Official Reiner Knizia Fan Club Thread

All this talk about Mr Knizia's games recently shows he really deserves his own thread. His games have always been popular on this site anyways.

What are your favorites he designed?

What are your least favorites he designed?

Which of his designs have you played the most?

What do you think is his most underrated design?

Also, What KNIZIA's have you been PLAYING?

Blue Moon and Blue Moon City may be my faves... No, Samurai is my fave. Definitely. No wait, Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation is his best design, Yes, that one.

I believe the Scarab/Minotaur Lords card games to be criminally underrated. As is Indigo, the only title of his which I currently own and still quite enjoy despite it being quite light. But it's definitely a fabulous family game that is downright gorgeous as one would expect from Ravensburger's production values. I love that company and they rarely disappoint.

I can't stand Beowulf: The Legend.

He's made a fuck ton of stinkers though. Objectively poor games. They have snippets of a good mechanism, and then X game company decided to make a game out of it based on his name alone. It didn't help Knizia or the company that produced them, in the long term.
MMM Brains... the only good thing about that game was the plastic brain tokens it contained for example.

It's been a Knizia-fest over here. I need to get T & E out of its unjust toad status, but in the meantime these have seen action in the past few weeks:

Modern Art
Through The Desert
Quest for El Dorado

These have all been very successful family games. Blue Lagoon will probably be next.

I've been playing a decent amount of Yellow & Yangtze lately. I still prefer T&E, but Y&Y is simply easier to teach to newcomers and has so many individual clever ideas.

I believe Sakura, his Osprey published 2017 release, is quite good and underrated.

Tigris & Euphrates was my first and still my strongest love. I played it pretty early in my modern gaming career, and it just blew me away.

I'm really liking Yellow & Yangtze, although I'm terrible at it. The old T&E strategies just don't work. What I really like about Y&Y is how accessible it is. I've had no trouble explaining it to players of all levels, and they grasp it just fine. Then they beat me, and I'm sure I must be teaching it wrong.

I think his best design is either Medici or Loco (reprinted numerous times under many different names). They both are so pure and simple; it's like minimalist game design that strips everything away to just the essence of play. That is very hard to do in most fields. I think they also really show his love of mathematics without feeling "mathy."

For underrated, I used to say Stephenson's Rocket because people rarely talked about it. However, Grail Games finished a successful Kickstarter reprint, so I imagine it will pop back into the conversation soon. Instead, I'll go with Orongo. A clever race game that's a combination of Africa and Traumfabrik. There are some minor issues with the graphic design making the board-state less readable than it should be, but you can get used to it and/or modify the board so that it's not a problem. It's currently on close-out at many online retailers, so I highly recommend picking up a copy for cheap.

I'm not sure what I would say is my least favorite of his designs. That's not to say he hasn't made some klunkers, because I've certainly played a few. I just tend to forget about them and move on. Plus, he has such a great hit to miss ratio that anytime I don't like one, I tend to think the problem is with me rather than the game.

I think I have more fun when I play RA, but I'd say Tigris & Euphrates is my favorite and the better game. It's also the game of his I've probably played the most. Especially if we count the old BGG implementation.

I've never been a fan of his LotR Co-op that everyone else seems to love. I recall the only thing stopping it from being a solitaire puzzle was not seeing everyone's cards. Which at the time I thought was really lame so didn't bother with co-ops for a long time afterwards. Last time I played was probably 2002 so maybe I'd feel differently now that I've matured as a gamer and have actually read the books. LotR The Confrontation on the other hand is excellent and I'm always up for a game.
Probably my next lowest rated after that is Marco Polo Expedition. Been too long to remember what I didn't like but it was around the time I was getting sick of Euro-of-the-week so might change my mind on that one too.

Not sure about underrated but Colossal Arena is fun. Haven't played Keltis Das Kartenspiel in a long time but I enjoyed it more than Lost Cities which is itself a classic so that's saying something.

What are your favorites he designed?
HANDS DOWN, Star Trek: Expeditions is the best he's ever done.
Through the Desert is fantastic. Love it. Wish I'd never given away my copy.
Formula Motor Racing is awesome.
Lost Cities is meh, but entertaining enough.
Whoowasit is fucking rad. One of my all time fave fam games.
En Garde is fun. Nasty.
Criss Cross is a great little soloish dice game. I just hate the symbols he chose.
Little Italy is fun, cool bits, but gets old FAST.


What are your least favorites he designed?

Tigris and Euphrates. Fuck that game a thousand times with a diseased dildo. I hate it.
Atlanteon should have resulted in his expulsion from every list of "great ludists" ever.
Gravediggers is a disgrace.


Which of his designs have you played the most?
Hands down, Star Trek: Expeditions. Still don't have a perfect score after 20+ plays. Gary Sax is sending me a copy, so I'll play it some more.

What do you think is his most underrated design?
Definitely ST: Expeditions. I'm the world's biggest fan despite not being a major Trekkie.

What KNIZIA's have you been PLAYING?
Criss Cross is my only current Knizia game.

Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation is a gem of a game. It's so tight and so tightly wound with the source material. I haven't played it in a long time, but that's only because I haven't really played two player games in ages. It is very good.

But my favourite Knizia is hands down his coop LotR. Last summer I started playing it with my eldest (then 5 and 8), and it fucking delivers. It helps that we have read The Hobbit to both of them and LotR to the eldest, but there is just so must story and tension in the game. But it also has a special place in my heart because it was the first game I bought with my then girlfriend now wife. We were on our first vacation together in a cabin in Norway in 2004, I think, and had brought a bunch of games. One was Mag*Blast which is an ok fun space battle game. But the thing about it is that not only can it take a while to lose even when you know you're losing, but you have to make dumb laser noises when playing attack cards. It is, in not so many words, a break up waiting to happen. But in a small bookstore we found the Norwegian version of LotR and bought it because I had heard good things about the doctor. And the fact that it was not just great, but also a coop made it the perfect game for the occasion.

You can say what you want about alpha player and silly rules about card secrecy, but those are problems in your group, not in the game which is downright awesome.

I'd love to find a Bokmål version of LotR: the Confrontation.

Been thinking about picking up Modern Art and Tigris and Euphrates...

Gary Sax wrote: Been thinking about picking up Modern Art and Tigris and Euphrates...

Neither is good with 2 players if you're planning to play with your wife.

What are your favorites he designed?

T&E, Modern Art, Ra, Samurai, LOTR, Taj Mahal, Quest fot El Dorado, Royal Turf/Winner’s Circle

What are your least favorites he designed?

Ingenious, Kingdoms, Ilium, Notre Dame, Loco/Flinke Plinke/Quandary, any of his zombie/Lovecraft games and other obvious contract work.

Which of his designs have you played the most?

Ra, LOTR and T&E.

What do you think is his most underrated design?

Tower of Babel, The Hobbit dice games, Amun-Re, Beowulf, Dragonland,
Municipium

What KNIZIA's have you been PLAYING?

Blue Lagoon, Medici, High Society, Royal Turf/Winner’s Circle, Planet Rush (Tower of Babel)

There has not been near enough appreciation for Winner’s Circle in this thread. It runs a touch long, and the last race can be a slog if the winner is already guaranteed from big bets in the first two races, but nailing the right roll to burst to victory or hobble the leader is a precious feeling indeed.

Looking at the used prices, I am regretting having essentially given away the small and large versions of Lord of the Rings: the Confrontation

I used to have the small and large versions of Confrontation. Ended up just keeping the smaller version since I didn't like the expansion characters anyways. They didn't feel as thematic or balanced. The original game Kinzia made is perfectly balanced (as all things should be).