Meet Reiner Knizia: The man who’s designed over 700 board games
November 28, 2022 6:13 AM   Subscribe

 
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posted by sixohsix at 6:21 AM on November 28, 2022 [5 favorites]


Reiner seems like such a solid dude. :-D
posted by Fizz at 6:24 AM on November 28, 2022 [1 favorite]


I didn't see the names of any of his games in this piece so here's a link to his Wikipedia page which has some of his games listed: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reiner_Knizia

Thank you for the post!
posted by an octopus IRL at 6:24 AM on November 28, 2022 [6 favorites]


See his BoardgameGeek profile page for more info, including a list of 677 games.
posted by mrgoldenbrown at 6:44 AM on November 28, 2022 [2 favorites]


One of the chief architects of the renaissance in modern board games. Too many hits to name. I'm interviewing him next week for a thing, and am looking forward to it enormously.
posted by Hogshead at 7:36 AM on November 28, 2022 [13 favorites]


His stuff is always so mathy, and usually theme is an afterthought at best. They're almost always great little designs, though. Lost Cities has been a go-to time-passer/chitchat game here for decades.

It's the Kniziest!
posted by Scattercat at 7:42 AM on November 28, 2022 [2 favorites]


What I find interesting about Knizia is that he's sort of the RL Stine of the boardgames world. He's never had a world-shattering hit. He's never had a wild breakout hit like Catan. He's never had a game like Gloomhaven or Twilight Struggle that people habitually put in the top slot of "Best Boardgames of All Time" lists. He's never had a game like Dominion or Risk Legacy that defined a new genre or dramatically changed the way we think about what boardgames can do.

He's just been consistently good year in, year out, at a pace that no one else can come close to matching, a pace that almost by itself makes him a giant of the hobby.
posted by firechicago at 8:10 AM on November 28, 2022 [7 favorites]


I went through the whole list on bgg, and I’ve played about 65 of them. (My memory is fuzzy and I’m not like counting each of the blue moon decks as separate games, even though bgg does).

He used to be my favorite designer, but then I dug too deep into his catalog, and now I don’t really have a favorite designer.
posted by aubilenon at 8:16 AM on November 28, 2022


He's never had a game ... that people habitually put in the top slot of "Best Boardgames of All Time" lists

Yeah tho there was a time when Tigris and Euphrates, Ra, Modern Art, Through the Desert, and Lost Cities were together claiming huge tracts of "best board game" land, and there's others I'm probably forgetting... but then again that was towards the beginning of the board game explosion. He was king, but too early.
posted by fleacircus at 9:16 AM on November 28, 2022 [2 favorites]


It's not just that he doesn't have a top game; he doesn't even have a game in the top 100 on BoardGameGeek. His first entry is at #102. I don't mean this as a criticism of his work, more a reflection on the genre and rating systems.
posted by Nelson at 9:46 AM on November 28, 2022


I knew the name immediately, but was surprised that I only played a couple of his games. Lots more (like "Tigris and Euphrates") that have been on my radar but I don't think I've gotten to.

I feel like I play a decent number of board games but this man has probably published more games than I've played in my adult life. I mean, if I played a new game every week it would take 14 years to get through his catalog.

It is a sign of where the industry has come since my grognard teen years that he says he's even written "hardcore" games that take "two or three hours" to play, as opposed to the time when hardcore meant two or three weekends. This is a good thing. Games have gotten better and more accessible, and he played a big part of it.
posted by mark k at 10:12 AM on November 28, 2022 [1 favorite]


I measure this article at 673 words. Surely, this man deserves at least one word per game.
posted by Revvy at 10:42 AM on November 28, 2022 [2 favorites]


I bought Tigris and Euphrates and have never played it. It looks great, but it is a 4 player game exactly, not 2-4 players, you need 4, and only 4 players to play. That's a pretty tough ask for a board game...
posted by Chuffy at 10:48 AM on November 28, 2022 [1 favorite]


I bought Tigris and Euphrates and have never played it. It looks great, but it is a 4 player game exactly, not 2-4 players, you need 4, and only 4 players to play. That's a pretty tough ask for a board game...

Really? I could have sworn I played it with 3 and had a great time. But if you're not able to get it to the table, DM me and I'm sure I can find it a good home, hehe..
posted by FatherDagon at 11:16 AM on November 28, 2022


It's not just that he doesn't have a top game; he doesn't even have a game in the top 100 on BoardGameGeek. His first entry is at #102. I don't mean this as a criticism of his work, more a reflection on the genre and rating systems.

According to that BGG link above, dude shipped 27 games in 2021. A new game every 2 weeks. They can't all be Modern Art, but the odds might go up if he focused?
posted by pwnguin at 12:27 PM on November 28, 2022 [1 favorite]


The BoardGameGeek rankings are weighted towards newer games. At a glance I'd guess that some 65-70% of them are games that came out in the last 5 years. Ra, a game from 1999, is in the top 200, which is evidence of how much of a classic it is.
posted by JDHarper at 12:42 PM on November 28, 2022 [2 favorites]


I'm playing 2 of his games right now on BGA in fact! I love Tigris and have played that on and off over the years, and am playing My City for the first time there. Plus he just seems like a lovely man! I didn't ever expect to see him with a pear stick on his forehead, and yet here we are!
posted by Carillon at 1:01 PM on November 28, 2022 [1 favorite]


I bought Tigris and Euphrates and have never played it. It looks great, but it is a 4 player game exactly, not 2-4 players, you need 4, and only 4 players to play. That's a pretty tough ask for a board game...

It definitely plays at 2 or 3. Four is optimal, but it's a great game at 2-3 as well.
posted by pahool at 1:35 PM on November 28, 2022 [4 favorites]


The BoardGameGeek rankings are weighted towards newer games. At a glance I'd guess that some 65-70% of them are games that came out in the last 5 years. Ra, a game from 1999, is in the top 200, which is evidence of how much of a classic it is.

By my count 42 of the top 100 are 2017 or later (so really the last 6 years). And only one is from before 2000 (Crokinole, which they date to 1876). The highest ranked game from the 90's is Tigris and Euphrates, at 102. In fact, I went down three or four hundred places, and every game from the 90's was a Knizia joint. It's easy for those of us who have "only" been active in the board game hobby for 15 or 20 years to underestimate just how dominant Knizia was back then.

But I don't think it's purely recency bias that makes that number so high. For one thing, there are a lot more board games coming out now than there were back then. BGG lists just over 140,000 games in its "All Boardgames" list. It's hard to get exact numbers for recent years because their advanced search tops out at 5000 games, but each of the last 6 years hits that number, so games released since 2017 are at least 21% of the total and could easily be 42%. By contrast, BGG has just under 1,100 games for 1997, the year Tigris and Euphrates was released. And that's without even considering the idea that designers today have access to many more resources and a much richer tradition of thinking about game design than their counterparts 25 years ago, and that as a result, new games might actually be better in some meaningful sense than their forebears.

Which I think also gets to Knizia's place in the modern industry. He's spent the last 30+ years making Reiner Knizia games. There was a while where that made him the biggest, most exciting fish in a small pond, and a much longer period where that made him sort of a throw-back. But he just kept making them, and lots of people keep enjoying them, even when they're not the new hotness. Good for him. We could all do much worse than doing precisely what we love again and again until we achieve elder statesman status.
posted by firechicago at 2:01 PM on November 28, 2022 [6 favorites]


And that's without even considering the idea that designers today have access to many more resources and a much richer tradition of thinking about game design than their counterparts 25 years ago, and that as a result, new games might actually be better in some meaningful sense than their forebears.
The most obvious thing which comes to mind is the benefit of the internet and translation tools. A designer in 1997 couldn’t get feedback from thousands of people around the world this easily, and they especially would have had trouble getting comments from people who bounced off of the game (as opposed to the much smaller number of people who wrote long angry letters). That kind of stuff adds up quickly, especially with things like parents sharing what was a struggle teaching their kids (who might be buying games for half a century).
posted by adamsc at 6:16 PM on November 28, 2022


I can suggest that Carcassonne: The Castle is a great great great version of Carcassonne redesigned by Knizia.
posted by NoThisIsPatrick at 10:18 PM on November 28, 2022 [6 favorites]


I liked a couple of his LotR games a lot. LotR from 2000 was a pretty influential co-op game. (Ironically Pandemic is a more "Knizia" design; hardly any theme at all, kinda bland and e.g. pursuing colors that don't mean anything.) LotR: the Confrontation is a beautifully asymmetric Stratego-like game.
posted by fleacircus at 11:28 PM on November 28, 2022


I'm long time fan of Knizia games - Tigris & Euphrates, Modern Art and High Society are among my favourites.

I recently learned that there's a Heckmeck World Championship too!
posted by alfhild at 2:08 AM on November 29, 2022


Oh, I should probably share this pic of me at the Kniziathon I did in 2019

I think we played around 8 different Knizia games in one day.
posted by alfhild at 2:22 AM on November 29, 2022 [3 favorites]


According to that BGG link above, dude shipped 27 games in 2021. A new game every 2 weeks. They can't all be Modern Art, but the odds might go up if he focused?

If you make 27 of anything, one of them will be the 27th-best.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 7:21 AM on November 29, 2022


He is brilliant. I, too, have done a Kniziathon! Took 2nd Place, IIRC.

And I won a Too Many Cooks tournament (rereleased as "Foodie Forest") and still love to pull out my much loved, much played, slightly frayed signed copy.
posted by BrashTech at 11:41 AM on November 29, 2022


Further to my comment above, I interviewed Reiner on Friday and he was as amazing as I'd hoped. Three key highlights:
* He's typically working on around fifty games at any one time.
* He does not usually play games by other designers, as he's too busy playtesting his own.
* I recorded the interview for a forthcoming (audio-only) podcast (Everybody Wins, a six-part series to promote my forthcoming book of the same name), and even for that he was wearing a bow tie on the webcam.
Time spent with Reiner is not time wasted. There's nobody like him.
posted by Hogshead at 5:26 PM on December 4, 2022 [5 favorites]


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