While the term ‘Spin-Off’ might inherently sound like a lesser version of its source material, movies such as Creed (Rocky) and Logan (X-Men), TV shows such as The Mandalorian (Star Wars) and Better Call Saul (Breaking Bad), books including The Lord of the Rings trilogy (The Hobbit) and the Wax and Wayne Series (Mistborn), and video games including Super Mario Bros (Donkey Kong) and Super Smash Bros (Nintendo) would beg to differ.

The world of board games is also rife with spin-offs, whether a publisher is milking the cash cow of a popular IP or a designer is exploring their clever concept from another angle, or both!  Our consumerist society lives and dies by a constant blend of nostalgia and novelty.  The benefit of a great spin-off game is that often it can end up being even better than the source that inspired it! 

In celebration of our upcoming publication, Trailblazers—which is itself a spin-off of the critically acclaimed Pipeline—we’ll explore my Top 10 Spin-Off Games and how they iterate on their parent designs.  And be sure to stick around for the end where I’ll reveal new juicy info and images on Trailblazers by Ryan Courtney!

7 Wonders Duel

7 Wonders is a card drafting, civilization building game that took the gaming world by storm in 2010.  It went on to win dozens of nominations and awards including the coveted Kennerspiel Des Jahres.  Players love how quick and crunchy the decisions are as well as the various strategies one can pursue from crushing military to crafty science.

Five years later, the designer of 7 Wonders (Antoine Bauza) teamed up with another prolific creator (Bruno Cathala) to bring us a 2-player dueling version of his classic in 7 Wonders Duel.  Duel takes the core civ-building formula and turns the experience into a more tense, cut-throat, and interactive competition.  It’s why I haven’t played regular 7 Wonders in years.  While one player threatens to end the game immediately with a military victory, the other might be sneaking their way to a sudden science win.  Every card you draft from the pyramid display opens up another opportunity for your opponent.  And the expansions to this one add even more juicy layers to the strategy.

Blitzkrieg/Caesar

Staying on the topic of 2-player versions of beloved concepts, Blitzkrieg is a 2 player Paolo Mori design that shares much in common with his older 3-5 player game, Dogs of War.  Both games explore an interesting combination of worker placement tug-of-war where you’ll commit your piece to a region to pull a region marker in your direction, and the space you place your piece on top of will often grant an immediate bonus.  

Dogs of War remains one of my favorite games, but it really only works with 4 or 5 players.  Blitzkrieg manages to offer me a similar tension of dangling carrots and shifting momentum in a lightning fast 20 minutes that only requires one more player.  That’s why both of these games ended up right next to each other on my most recent Top 50 Games of All Time post.  We’ll see if 2022’s Caesar—the spin-off of this spin-off—manages to also reach such lofty heights, but so far it’s looking very promising.

L.A.M.A. Dice

L.A.M.A Dice is a 2021 release that is based on the popular card game L.A.M.A., yet it hasn’t officially made its way to North America yet.   Hopefully that will change soon, as we’ve found L.A.M.A. Dice to be a hoot at the table.  This is a particularly surprising redemption story for L.A.M.A. considering my initial impressions of the card game weren’t too enthusiastic.  I’ll be sharing my full thoughts on this game soon, but here’s a teaser for now:

While L.A.M.A. Dice plays out similarly to L.A.M.A. the card game, it also has some key differences that make it the more lively, loud, and laugh-inducing game of the two.  Where the card game is more about quiet, subtle, and private hand management, the dice game is about clackety rolls, foolish decisions, public humiliations, and occasionally glorious triumphs.  While there is of course a big old dollop of luck to the game of L.A.M.A., the dice game transforms that luck into a collective experience of laughs, groans, and cheers.  And because it comes in at a breezy 20 minutes, that means that you can get in, have a colorful little riot, get out, and be on to the next game in the blink of an eye.

Patchwork

One cannot discuss board game spin-offs without discussing the legendary duo of A Feast for Odin and Patchwork.  The legend goes that while esteemed designer Uwe Rosenberg was crafting and polishing his magnum opus—the dense and sprawling polyomino worker placement game A Feast for Odin—he began to toy with a smaller 2-player design that focuses solely on the polyominoes.  

In this case, the spin-off ended up releasing a whole two years before its source material, but the end result was the same.  We got two excellent games from a master chef who went on to craft many more polyomino designs.  While Patchwork and A Feast for Odin cater to very different crowds, you never know if these two might be the gateway drug for polyomino lovers into the realm of heavy Euro games.

Pandemic: Iberia

Pandemic is an industry phenomenon that likewise has a cornucopia of spin-off titles thanks to its monstrous popularity and approachability as a cooperative game.  While many Pandemic spin-offs would be great options for this list, I opted for my favorite of the bunch.  This one features the opportunity to develop rail lines for faster travel plus a preventative buffer action of distributing water.

2 new actions, a different board, and a few rules tweaks doesn’t seem like it would make a big difference.  Yet Pandemic: Iberia is the best version of any Pandemic spinoff or copy-cat that I’ve ever played.  The stakes are raised, the strategy is deepened, the tension is thickened, and our love for Pandemic is rekindled. 

Schotten Totten 2

I see many folks point to Battle Line / Schotten Totten as their favorite 2-player game and/or favorite Knizia design of all time.  Who can blame them?  This clever 2-player card game of forming poker sets across a battle line is ripe with tough choices, narrow defeats, and tight victories.  

So what does a sequel to this masterpiece possibly have to offer?  Surprisingly, a lot.  Schotten Totten 2 approaches this tactical card game with a few interesting wrinkles that dramatically change the overall experience.  Both players have asymmetric objectives and abilities as one defends their wall while the other tries to break through.  Furthermore, each section of the wall features a unique formation requirement to keep you on your toes.  This one continues to grow on me with more plays, which is why it’s absolutely worthy of this list.

Brass: Birmingham

Here we have another spin-off that seemingly split it’s fanbase right down the middle as to which one they prefer.  But more than anything, I typically hear that fans of Brass are happy to play either Lancashire (the original) or Birmingham (the spin-off), and that’s the mark of a great spin-off based on a solid classic.

Birmingham offers a few twists to the Brass gameplay including a new scout action to obtain wild cards, several new industry types, and an additional commodity—the ever precious beer.  It seems that folks who like more flexibility opt for Birmingham while those who glutton for punishment prefer Lancashire, but you really can’t go wrong either way.

The Crew: Mission Deep Sea

The Crew: Mission Deep Sea is perhaps the only spin-off on this list where many fans claim that it makes the original game obsolete in their collection.  That’s only because Mission Deep Sea possesses a more elegant mission structure that provides infinitely more possibilities.  This is another one I’ll be discussing further soon (in an upcoming first-impressions post), but since you’re here I might as well spoil my conclusion:

Much more than The Quest for Planet Nine, Mission Deep Sea feels like a game I can endlessly revisit (even after beating all the missions) because I’ll never see the same combination of objective cards.  Essentially, you can astutely consider Mission Deep Sea the Toy Story 2, the Spider-man 2, or the Shrek 2 of card games.  It takes a bona-fide classic and does it even better.

Yellow & Yangtze

Tigris & Euphrates is one of my favorite games of all time thanks to abyss of layered strategy and brilliant interactions that exist in its box.  While T&E has existed as a holy grail game for decades now, Reiner Knizia boldly decided to create a sister design to it only a few short years ago.  

While I consider the original to be a perfect experience, it seems as though every T&E complaint that someone might 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 in Yellow & Yangtze.  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.  It’s so brilliantly distinct that I consistently have a commitment crisis just deciding which of these two favorites I should play next.

Tournament at Avalon

Some designs just understand how to embrace chaos and capture its essence within a ruleset that still manages to make you feel strategically clever.  Tournament at Camelot is one such design, and this trick-taking card game is further improved upon with the spin-off: Tournament at Avalon.  I haven’t even played the original game, but I understand enough to know that what Avalon adds to experience is something I couldn’t live without.  These improvements include more strategic flexibility for when you can play your wild cards plus even wackier powers that help make the most of this zany premise.  Check out my full review of this spin-off here.

Honorable Mentions

• Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion
• Pandemic Legacy
• Ra: The Dice Game
• The Quest for El Dorado: The Golden Temples
• Undaunted: North Africa
• Curious Cargo

Trailblazers—An Exciting New Spin-off

During my Most Anticipated Games of 2022 post, I shared how Trailblazers is to Pipeline as Patchwork is to A Feast for Odin.  Some might cry that I’m doing Curious Cargo a disservice by not including it in this comparison, as it is technically another spin-off of Pipeline that is even exclusively a 2-player game (similar to Patchwork).  That said, designer Ryan Courtney approached the design of Trailblazers in a dramatically different way from how he designed Curious Cargo.  So let’s explore a little bit more of what makes Trailblazers unique from its windy pipe siblings.

From day one, Ryan has approached the creation of Trailblazers with two priorities in mind:

1. Make the game rules as simple and approachable as possible (contrast this to Curious Cargo which was intended to cram as much brain-burning, decision-making complexity into a small-box as possible)
2. Develop compelling solo modes to make this a solo-friendly game as much as it is a family-friendly game

These two design goals have been like a guiding North Star through the entire development of Trailblazers.  We’ll save the discussion of that second priority for next month, but for now let’s explore what makes Trailblazers approachable for anyone yet satisfying for everyone.

Many folks will point to the spatial puzzle aspect of Pipeline and Curious Cargo (the windy pipe domino tiles) as their favorite element of those designs.  That’s because there is something inherently satisfying about finding and fitting the perfect tiles together to establish an elaborate network of routes.  Pipeline utilizes this puzzle to fit into a larger economic challenge where the spatial puzzle aspect simply becomes: “build your pipes as long as possible to help you refine oil.”  Curious Cargo cranks the spatial brutality up to eleven by giving you less flexibility in your tile options and more demands in what exactly needs to connect to where in order to ship and receive cargo of the curious kind.

Trailblazers features the same type of domino tiles (albeit these are cards, not tiles, and trails, not pipes or conveyer belts), yet this time the game steps completely out of the way and gives you a wide open field of endless possibilities.  Gone are the economic considerations and shipping demands.  Cast aside are the brain-melting conversions and pesky rules restrictions.  Here, you’ll simply be drafting two cards from a hand of options and arranging and layering them however you’d like.

The other side of the coin that really gives Trailblazers a distinct flavor is the objective of the game: to construct loops that start and end at a campsite of the matching trail color.  Like I mentioned previously, Pipeline asks its players to build long networks, Curious Cargo demands that they establish very specific and deliberate connections, but Trailblazers simply requests that your adventurous routes return back to their square camp card eventually.  Yet between that time period of now and eventually (or more specifically, before the end of the game), you can blaze your trails however you’d like.  

It seems almost too loose and free to be interesting, but the tension of the game is quickly uncovered when you must decide how far you wish to push your luck.  How long and elaborate and winding are you going to make your trail before you focus on connecting it back to camp?  How many loops are you going to invest your precious turns in before the final round of the game sneaks up on you and demands you complete them all?  A loop that is 99% complete is a loop that will score zero points at the end of the game.

Yet this push-your-luck pillar of Trailblazers is exactly why a game with rules as simple as “draft two cards and place them however you want” is still satisfying for more ambitious and experienced spatial puzzlers.  I consider myself a relative veteran, having played Ryan’s spatial puzzlers—including Trailblazers—many times.  Yet I’ve managed to lose the game to complete newcomers because I flew too close to the sun and got burned by my lofty ambitions while my opponents played smarter and safer.  And for a game that is over in the blink of an eye—usually about 30 minutes—I’m able to laugh at my failures rather than painfully regret my poor decisions or resent a stroke of bad luck.

That’s the beauty of Trailblazers for me.  It provides all the juicy spatial puzzling and brain-burning strategy that Ryan Courtney fans (such as myself) have come to love, yet it’s also a game that I can introduce to anybody and not completely crush them at thanks to its press-your-luck simplicity.  For a hobbyist who still can’t get enough of Pipeline (and its zesty new expansion) and Curious Cargo, Trailblazers is absolutely my kind of spin-off game.

Want to follow Trailblazers all the way to its Q2 Kickstarter launch? Be sure to subscribe to the Bitewing Games newsletter where we’ll continue to reveal more art, components, and details over the coming weeks.

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 Spin-off Board Games 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.

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.

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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