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 a magazine in 1985 (although he’d self-published games before then as well).
Since then, 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 ‘E’.
E – Euphrat & Tigris (1997)
We’re bending the rules slightly for ‘E’ to suggest 1997’s Euphrat & Tigris, released in English 2 years later as Tigris & Euphrates. Since Meeple Mountain is primarily an English-language site, we’ll refer to the game from now on by its English-release name, but just know that the game is actually an ‘E’!
Regarded by many hobbyists as Knizia’s masterpiece, Tigris & Euphrates is a far cry from the llamas, cards and dice we’ve encountered so far in our alphabet. In fact, users of BoardGameGeek have rated it as Knizia’s ‘heaviest’ game and whilst we’re doubtful over the use of the ‘weight’ scale and terminology, in this case it’s fairly accurate for multiple meanings of the term. It’s an uncompromising story of civilisations rising and falling, with players expanding their kingdoms tile-by-tile whilst looking for opportunities to kneecap their opponents. Throw in some typically Knizian rules about scoring and you have a game that’s just as relevant in today’s hobby as it was on release a quarter of a century ago.
In his upcoming review of Tigris & Euphrates, Meeple Mountain’s own Thomas Wells discusses the impact the game has had, saying: “Entire branches of game design—including games by designer Reiner Knizia himself — have forked from this ur-text, yet none have quite managed to replicate it. It has quirks, panache, personality, and, like a hoary tome full of forbidden arcana, it juices up its players with the hubristic promises of power. It’s a game where you will climb high, but if you don’t watch your feet, down you’ll go into a pit of punji sticks.”
Many people criticise Knizia games as essentially themeless, something Meeple Mountain’s Kurt Refling joked about with his theme-paste shortage satirical piece. Mark Wilson of Bumbling Through Dungeons defines the great Knizia games as “abstract + chaos”, citing Tigris & Euphrates as the poster child, a mostly “cerebral, abstract experience” with the occasional moment of player-driven bombast. For some Knizia games this assessment is accurate (although fewer than you might imagine), but for Tigris & Euphrates… well, let’s briefly explore Tigris & Euphrates and its use of theme.
All games are abstractions. As Michael Heron of Meeple Like Us argues, however, finding the right level of abstraction is critical for a game’s success and Tigris & Euphrates demonstrates Knizia’s mastery of this. Spanning some of the two thousand years of fluctuating Sumerian city-states and the birth of civilisation around the titular rivers, the game doesn’t deal in the blood, dirt and swords of its setting. Instead, it takes a wide angle approach to history. Tigris & Euphrates “provides a distant bird’s-eye view of a struggle that spans hundreds, if not thousands of years,” says Dan Thurot of Space-Biff, “and captures the spirit of that struggle so perfectly that I’d be surprised if Ur-du-kuga isn’t grinning like a madman in his grave that somebody finally got it right.” Few tabletop games earn the level of analysis and thematic exploration as Tigris & Euphrates has received over the past quarter of a century. “It feels sweeping,” says Heron, “like watching the slow churn of history unfold on your tabletop… Even the self-destructiveness of human nature is captured at this level of abstraction”.
Back in 2014 Michael Barnes of No High Scores wrote a fascinating article about Knizia’s use of theme. It’s well worth a read, as are Heron and Thurot’s reviews of Tigris & Euphrates. If you value miniatures, flavour text and illustrations then Knizia games aren’t thematic, but, Barnes argues, “if by theme you want and expect a game to provide a formalized, abstract explication of more literary and interpretative contexts and meaning, then some of Knizia’s best games reveal him to be a far greater master of expressing theme in games than any of Fantasy Flight Games’ house designers”.
Tigris & Euphrates is a monument of board gaming, however its impact on the tabletop world extends far further than just game design. In the 1990’s, Scott Alden was a video game programmer who designed a news site for computer games called 3DGameGeek.com. Around 1998 Alden became interested in board games, and in particular the German-style games that were revolutionising the hobby at the time. The game that hooked him more than any other was Tigris & Euphrates and, as a result, he became an “uber fan of board gaming”. Together with Derk Solko he used the core of 3DGameGeek to create BoardGameGeek, what is today the internet’s largest resource for board games. Bringing the story full circle, the structure of BoardGameGeek was later used to create RPGGeek and VideoGameGeek.
Sadly, there isn’t a single Knzia title in the top ranked 100 games on BoardGameGeek. At the time of writing Tigris & Euphrates is Knizia’s second highest ranked game, sitting at number 123 and only a couple of steps behind 2017’s The Quest for El Dorado. Whilst the Top 100 is influenced by recency (only two older games currently rank higher, Crokinole and El Grande), Tigris & Euphrates was recently inducted into the BoardGameGeek Hall of Fame, which was launched to celebrate the site’s 25th anniversary. In the announcement, Matthew Jude of the This Game Is Broken podcast said that it’s “one of the most devastating wargames out there… what a magical experience, infinitely replayable, always different, kind of weird to learn and understand, one of the most fundamental examples of what makes Knizia such a fantastic designer”.
Exploring Extra Enchanting Entertainments
‘E’ isn’t the most populous letter in the Knizia alphabet but there are several great games that we’ve passed over in our choice of Euphrat & Tigris. Here are some excellent examples that are worth exploring:
East-West – A curious precursor to Schotten-Totten and Battle Line (featured when we covered ‘B’ in our Knizia alphabet), East-West was released in 1995 within the covers of Knizia’s book Blazing Aces!: A Fistful of Family Card Games. Using a reduced standard deck of cards, two players battle over three shared cards (what would later be known as ‘flags’) to make the best poker hands. Essentially themeless, the game’s title originally made us think of spies, the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall which happened only 6 years before the book was published, however the book’s title was originally Kartenspiele im Wilden Westen (‘Cardgames of the Wild West’) so we clearly got the wrong genre!
EGO – An updated and reworked edition of a minor gem of the Knizia catalogue, EGO has yet to be released having only been crowdfunded in late 2024. Based on 2005’s Beowulf: The Legend, EGO is a curious game of alien auctions and risk taking. We’re looking forward to this one arriving later this year.
Einfach Genial 3D – Released only last year, Einfach Genial 3D is the latest game in the Ingenious line and has quickly become one of our favourites in the series. It’s a “fantastic sequel-of-sorts,” says Meeple Mountain’s Tom Franklin in his review of Einfach Genial 3D, “It doesn’t replace Ingenious so much as it augments the best parts of the original and creates a familiar-yet-different version with its own unique strategies… I cannot recommend Einfach Genial 3D enough. It really is that good”.
En Garde – If you pushed us for an English-language release for the letter ‘E’ then En Garde might well be it. Admittedly, the title is French, but it’s a decent card game of fencing attacks and parries that only suffers for not being themed around Westley and Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride. 2025 sees an updated version of this 1993 classic, themed around Ultraman. According to its BoardGameGeek listing, it will bring “immense enjoyment to Ultraman enthusiasts, just like you and me”. Those of us who aren’t Ultraman enthusiasts might just stick with the original!
Equinox – The large and gorgeous current endpoint of a Knizia reimplementation chain, 2021’s Equinox can trace its ancestry back to 1996 and Knizia’s Grand National Derby. Equinox’s modern reimagining is a deluxe offspring of this betting series, all magical creatures, oversized cards, tactile betting stones and unnecessary cloth bags. It might be over-produced and slightly unwieldy, but at the right player count it’s an underrated gem. It’s a “chaos factory” at 4-5 players according to Meeple Mountain’s Andrew Lynch in his review of Equinox, but “played with two or three, it’s a delightfully sharp and thoughtful little game”.
Excape / Exxtra / Rapido – Recommended to us by Meeple Mountain’s founder and editor-in-chief Andy Matthews, Excape is a weirdly colourful experience for a game with a cover that shows people fleeing for a fire escape. The odd contrast is irrelevant, however, since the game is a purely abstract experience and involves rolling dice to move your marker to the end of a track, bumping your opponent’s dice off the movement chart without being bumped yourself. A minor Knizia dice-roller, but one that’s strong enough to have seen multiple editions throughout the 2000s since its original release in 1998.
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And so we exit the ‘E’s. Was it exactly what you expected, have we exceeded your estimations or do you eagerly envisage our evisceration? What ‘E’ game would you have chosen? Let us know in the comments below and check out the rest of the Reiner Knizia Alphabet here!
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