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 ‘F’.
F – FITS (2009)
As we saw with the Letter ‘C’, Knizia often observes the gaming world and then delivers his own spin on a genre. FITS (‘Fill In The Spaces’) is what happens when he takes a look at one of the most influential and best selling video games of all time: Tetris.
In FITS, players flip a central card, find the corresponding polyomino shapes of their colour and then slide it down their sloping boards (the equivalent of the Tetris playfield). The first board is straightforward – fill as many rows as possible, with every empty space costing you points – but over the following three boards Knizia introduces individual spaces that score additional positive or negative points if left uncovered at the end of the round.
In the same year as the base game was released, Knizia followed up with a print-and-play expansion offering minor evolutions on the original boards. A common criticism of FITS is that only having the same four boards means the experience gets stale over time, and perhaps including these expansion boards from the start would have helped keep the game feeling fresh for longer.
The expansion is excitingly called the FITS Official Expansion, a name whose dullness speaks more to the three free print-and-play expansions released in the same year by designer Ted Alspach and Bézier Games. Officially approved by publisher Ravensburger, their names are more interesting (MOTS: More Of The Same, LOTS: Letters On The Spaces and BOTS: Big Obnoxious Terrible Spaces) and they push the design space further, including requiring the player to spell words with letters they leave uncovered.
At the time Alspach was mostly known for the social deduction game Ultimate Werewolf and expansion maps for Age of Steam, but he also had form with expansions for other designer’s puzzly games. The year before he’d released Ubongo Extrem’s Craxy Expansion, the cover of which is a snapshot of the sexist culture in the hobby at the time, warning that it’s too challenging if you happen to be a “Scared Little Girl”. Curiously, Alspach’s clear interest in Tetris-style puzzling has yet to result in an original design within that space, although he would later go on to design the polyomino-adjacent Castles of Mad King Ludwig in 2014 and its flip-and-write sequel Blueprints of Mad King Ludwig a decade later.
FITS received a good reception on release, its ease of play, engaging presence and challenging puzzle receiving praise. “FITS is very much the embodiment of what I’d call the Knizia Modernist period,” says Detailed Reviewer Neil Thompson, “a classic case of taking something familiar, something quite light in scope and making a simple yet engaging little gem that can appeal to a wider…more mainstream audience.” The game was nominated for the coveted Spiel des Jahres in 2009 alongside Pandemic, although both lost out to Dominion. It was also nominated for a number of Golden Geek awards in 2009 and 2010, eventually winning the Best Abstract Board Game award, beating out Knizia’s own Genial Spezial and, in a pleasingly Alspach-adjacent link, Ubongo 3D.
Capitalising on its success, Knizia released a sequel, BITS, in 2011. As the DiceTower’s Tom Vasel points out, if FITS is the board game version of Tetris then BITS is the board game version of Dr. Mario. The game uses coloured domino pieces and tasks players with creating shapes out of colours as they fill in their board. Sadly, we’ve not been able to discover what, if anything, BITS is an acronym for (although our thanks to Guy Brown in the Reiner Knizia Enthusiasts Discord channel who suggested ‘Better Infinitely: The Successor’ – we know which of the two games he prefers!).
A minor Knizia today, what’s most interesting about FITS is how many of its mechanics have become popular in recent years, from the covering of dots to prevent negative points in Uwe Rosenburg’s Patchwork and A Feast For Odin to the flipping of a central card featuring a tile shape to be played by everyone in games such as Scarabya and NMBR 9.
Knizia himself has also successfully revisited polyominoes, negative spaces and card flips with his legacy game My City. Whilst Meeple Mountain’s David McMillan wasn’t completely wowed in his review of My City, Knizia-afficionado Andrew Lynch was so delighted by its charms that he’s completed the campaign twice, enjoys the roll and build version, and found its sequel, My Island, to be a “worthwhile getaway”.
Further Fantastic Frivolities
If you’re famished for fresh ‘F’ games then Knizia has you covered, almost as well as Friedemann Friese (ok, perhaps not – Friese is the Knizia of ‘F’!). Here are some fascinating Knizia features:
Family Inc. / Fruit Fight – We’ve covered the Cheeky Monkey family briefly already in the Letter C, but 2021’s Family Inc. and 2025’s Fruit Fight are simian successors of that very fecund forebear. Family Inc. involves poker chips, gangsters and gambling. Fruit Fight is title 4 of publisher CMYK’s Magenta card game line, and its card-play antics were previously seen under the names No Mercy and Hit!, among others. “Fruit Fight is based around a perfect little feedback loop of incompatible priorities,” said Meeple Mountain’s Andrew Lynch in his upcoming review of the Magenta series, “it is, at lower player counts, a lot of fun”.
The Fifth Column – Like 1995’s East-West when we covered the Letter ‘E’, The Fifth Column is a precursor to the Schotten-Totten and Battle Line family (covered in the Letter ‘B’). It’s clear that in 1995 Knizia was on a roll with building poker hands over contested cards (known as ‘columns’ in this game and ‘flags’ in later games in the series). The Fifth Column was released in the Issue 13 (April 1995) edition of Games & Puzzles magazine (retailing at an inexpensive £2.50) and is much closer to Schotten-Totten than East-West. Played with a standard deck of cards, players compete over nine columns with the winner being the first to claim five of them – hence the name!
Foodie Forest – A trick taking game originally released in 2002 as Too Many Cooks, IELLO’s 2022/23 edition of Foodie Forest features anthropomorphic animals competing to make the best soup in the forest. Played over five rounds, the game’s twist on the genre involves five separate scoring objectives, with players choosing their own objective each round – some rounds might see players competing for the same things, other rounds everyone is doing different things.
For One series – The For One series are five solo games by Knizia published by Schmidt Spiele, each with 20-25 levels a piece. And there ends the similarities between the games. There’s domino flower placements in Schwarze Rosen (‘Black Roses’), numbered card matrices in Number Up, pawn racing in Mensch ärgere Dich nicht (‘Don’t get angry’), no-rerolls-Yahtzee in Kniffel (the German for ‘Yahtzee’), and a dice-based space-take on Keltis in Galaktix. Each is different but they’re rated well and in a nice link back to our choice for ‘F’, Laszlo Molnar in his exploration of four of the series considers Chapter 2 of Schwarze Rosen to be like a mix of FITS and BITS.
Forbidden City – We’ve already seen Knizia venturing into Carcassonne territory, but 2018’s Forbidden City (and the space-set Mise: Kolonizace two years earlier) is a return to a similar design space of tile laying and area majorities. Players build rooms within China’s imperial palace (the titular Forbidden City) aiming to complete the rooms with the most influence inside them and thus increase their power with the new young emperor (aka get the most coins).
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And so we’ve finally finished the ‘F’s. Do you fancy our findings or are you flabbergasted by our feelings? What ‘F’ game would you have chosen? Do you know what BITS stands for? Let us know in the comments below and check out the rest of the Reiner Knizia Alphabet here!
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