better off pouncing on the fleeting opportunities of each round, if you can even spot them.  It seems as though every T&E complaint that someone would have regarding luck of the draw, value of the tiles, usefulness of leaders in the late game, brutality of the conflicts, etc., has been considered and addressed in one way or another here.

And somehow, that doesn’t make Yellow & Yangtze superior to Tigris & Euphrates for me.  It’s merely a yang to Reiner’s masterful yin (see what I did there? ;).  Between the low-key enormous shift to hexagon spaces (from squares) and the shocking addition of yellow tiles (providing wild points), there’s an entirely new pool of possibilities to explore.  Many will plant their flag on one side of the fence or the other, but I think I’d prefer to sit on the fence itself and enjoy the panoramic view.

Current Rating: 10/10

As a side note, if either Y&Y or T&E catch your interest, then the best time to jump on a copy is ASAP as they are both entering the dark ages of their publishing cycle until a new publisher inevitably picks them up.  And as a double side note, we got to take the BGG plastic & bamboo tiles of Y&Y for a spin and they were precisely as exotic and luxurious as that sounds (just make sure you find yourself a bigger cloth bag if you decide to upgrade your own copy, as they bafflingly left that problem up to the customer to solve).

Looking for more Reiner Knizia goodness? You’re in the right place! Check out our upcoming Kickstarter campaign below featuring THREE Knizia games! Be sure to subscribe to our monthly newsletter so you don’t miss out on this killer collection!

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 with a 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 Candid Cardboard: 1st Impressions of Nidavellir & A Bunch of Newish Knizia Games appeared first on Bitewing Games.

It’s that time of year once more, my friends!  Now that the cardboard dust of 2020 has settled, as we find ourselves in the calm before the storm of 2021 releases, I’ve been reflecting on all the tabletop games I’ve ever played.  Within this mountain of ever growing titles, fifty designs have risen to the top.  These are the board games that have proven their quality over hours of play across many tables surrounded by friends, family, and strangers.  These are the games that I love and want to play more than any others.  Indeed, these are my current Top 50 Board Games of All Time.

If you’re even remotely familiar with my last Top 50 Board Games of All Time list, you’ll soon notice a DRASTIC change in most of the games and their rankings.  This change not only represents the many new-to-me discoveries of the past year, it also symbolizes a significant shift in my gaming tastes and preferences across the nearly 700 plays since my last top 50 list was created.

The list of games that I love is getting to be a crowded place.  To offer you a bit of context, I used the Pub Meeple ranking engine to pit individual games head-to-head against each other over and over until my I died of a broken heart for declaring so many of my beloved board game children to be inferior to each other.  Each game left outside of my top 50 hurt to leave out until perhaps the 89th ranked game.  There are still many designs beyond that which I truly enjoy playing, yet this low on the list is where I’m finally content with leaving them out of my Greatest of All Time post.  Perhaps next year we’ll have to extend this list to my top 75 or top 100, but it’s the excellent games which don’t make the GOAT list that give weight and credibility to the ones that do.

So let’s roll up our sleeves and wrestle with the rankings of the greatest games to grace my tabletop…

50. Watergate

Best suited for everyone

Watergate won’t be the last tug-of-war style game on my list, nor will it be the last Capstone Game here, but it was one of the very first of both categories that I had the pleasure of discovering.  This endearing 2-player game is far more accessible than it sounds or appears.  Yet the way each session plays out is consistently tense and refreshing.  My favorite aspect is perhaps the difficult decisions one must make within the hand management, between deciding whether to dispose of a card to use it’s powerful ability or retain it for its useful pull on the tug-of-war track.  Thanks to the asymmetric decks and objectives of the Nixon Administration vs. the Press and the dynamic unfolding of the pin board conspiracy, I don’t see myself tiring of this excellent design.

49. Arboretum

Best suited for mean, thick-skinned folks

I wonder if us hobbyist gamers sometimes take small box card games for granted.  These are rarely the games that I intentionally schedule a game night for, yet a really good one can often pack a bigger punch and provide more thrills and amusement than a longer and larger “event” game.  Arboretum is the first of these such titles on my list, and it’s as sharp as they come.  There is nothing quite like writhing in my chair because my cards are either too important to play so soon or too precious to discard.  Arboretum is a game where my entire hand feels this way almost the entire time.  I still adore this beautiful little design about trees, yet it’s probably fallen a bit since last year because it’s almost too bitter of a brutality pill for others to swallow when an opponent denies them the scoring on a tree type they’ve spent all game building towards.  If your group has thick skin, then Arboretum is a collection essential.

48. Modern Art

Best suited for any group of four or five people

If you liken an art museum to a snooze fest, then you should come and let Modern Art teach you the exciting intricacies of art valuations.  Modern Art is where my love for auctioning games was born, as the bombastic bidding takes center-stage here.  It’s essentially Dr. Reiner Knizia flexing his auctioning design muscles for up to an hour of richly thematic fun.  The mix of four auction types and the mystery of which artists will have the most valuable pieces hits the spot like a piña colada on a hot summer day.

47. Blue Lagoon

Best suited for everyone

Blue Lagoon is a bit of an unexpected hit of a purchase, despite that being a common theme with Knizia Games in my collection.  On the surface, it appears to be a generic abstract game with shameless Moana-like art.  You combine those two off-putting things together and only a name like Reiner Knizia and a cheap price of $20-30 could warm my icy heart enough to give it a chance.  Yet now here it sits among my Top 50 Games of ALL TIME.  I freaking love this family-friendly strategy game.  I very recently shared how it’s one of Dr. Knizia’s best designs thanks to its agonizing decisions and passive-aggressive opportunities across two subtly distinct rounds of play.

46. Irish Gauge

Best suited for everyone

Well, it’s not the third Knizia game in a row on this list, but it is a Knizia-like design.  What does Knizia-like even mean, you ask?  And why is that a compliment?  Much like the work of Reiner Knizia, Amabel Holland’s Irish Gauge is a vast wealth of deep and compelling gameplay born out of extremely simple rules.  So simple, in fact, that the rules fit onto a single sheet of paper.  It’s hard not to be drawn in by Ian O’Toole’s face-melting box art and clean graphic design, yet it’s the pleasure of placing trains, auctioning shares, and calling for dividends that keeps me thoroughly engaged in this cube-rail classic.

45. The Quest for El Dorado

Best suited for everyone

Phew, well I don’t know about you, but I almost had a panic attack straying from Reiner Knizia for so long.  Look, I get that his style of game isn’t for everyone.  And I can assure you that we won’t break into the double digits of Knizia designs on this list… but we do get awfully close (and you should probably brace yourself for a couple more of them in about two minutes).  Anywayyyyy, let’s talk about one of the best deck-builders ever designed!  Despite the miniature cards and sprawling components, The Quest for El Dorado marries deck-building to racing on a game board with seemingly effortless ease.  The game is so polished and simple that it can be easy to dismiss the genius mechanisms and satisfying flow hidden within.  This is a title that I can put down in front of my eight-year-old niece and thoroughly enjoy playing or break out with my fellow hardcore hobbyists for a charmingly cutthroat contest.

44. Great Western Trail

Best suited for hobbyist gamers

Allow me to be vain for a moment (if putting together this massive ranked list about cardboard leisure isn’t vain enough already) and share that the main thing that keeps me from loving Great Western Trail even more is the uncomfortable box art containing three massive faces of scowling, staring, soul-less men.  It’s like Mount Rushmore got lost in the Twilight Zone and landed itself in a dystopian Wild West.  Thankfully, publisher Eggertspiele decided that five years of heebie-geebies was long enough, and they’ve finally invested in a redesigned and drastically improved art style for the second edition coming later this year.  Yet I’m not so vain as to dismiss the intricate complexity that launches this heavy Euro game to greatness.  The mechanisms interwoven together include deck building with a herd of cattle, traveling with a cowboy along an action rondel, progressing economic potential along a railroad track, constructing buildings along the trail to help yourself and hinder your opponents, developing an engine within your evolving player board, and so much more.

43. Through the Desert

Best suited for everyone

As promised, we’re back with another irresistible adventure from the bottomless well of brilliance that is Knizia Games.  This time, we have pastel camels sprawling across a dry desert in search of lush oases, private piles of sand, and thirst-quenching watering holes.  Believe it or not, I was mildly underwhelmed with this game after my first play of it.  It was only with more plays at varying player counts that I uncovered my adoration of Through the Desert.  Once again, you can hear more about why I love this design in my recent Top 10 Knizia Games post.

42. Lost Cities

Best suited for everyone

Speaking of which, Lost Cities is the last I’ll speak of Reiner’s work for at least a dozen games, so you better eat up while you can!  Remember back when we were talking about Arboretum and how that is a painful card game where you don’t want to play or discard any of your cards?  Lost Cities takes those same hand management woes and cranks them up to ten!  The 20-point penalty for committing to a color is perfectly calculated to make you hesitate with every card you decide to play.  I especially love that you can start out a color with handshake cards that raise the stakes by doubling, tripling, or quadrupling your score, whether they are positive or negative points!  The temptation to commit to a color late can become strong as that color appears in your hand or in the draw piles, and the threat of a premature game end can make the final turns tight as noose!  I still stand by my previous statement that this is the chips and salsa of 2-player card games.

41. New York Zoo

Best suited for everyone

2020 was a great year for board games releases, and New York Zoo is the first one on my Top 50 games list to prove it.  Between the giant tray of animal meeples, the piles of polyomino enclosures, the emerging zoos on player boards, the bounteous breeding bonuses, and the roaming elephant action token, I find myself submerged in a colorful pool of play.  The race to fill your zoo first remains a refreshing change of pace from the common trope of gaining points for anything and everything.  Uwe Rosenberg and polyomino games pair together just as well as chocolate cake and vanilla ice cream…. Am I getting hungry or something?

40. Mandala  

Best suited for everyone

I’ve never been let-down by a play of Mandala.  The moments of difficult decisions and clever plays are a gift that keeps on giving.  The pleasant production consisting of a cloth “board” and colorful cards are merely a disguise for the confrontational gameplay that lurks beneath.  Your turns are spent essentially bidding for first dibs on the sets of colors in each mandala while feeding those sets for lucrative points.  Once a mandala is complete, the highest bidder chooses the first color to add to their scoring river, and frequently it’s best to take the cards that would help your opponent more than they help you.  

39. Jaipur

Best suited for everyone

Jaipur falls into the same category of simple, all-time greats within the 2-player card game genre.  It’s another one that doesn’t contain an immediate hook or obvious wow-factor, but it’s addictive flow grows on you over time.  I could tell you more about how Jaipur perfectly balances incentives against risks or goods against camels, but I wouldn’t be able to do it better than Kyle who put out a very slick 6-minute review of the game last year.

38. Cosmic Frog

Best suited for hobbyist gamers who appreciate the weird and wacky

We’re onto another one of my top releases of 2020 with Cosmic Frog!  Something about this punishing experience is so irresistible… sort of like staring at a sunset, or staying up past bedtime to watch another episode of your favorite show, or drinking soda while eating spicy food.  The more that Cosmic Frog hurts me, the more I want to play it.  Yet I’m far too greedy of a gamer to play the game defensively, and my greed continues to burn me.  Why send my frog groveling back to its vault with only one or two shards when I can load his gullet to the brim with goodies?!?  Why take only one action on my turn when I can spend a little oomph to double my productivity?!?  Why, you ask?  So my merciless opponents can come in and gut-punch me to another dimension and steal away everything I ever held dear.

37. The Estates

Best suited for mean, thick-skinned folks

While we’re on the topic of merciless gut-punching, we might as well transition to another one of my favorite blood baths, The Estates.  This one feels sort of like a sandbox game, where on your turn you have the freedom to auction off almost any piece still on the table, except players spend more time throwing sand at each other than building their own sand castles.  You may be the owner of the red company, but if I win the bid for that red building block, then you better believe I’m going to stack it in the negative point row to sabotage your score.  And if you let me get away with purchasing the Mayor token, then I’ll gleefully add it to your incomplete row where your buildings will now score you double negative points.  In The Estates, cruelty knows no bounds.

36. Lords of Vegas

Best suited for those who can tolerate a hearty dose of luck with their strategery

You know, it’s quite convenient that these games all ended up next to each other on my rankings.  Starting back with Cosmic Frog, we’re currently in the thick of some of the more polarizing games on my list.  It’s likely you either love ‘em or you hate ‘em, and Lords of Vegas is no different.  This is the game many have pointed to as “What Monopoly Should Have Been.”  Growing casinos, hostile business takeovers, big pay-days, gambling to steal money from others, and player turns spent blowing all your cash on greedy expansion schemes.  As an area control game with a flair for dramatic Vegas-style gambling, you’d be hard-pressed to find another game quite like Lords of Vegas.

35. Condottiere

Best suited for everyone

Kyle and I recently shared each of our Top 10 Family Games, and Condottiere was an easy one to add to this list.  It had proven it’s merit when I brought it on a vacation with relatives and they requested to play it multiple times over the many other games I had also brought and taught them that week.  Condottiere boils down to a card game of chicken where the last person to stay in gets to claim a territory if they committed the most troops, and the first person to control three adjacent territories or five total wins.  This game of chicken takes the form of an auction where you can commit troops from your hand to a battle, but that means you’ll have even less cards in the following round.  A major aspect of the strategy is to bluff your commitment and push others to spend too much for something that you don’t actually want, just so you can easily take a more important territory later.

34. Undaunted: Normandy & Undaunted: North Africa

Best suited for everyone

We’ve now arrived at my personal favorite deck-builder, the Undaunted series.  I’ve now played a combined total of 17 games of Undaunted (Normandy and North Africa) and we’re still going strong.  The many scenarios provided in these games help to keep each play fresh, and the asymmetry offered by each setup and faction make it doubly replayable.  The addicting loop of sacrificing a card to compete for initiative, deciding which actions to take with the remaining cards, and honing your deck in on the victory objective is as good as deck-building gets for me.  Just like in war, you’ll be sticking your neck out and taking big risks in hopes gaining the upper hand in this streamlined, 2-player, scenario-based war game.

33. Love Letter

Best suited for everyone

Love Letter might just be the best micro-game ever designed.  With only 16 cards and a handful of cubes, this design weaves together a tapestry of deception, deduction, drama, and delight.  Each player is holding one card in their hand, kept secret from everyone else.  On your turn, draw a second card into your hand and play one of them.  The goal is to be the last person standing or have the highest number when the deck runs out.  And the card actions and values are brilliantly crafted to where players can try to outfox each other with each quick round of play.

32. Treasure Island

Best suited for everyone

I adore how the pirate’s life comes alive in this island treasure hunt!  There is something so exhilarating about being Captain Long John Silver, marking the spot of your buried treasure on your private map, and then spending the entire game misleading the other mutinous pirates with vague, piecemeal information on your treasure’s whereabouts.  I also enjoy being one of those mutinous pirates, drawing on the large game board map, and scouring the island for the booty as I try to puzzle together the hints and clues before Long John escapes captivity and reunites with his treasure.  It’s been a while since I’ve played this wonderfully unique design, but that’s only because I’m waiting to receive my copy of the expansion which promises even more variety to the core experience.

31. Beyond the Sun

Best suited for hobbyist gamers

We’re back with yet another big 2020 release, and it’s really had an upswing in the rankings with my most recent plays of it.  In particular, Beyond the Sun was the very first game we played in our recent 2-part Board Game Birthday Marathon, and it ended up being the group favorite of the entire day.  We had a killer lineup of games that were played too, so that’s high praise indeed.  Beyond the Sun mixes tight resource management with branching worker placement actions on an evolving tech tree while providing a buttery smooth area control experience on the space exploration board.  The whole package comes together so beautifully that it’s all the more impressive to discover that this is designer Dennis K. Chan’s first published game.

30. Concordia

Best suited for everyone

As far as I’m concerned, Concordia deserves to be the real Catan of the board game industry.  It’s an accessible game all about getting your wooden settlements built onto the map, yet everything about Concordia is far more interesting and engaging than Catan.  You build up your hand of cards over time, and these not only serve as the action you take on your turn, but they also score you points at the end of the game according to how well you executed your game board strategy.  Concordia never fails to hit the spot, especially because you are not waiting for the dice to roll your numbers and trigger your resource production.  So maybe it’s time to give Catan the boot from your collection and introduce your friends to the REAL Catan which is the unbreakable Concordia.

29. Stephenson’s Rocket

 Best suited for Knizia fans and/or train game fans who plan on repeat plays

Like Beyond the Sun, Stephenson’s Rocket was another game we had the pleasure of enjoying at our recent gaming marathon.  While I can understand why it might be a bit polarizing due to the objective opacity and in-your-face nastiness, Stephenson’s Rocket is a game that really sings once you catch onto its crafty ways.  The opportunities for clever turns are subtle yet numerous in this design about extending rails, investing in industries, and bidding for control.  This game, in my opinion, is criminally underrated among Knizia’s designs and the board game industry itself.  To this day, I thank my lucky stars that I was able to discover it and snag myself a copy of Grail Game’s beautiful version.

28. Dogs of War

Best suited for any group of 4-5 players

Thus begins the reign of Paolo Mori on my top 50 games of all time list.  The man has landed himself not one, not two, but three spots among my top 30.  Dogs of War is the first that I have the privilege of acclaiming today.  While you could call this a worker placement game, I don’t really think of it as such.  Rather, I tend to think of it as a political tug-of-war strategy game.  Players act as Dogs of War who influence the battles that are taking place between noble houses.  The victor of each battle will be determined by whichever house receives the most support from players, and the players on the winning team will gain significant benefits.  The incentives to support a particular house on a particular round are many, and the challenge is to choose your allies wisely so that you benefit from the various battle outcomes more than any opponent.

27. Blitzkrieg!: World War Two in 20 Minutes

Best suited for everyone

For those of you who are unable to track down a copy of the out-of-print Dogs of War—or perhaps even more difficult is the challenge of gathering 4-5 players around one table—then Mr. Mori has just the solution: a new 2-player, 20 minute version of this game known as Blitzkrieg.  And what a heck of a 20 minutes this design is.  Those who dismiss Blitzkrieg for its generic look or plain production are simply missing out on one of the best new 2-player games in the industry.  The back and forth that occurs between two opponents as they attempt to conquer each theatre of war is a blast from start to finish.  Unlike most war games, there are no cards or dice involved here.  You simply select one of three tile options that are hidden behind your shield to play out almost anywhere onto the board.  The tile you choose and the spot you place it on may haunt you long after this 20 minute romp is over. 

26. The Mind

Best suited for everyone

I have to imagine that those who scoff at the simplicity of The Mind just haven’t uncovered the magic within.  The Mind captures the organic satisfaction of acting on gut-feelings and having those feelings confirmed by others without even word spoken between them.  It’s a cooperative game where the group must find an equilibrium, a rhythm, and a tempo together as they play numerical cards from their hands in ascending order without saying anything.  While it starts out laughably basic in round one, the difficulty quickly ramps up as more cards are dealt each round and the group loses more lives.  Some of the best board and card game designs on this planet attain such greatness because they trim away the fiddly supplemental rules and maintain a laser focus on what makes them special.  The Mind is one such design that remains a joy to play with the right people who are willing to invest in its unusual concept.

Continue on to the next post for the final 25 of my Top 50 Board Games of All Time!

Article written by Nick Murray. If you found yourself nodding in agreement to some of his favorite games, then keep an eye out for three upcoming games that he loved enough to publish! Nick’s first published design, Social Grooming, which will debut in a Kickstarter bundle alongside two games—Soda Smugglers and Pumafiosi—from critically acclaimed designer, Reiner Knizia! Don’t miss out on this killer filler bundle coming in 2021! Subscribe to the Bitewing Games monthly newsletter to stay in touch.

The post Top 50 Board Games of All Time — Games 50-26 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!

The post Top 10 Reiner Knizia Games appeared first on Bitewing Games.

To Be Exciting, or Not to Be Exciting

“Based on theme alone, I think this would be a tough sell. Hot air ballooning doesn’t feel that exciting.”

-Anonymous Judge

These words were written recently about my design, Balloon Jockeys, from a judge who was evaluating game design pitches.  It was for a contest of sorts known as the Pitch Project.  In this event, designers had the opportunity to submit a sell sheet (a 1 page elevator pitch) to be evaluated by judges based on 3 criteria:

1. How well does the sell sheet convey how the game works?
2. How original is the game?
3. How much do you think the target audience would want to play the game?

With roughly 750 sell sheets submitted, and only 50 being allowed through to the live online pitching event (where designers have 5 minutes to pitch their game to a few dozen publishers), I’m sure that there were more than plenty of sell sheets that were cleaner and better designed than mine.  But I have a hunch that this particular judge at least deducted points on my pitch based on the third criteria: how interested would the target audience be in playing Balloon Jockeys?

The “target audience” in this case is strategy board gamers, and clearly they wouldn’t find Hot Air Ballooning as “exciting” as something like trading in the Mediterranean….

Of course I’m being facetious here.  While it’s a bummer that Balloon Jockeys didn’t qualify for the pitching event, I’m honestly more put off by this judge’s thought process.  They must have been thinking 1 of 2 things (or both):

A: “Only games with exciting themes can attract publishers and succeed in the marketplace.”

B: “Hot air ballooning is not a marketable board game theme.”

Getting with the Times

When I first read this judge’s comment, I had to laugh because I immediately thought of the hottest game of 2019, Wingspan.  A game about birds, eggs, and bird food is not only ranked in the top 20 games of all time on Board Game Geek, but it’s also won countless awards including the prestigious Kennerspiel des Jahres.  Yet, I’m willing to bet that (before last year) if my sell sheet would have been for the game Wingspan, this judge would have made the exact same remark.

Let’s set aside the fact that this judge’s perspective is probably out of touch with the modern board game market and peer into the deeper truths behind this encounter.  Not long ago, hobbyist board gaming was divided into two buckets: “Ameritrash” games that put theme far above deep strategy and clever mechanisms, and “Euro” games that typically slapped a theme on a thinky, mechanical design, almost as an afterthought.

Fortunately, we’ve seen the line between these two categories blur in recent years as the barriers to creating board games have broken down and creativity has flourished.  What once was a hobby exclusively for “geeks,” has now evolved into an activity for everyone.  Where there was once only Sci-fi, Fantasy, and European mercantilism, we now have everything from migrating butterflies to kids building forts. A great combination of theme and mechanisms is becoming the new standard.

Despite this evolution, I’m still surprised to encounter people in the industry, be they judges, publishers, designers, or gamers, who believe that games can’t thrive unless they fit into their idea of worthy themes and settings.

What Makes a Theme Exciting?

Do we really need another pirate game?  Another cthulhu game?  Another viking or zombie or space game?  Granted, we’re still seeing plenty of exciting ideas coming from these exhausted sources.  But are these really the only wells that we can draw inspiration from?  The narrow-minded among us seem to think so.

The fallacy of these individuals is that a theme must be immediately and obviously exciting, otherwise it is not worth exploring.  I wish to push back against this notion and point all of us toward a higher truth:  

“Any theme can make a fantastic and exciting game, especially if the designer/publisher can capture the aspect of that theme which is most interesting and make it the focal point of the design/production.”

Me… just now

Now, please don’t take that out of context. I’m not implying that even endorsed immorality in themes can make for a great game… Space Biff provides a fascinating comparison of portraying vs. endorsing immoral themes in games, and there is no need for me to venture into that territory as well. Rather than the immoral, I’m thinking more about the mundane. Yes, even the most mundane of themes can make for an amazing gaming experience. What does this look like?  Let’s explore some examples…

When I think of buses, I think of slow trips, poor temperature control, motion sickness, and strange smells.  Years upon years of riding the bus to and from school have ingrained these negative feelings into my very DNA.  The day that I got a drivers’ license and a hand-me-down family vehicle to drive around was one of the greatest days of my youth.  There is simply no way around my bias against buses. So how on EARTH did Capstone & Splotter Games get me so excited about buses that I jumped at the chance to pay them SIXTY BUCKS for a game about buses called, you guessed it, BUS?!?

How does Viticulture get me hyped to make and sell wine when I don’t even drink alcohol?  How does Modern Art get me pumped to buy and sell pieces of art that I have minimal appreciation for?  Why did I lunge at a chance to play Q.E. when I couldn’t care less about global economics?  How come I’m so eager to recreate the events surrounding the Watergate scandal, something that happened long before my birth and merely received a quick nod in my US history class? 

All of these games with “unexciting” themes are wildly successfully and widely loved because they dig deep into their core source material, grasp the fascinating essence within, rip it out into the spotlight, and slap it down on a player’s table for them to explore and dissect like a still-beating heart from a strange creature’s chest.

Watergate pits players in a tense tug-of-war of information, incentives, and priorities between the Nixon administration and Washington Post.  

Q.E. makes each participant a powerhouse country handing out limitless checks left and right to struggling industries until one country finds that it spent far too much.  

Modern Art captures the peculiar trends and finicky tastes that drive the relative value of art up and down as players control greedy museums that are hungry for the next big thing.

Viticulture, with its round, glassy, aging grape/wine tokens satisfies the connoisseur within as they build up a beautiful vineyard in the rolling hills of Tuscany.  

And Bus spins the wheels of its scheming players’ brains as they seek to develop a route that can satisfy the most passengers during their daily routines.

Why was Wingspan such a smash hit that continues to soar above its competitors?  Because Elizabeth Hargrave and Jamey Stegmaier understood that birds are inherently fascinating in their function and diversity… their colors, their personalities, their behaviors, and their habitats.  So they created a game that puts this most fascinating part of birds at the forefront.  They invested time and money in making each and every card functionally unique and genuinely beautiful.  They tied each unique species to mechanical aspects of the game in thematically subtle but meaningful ways.  While the blind bats of the industry cried out from their drab comfort zones, everyone else took notice and at least appreciated the love and care that went into this project.

Irony in Ignorance

The irony of this Pitch Project judge’s remarks is that I set out to create Balloon Jockeys precisely because of its theme.  During a brainstorming session, I realized that hot air balloons are naturally awe-inspiring, effortlessly beautiful, and criminally underrepresented in the realm of board gaming.  Show me the person who doesn’t feel an ounce of joy or wonder when they suddenly notice a hot air balloon soaring overhead.  We’ve all been outside with others when one of us noticed the balloon first and immediately pointed it out for everyone else to appreciate.

Every design decision I’ve made since Balloon Jockey’s inception has been anchored in the most compelling aspects of the subject.  I started this design journey knowing practically nothing about the topic of hot air ballooning, but I’ve since found plenty of golden nuggets to treasure.  If I can manage to transfer these golden nuggets into how the game plays, looks, and feels, then I have zero doubts that it will find plenty of fans, regardless of whether the theme initially excites them or not.

As time goes on, I hope to see more and more unconventional themes that are magnified into exciting experiences.  I hope to see publishers, designers, judges, and gamers step outside their comfort zones, think outside the box, and uncover the extraordinary within the ordinary.

This concludes our exploration of What Makes a Board Game Theme Great. Despite my difference in opinions with one particular judge, I want to be clear that, as a designer, the Pitch Project has been an excellent resource and worthwhile event… even for Balloon Jockeys! Our current plan now is to self-publish Balloon Jockeys through Kickstarter (campaign expected late 2021 at the earliest). To follow our designs as they come to fruition, subscribe to our newsletter and follow Bitewing Games on social media!

Article written by Nick Murray. To learn more about his tabletop gaming tastes and preferences, check out his blog series: Tabletop Tastes: My Favorite Flavors in Board Games.

The post What Makes a Board Game Theme Great? appeared first on Bitewing Games.

Introduction

I dove into the deep end of the board game community over a year ago. With helpful guides including Shut Up & Sit Down’s recommended games, The Dice Tower’s Top 100, Board Game Geek (BGG) rankings, Geekbuddy comments, and more, my hunt has led me through the “Cult of the New”, Cult of the Classic, and many games in between.

I’ve played and purchased more board games in the past year than I have in my entire life, and it has been a blast! The true catalyst that launched me into the hobby was when I discovered a passion for designing board games during the summer of 2018. My experience learning and playing new-to-me tabletop games has been one of both research and adventure, discovery and inspiration. As I’ve sought to feed my creative drive, I’ve also uncovered an explorative hunger and developed a personal palate. Playing board games and creating board games are cyclical interests for me that have consumed much of my free time since they began.

So while I feel my understanding of the board game industry is well researched and experienced on one hand, I realize my complete amateur status on the other. Perhaps my perspective will offer you something new to consider, and I certainly hope you won’t hesitate to offer me suggestions as well.  

If you feel we may have similar tastes, and you have a BGG account, please feel free to add me as a Geekbuddy! I’m always eager to hear what you fine folks think of any games I am curious about, and I’ve found the Geekbuddy tool to be invaluable in narrowing down my wishlist. It’s also possible that your suggestion for me is already on my wishlist, so check out my most anticipated new-to-me games list!

So without further adO, I present to you my current Top 50 Games!

#50 Roll for the Galaxy

Recommended for: Gamers

I seem to like this game more every time I play it. Always engaging and interesting with loads of variety. The rules and symbols can seem intimidating at first, but the player shields contain basically all the information you need to play the game (and remember the rules). Very well done production.

I realize how popular Terraforming Mars is, but Roll for the Galaxy is my preferred space engine builder thanks to its zippy play time, better production, and higher fun factor.

#49 Skull

Recommended for: Everyone

Skull is a game of bluffing filtered down into its purest form. I love those moments when I can get on a roll and make my opponents feel like I am reading them like a book.

If you enjoy bluffing games like Poker, but you want a game that throws out everything but the good old bluffing, then Skull is for you!

#48 Takenoko

Recommended for: Everyone

Fantastic family game. We absolutely love the theme and components; the presentation is a home-run. The feeling of watering bamboo tiles to build bamboo towers and moving the Panda to eat bamboo comes together so nicely.

The event die is interesting in how it encourages players to adapt their strategy on each turn.

There is definitely a significant amount of luck involved in drawing the right or wrong objective cards (especially late in the game). This can make some plays quite frustrating for competitive players.

The Takenoko: Chibis expansion helps with mitigating some bad luck and adds some really interesting mechanics to the game, so I would suggest getting the expansion if you enjoy the base game.

#47 The Quest for El Dorado

Recommended for: Everyone

There’s something about this game that is so slick, streamlined, and satisfying. Perhaps the obvious answer is: Reiner Knizia. I love how this deck-builder makes you plan ahead and consider the long-term consequences of buying all those machete cards when a dense area of water and villages lie ahead in the distance.

There’s also something to be said of a game that contains all the essential rules on the thin rectangular player boards, making for an easy-breezy teach leading to an epic, tense race.

The Quest for El Dorado has served as a major case-study and inspiration for the snowboarding deck-builder that I’ve been designing myself.

#46  The Fox in the Forest

Recommended for: Everyone

I grew up playing Rook from time to time with relatives. Having an auction based on your hand of cards always felt like such a clever way to mitigate luck in a trick-taking game. It never occurred to me that losing a trick could be just as much fun as winning a trick.

Enter The Fox in the Forest. I love how players can spend early tricks baiting their opponent, testing the waters, while late tricks find them desperately struggling to balance their wins and losses. Man, I need to play this again.

As I’ve been designing a trick-taking game inspired by hot air balloon competitions, The Fox in the Forest has been instrumental in helping me refine the mechanisms of my design.

#45 Startups

Recommended for: Everyone

I picked up Startups very recently (thanks to the fine folks at SU&SD), and found it to be delightfully similar to Arboretum. Both games reward clever hand management among calculated discards and well-timed plays. Startups is certainly the milder of the two, but still a solid card game I’m hungry to play again.

Startups is also my introductory game to Oink Games; their minimalist design and production is actually quite charming, in my opinion. I stumbled across Startups in a random board game store while out of town, and now Insider is next on my list to try. I’m also quite familiar with the famous A Fake Artist Goes to New York, although I haven’t played it, as it shares some similarities with a party game that my wife and I have in the works.

#44 Dominion (Second Edition)

Recommended for: Everyone

Dominion reminds me of a good bowl of vanilla ice cream. It’s nothing flashy, but it’s a fine-tuned base of deck-building that seemingly goes well with almost anything. Sometimes it’s just nice to go back to some smooth, quick simplicity and bask in Old Faithful.

To me, this game has plenty of tension within the decision space of cards to purchase and cards combinations you hope to draw; but for those looking for more player interaction, it seems that the later deck-builders it inspired fill this need better. I’m particularly enamored with Arctic Scavengers adding in the option to save a card for combat (even as a bluff) rather than play or discard it; this particular mechanism fits perfectly into my snowboarding deck builder design of storing cards as a snowball stash.

#43 Watergate

Recommended for: Everyone

Watergate captures and streamlines the element of tension that I’ve so come to love in my favorite games. This is the only game that I don’t own and haven’t played multiple times (yet), but it left a massive first impression with its novel historical theme and focused gameplay. I love that the cards have multiple uses and provide a deeper decision space beyond just deciding which card to play but how to play them.

#42 Deception: Murder in Hong Kong

Recommended for: Everyone

Deception takes the ever popular Werewolf/Mafia style of social deduction gameplay, combines it with the basic premise of Clue, and gives it just enough mechanical framework to satisfy everyone involved. The cognitive deducers can feel clever as they narrow down the probable weapon and key evidence, and the social influencers can steer the discussion and cast suspicion.

#41 Decrypto

Recommended for: Everyone

Decrypto blows the ever popular Codenames out of the water for me. I love how the clues you offer contain long-term consequences. The game forces you to think outside the box by avoiding new clues that are to closely related to old clues. One of my favorite moments is during a tie-breaker when teams must guess the exact words of their opponents.

If you enjoy Codenames, you have gotta try Decrypto!

Next Page: Games 40-31

The post Top 50 Board Games: Nick’s Cream of the Crop appeared first on Bitewing Games.