The year 2025 marks the 40th anniversary of Dr Reiner Knizia’s career as a board game designer – his first published game Complica was released in 1985 in a magazine (although he’d self-published games before then as well).
Over the last 40 years, Knizia has designed and published over 800 games, many of which are critically acclaimed. Put simply, Reiner Knizia is the landscape on which all other modern designers build their houses.
To celebrate Knizia’s career and back catalogue, Meeple Mountain are taking things back to basics to consider the ABC of Reiner Knizia: one game for each of the 26 letters of the alphabet.
This time: The Letter ‘A’.
A – Age of War (2014)
But what about 2003’s Amun-Re I hear you ask? Yes, it’s only the first letter of the alphabet and already we’re off to a controversial start. Hear us out though: whilst undoubtedly good and deserving of Alley Cat Games’ recent Amun-Re 20th anniversary edition, Amun-Re isn’t in Knizia’s top 3 auction games. It’s not even his best auction game set in ancient Egypt (I’m looking at you letter ‘R’).
Age of War on the other hand… well, that’s one of Knizia’s strongest small and speedy dice games, which is quite the achievement in a very populous category. A reimplementation of his 2006 design Risk Express, Age of War sees players competing for castles in feudal Japan by rolling and re-rolling dice to match symbols on castle cards.
Whilst Knizia rarely designs games where you give another player something bad (‘take that debilitating effect’), he regularly provides opportunities for players to steal from each other (‘I’ll take that, thank you very much’), and Age of War exemplifies this. Collect all of a clan’s castles and they’re safe but until that point your ownership is on shaky ground. It’s a game of weighing up risks (pun intended) and juggling the luck of the roll, with enough ambition and hubris to keep things entertaining.
Age of War epitomises the Knizia design philosophy: simple rules, surprising depths. Whilst ultimately you’re just throwing dice and hoping to get the matching symbols, there’s plenty of fun to be had in its tiny box as you weigh up probabilities and attempt to steal your friends’ castles. “Like many of Reiner Knizia’s games, the rules are so deceptively simple that they’re almost insulting at first glance,” says Dan Thurot of Space Biff, “as he has done in the past, Knizia has made a game with a brain-dead simple ruleset that nonetheless allows for lots of fun, discussion, and laughter.”
Not everyone is a fan, however, and criticisms include the randomness of dice rolling and the tendency for it to go on too long. As Nick Murray, founder of Bitewing Games, dentist and Knizia-aficionado, puts it, “never have I seen a game so effortlessly replicate that sinking feeling of inevitable failure more consistently than Age of War”. Despite the critics, the game remains popular with its fans and now that it’s out of print used copies of the game go for two or three times its original RRP.
Bringing his A-game
Despite being the start of the alphabet, ‘A’ is a middle tier letter for Knizia. Alongside Age of War you can find a couple of great, some good and a few lesser titles. ‘A’ games we’d like to highlight include:
Amun-Re: 20th Anniversary Edition – Okay, so we can’t not mention this modern update of Knizia’s 2003 auction game. Amun-Re supposedly emerged from the same development process as 1999’s Ra – after taking up board game design full time, Knizia wrestled with a 3-hour Egyptian game that wasn’t working. Stripping much of the design back he produced Ra, before later revisiting his original workings to create Amun-Re. The result is his most complex auction game, one where the auctions share the spotlight with a devious bit of area control. Read our Amun-Re: 20th Anniversary Edition review here.
Art Robbery – A small card game about distributing the loot after a successful heist whilst shoring up your alibi, Art Robbery might be a minor Knizia but there’s enough smarts about it to warrant a look. As Meeple Mountain’s Andrew Lynch said in his review, “The pace is snappy, the box is small, the rules are simple, and it’s deeply interactive, if a bit too chaotic above three players for my taste… I don’t like Take That games and I think this is a blast”.
Axio – Dare we say that 2017’s Axio is the superior title in the Ingenious line? A controversial opinion perhaps (and the jury is currently out on 2024’s 3D version of Ingenious), but the use of pyramids (ancient Egypt again!) to fill gaps and score multiple colours/shapes at once makes the game incredibly interactive as you try and prevent other players from placing pyramids. Not bad for a spin-off that originated from a trademark dispute.
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And so the first stop on our journey through the A to Z of Reiner Knizia draws to a close. How do you think we did? Did we miss worthy ‘A’ games that should have been mentioned? Do you disagree with Age of War being our top choice for the letter ‘A’? Let us know in the comments below!
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