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 ‘B’.
B – Battle Line (2000)
Knizia’s oeuvre in B-major includes many strong contenders, but it’s 2000’s Battle Line that claims the spot with its tense two-player experience.
In Battle Line, opponents play cards to their side of a line of 9 flags, winning a flag if they have the strongest poker hands of three cards assigned to it. The player who first claims 5 of the 9 flags or 3 flags in a row wins the game. Spicing the mix are tactics cards that mess with the rules, as well as the ability to claim a flag by proving that your opponent can’t win it, saving you from wasting cards.
Any game that’s continued to be in print for 25 years has clearly earned its place at the ‘Great Board Games’ table and Battle Line has received much praise over the years. Matt Thrower of There Will Be Games reckons it’s one of the best two player games ever, describing it as a simple game that “hides a wide ocean of absolute agony”.
Sometimes compared to playing “nine simultaneous hands of poker”, Battle Line is a game of bluffing, outmanoeuvring and skill. In 2011 Mark of The Boardgaming Life took the opportunity to ask the great man for Battle Line strategy tips. Whilst Knizia claims not to be the “strongest authority”, he pointed out that “the outer flanks are less important with respect to the opponent’s ability to get three flags in a row… there is specific importance on flag #3 and flag #7”. Then again he also said in that same interview that “there will not be any additional Battle Line themes or enhancements published”, so he’s not always right (just ask Richard Garfield!).
Battle Line is a classic example of Knizia’s tendency to revisit core design frameworks. It’s the offspring of two of his earlier designs (1995’s East-West and The Fifth Column) but is really just a minor tweak of 1999’s Schotten Totten, which originally had a comedy Scots Highland setting. The Battle Line line added the tactics cards and moved the conflict back to the time of Alexander the Great and subsequently forwards again for 2017’s Battle Line: Medieval.
Why did Knizia feel the need to rework Schotten Totten less than a year after it was published? The decision stems from the difference between the European and American markets and gaming culture at the turn of the century. Whereas the German market wanted the abstract purity of Schotten Totten, Knizia has said that “the American market wants more complexity and details. So I designed the Tactics deck [of Battle Line] specifically for this purpose”, which he says gives “more of a wargame flavor and more possibilities to plunge into the theme”. Whilst some criticise Knizia for seemingly churning out reimplementations of earlier games with different ‘pasted on themes’, this distinction between global audiences highlights his passion for creating games and moments of fun for everyone, as well as the importance of knowing your audience. It’s something we’ll see more later when discussing the letters ‘J’ and ‘K’.
Whilst largely the same game, the contrast between the poe-faced yet ‘thematic’ Battle Line and the silly abstraction of Schotten Totten became even more apparent when publisher IELLO switched the comedy Scottish highlanders to comedy Scottish chicken highlanders for 2016’s reprint and 2020’s sequel Schotten-Totten 2. Funny fowl are also something of a recurring theme for Knizia and we’ll see them returning later on in our alphabet too.
The act of playing cards to central columns was clearly on Knizia’s mind around this period: 1999’s Lost Cities takes a similar starting idea to create something very different (indeed you can play Lost Cities using the Battle Line cards). Beyond Knizia’s own reworkings, you can also feel the influence of Battle Line’s design in games such as Hanamikoji and Air, Land and Sea.
More Un-beta-able Knizia’s
‘B’ is one of Knizia’s stronger letters and several excellent games were pushed aside to get to our final choice of Battle Line. We’d like to salute them here:
Babylonia – Conventional wisdom has it that Knizia released an outstanding trilogy of tile-laying games in the late 1990’s and then followed them up with a sister trilogy twenty years later. It’s an engaging story (if lacking nuance and missing a whole bunch of great games released in between), and 2019’s Babylonia is felt by many to be the best game of the sequel trilogy, building on both Samurai and Through the Desert. Meeple Mountain’s founder and editor-in-chief Andy Matthews has even said that it’s “one of my favorite Knizia games”.
Beowulf: The Legend – A hidden gem in Knizia’s back catalogue, the underlying skeleton of 2005’s Beowulf: The Legend might not be hidden for much longer due to its recent reimplementation and crowdfunding success as Ego. Yet many Kniziaphiles love the richly thematic original and how “Knizia wants you to know that you aren’t as good as Beowulf”. In his fascinating discussion of Knizia’s mastery of theme, Michael Barnes of No High Scores says that “the game doesn’t need flavor text, excessive detail or elaborate mechanics to drive its narrative toward its thematic goal of having the player experience heroic fantasy as participator, an observer and most importantly an aspirant”.
Blue Lagoon – The oft-overshadowed sister in the same tile-laying trilogy as Babylonia, 2018’s Blue Lagoon deserves more recognition for its bright blend of Through the Desert and 2009’s Zombiegeddon. Former Meeple Mountain associate editor Ashley Gariepy coined the term ‘the Knizia effect’: “a board game that plays quickly and has painfully simple rules, yet has a hidden level of strategy that isn’t apparent until late in the game. As such, you feel compelled to play the game a second time to better apply this strategy”. Blue Lagoon, she says, “does nothing but embrace the Knizia effect”.
Blue Moon – Meeple Mountain author K. David Ladage is a big fan of Blue Moon, saying in his review of the Blue Moon: Legends set that it’s “a nearly perfect game”. This 2004 two-player duelling card game is often compared to Magic: The Gathering. In contrast to Magic, however, Blue Moon is not a Collectable Card Game (CCG) – all expansions have fixed sets of cards rather than a random selection – making Blue Moon the very first Living Card Game (LCG). Richard Garfield showed Knizia Magic when he was originally designing it and was advised by Knizia to forget about it, that the game would never fly. Perhaps Blue Moon was a reaction to that moment of poor advice!
Bretton Woods – Back in the 1980’s, play-by-mail games were popular and Knizia ran a zine called Postspillion. One game he designed for the zine was Bretton Woods, which started in 1987 and, according to Wikipedia (the only source we’ve been able to find about it), the game is still going to this day which would make it one of the longest running games ever. Let us know in the comments if you know anything more about this intriguing game!
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And so the second stop on our journey through the A to Z of Reiner Knizia draws to a close. How did we do? Would you have chosen differently? What great ‘B’ games have we missed? Let us know in the comments below and check out the rest of our Reiner Knizia Alphabet here!
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