I like puzzles. No, not necessarily the sort that you’d fine in Games magazine, but instead puzzles where you slowly build up pieces of information, only to see a larger pattern suddenly emerge. Tactical games often satisfy this desire in me — be it Australia or Dungeon Twister. You can imagine the chaos of possible turn, but then a sudden, perfect move abruptly emerges. I suspect Sleuth would satisfy this urge too, and I have no idea why I don’t own a copy of that yet.
This like also influences my writing, and so I often have a desire to categorize, index, and sort — hoping to again find that ever-elusive pattern underlying the mundane. And that’s what I’m going to do this week, in the first of what I expect will be many columns about game designers.
Here I’m going to give overviews of three of my favorites, and talk a little bit about what I feel holds their games together. The three designers I’ve chosen for this installment are, I think, the three biggest influences on the current Eurogaming scene: Reiner Knizia, Wolfgang Kramer, and Klaus Teuber — the Special K’s, to quote Larry Levy.
#1: Reiner Knizia
Reiner Knizia is, in my mind, the father of the modern Eurogames movement. Sure, it was Teuber that broke the field wide open, but Knizia really seems to have envisioned the lightly themed, heavily mechanical style of play which is emulated by most modern German designers.
In general, I’d call Knizia the “elegant designer”. He has a superb ability to create simple mechanics that allow for deep and meaningful strategy & tactics. In addition he seems to be a superb developer, producing games that are well-considered, without sharp edges, and largely picture perfect. Some Knizia games aren’t to my liking, but it’s rare that I see a Knizia game that has an actual flaw in it (though some do; no one’s perfect).
The biggest problem with Knizia’s designs is that he produces a wide variety of games, from ultra-ultra-light to medium-heavy, and they’re for a wide variety of audiences. A lot of people seem to be expecting him to put out a certain type of design (usually, one of those medium-heavy games), and so they’re disappointed by everything else. This year Knizia put out at least three games that I think will be enjoyed by gamers for years to come: two medium-light designs, Tower of Babel and Palazzo; and one medium design, Beowulf: The Legend — and they were mostly met with undeserved scorn and derision. Buck up, folks, not everything is going to be Tigris & Euphrates or Through the Desert.
I’d further classify Knizia’s games by saying that they’re almost all “auction games”. By this I mean that you offer up scant resources in opposition to other players for the chance of winning some prize. You have what used to be his “auction trilogy”, now including High Society, Medici, Modern Art, Ra, Traumfabrik, Amun-Re, Taj Mahal, The Merchants of Amsterdam, Palazzo, and Beowulf. You also have closely related trading games, such as Res Publica and Tower of Babel, differentiated mainly by the fact that the auctioneer isn’t required to take the “best” bid. His bidding games, like Titan: The Arena and Goldrush are similar, except the items you have to “bid” are much more random. Even two of his very popular “tile-laying games”, Samurai and Tigris & Euphrates, shade into the same categorization, since your have various values of certain currencies (a 3 buddha, 5 temples) which allow you win certain prizes (a city, a civilization). I’ll grant that the last one is starting to stretch the definition, but the mathematical maximization is still there, and perhaps that’s not a surprise given Knizia’s mathematical background.
Perhaps the only top Knizia game that doesn’t seem to fit into this style of play is Through the Desert, which places more importance on board position and majority control than just about anything else Knizia has done. (Well, actually, Carcassonne: The Castle and Tigris & Euphrates place a huge importance on board position, while Tower of Babel is a rare majority-control game for Knizia, but for someone with this many games, there’s going to be exceptions to everything.)
My Reviews: Through the Desert (A), Taj Mahal (A), Ra (A), Amun-Re (A), Tigris & Euphrates (A), Modern Art (A-), Carcassonne: The Castle (A-),Lost Cities (A-), Razzia (A-), Beowulf: The Legend (B+), Samurai (B+), Blue Moon (B+), Lord of the Rings (B+), Easy Come, Easy Go (B+), Titan: The Arena (B+), Tower of Babel (B), Palazzo (B), Quo Vadis? (B), High Society (B), Buy Low, Sell High (B), Relationship Tightrope (B-), Poison (C+),Tutankhamen (C+),Gold Digger (C+), Res Publica (C), Galaxy: The Dark Ages (C), Kingdoms (C), Spy (C),Loco! (D+)
Interviews: Funagain (1999), Gamefest, on Einfach Genial (2004), BGG podcast (2005)
#2: Wolfgang Kramer
If Reiner Knizia is the father of the Eurogames movement, Wolfgang Kramer is its grandfather. He’s been publishing games since 1974 and some of his games are utterly foundational. Kramer usually designs his games with other people — Michael Kiesling being his most frequent and I think most successful, goto guy — but I’m not going to try and differentiate. All of Kramer’s collaborations are fair game here.
At heart I’d call Kramer a “tough designer”. Most of his games have a diamond heart. They require deep strategy or very thoughtful tactics in order to succeed. He’s done some light and fluffy stuff, but they’re either less-common or less-well-known than Knizia’s, and Sunken City is the only game I can think of that really disappointed people solely because it was too light.
Kramer shows a lot of versatility & originality as a designer, and this makes some of his games, as already noted, foundational. El Grande kicked off a whole genre of majority-control games (though some are arguably the result of Sackson’s Acquire instead). 6 Nimmt! no doubt influenced later simultaneous-play card games. Heimlich & Company could easily have been Clans‘ predecessor. Other top-level games that show Kramer’s versatility but haven’t necessarily had the same effect on the industry include El Caballero (tile-laying), Pueblo (spatial geometry), Goldland (exploration), Daytona 500 (racing), and of course Princes of Florence (auction).
Kramer’s biggest category of play is that of “tactical games”. These are largely action-point-based systems which fit my core definition of a “puzzle game”. They allow players many opportunities to try and figure out how to do clever things on a turn-by-turn basis with limited resources. Entrants include Tikal, Torres, Java, Mexica, Maharaja, and Australia. These are all inevitably collaborations with Kiesling.
For some reason I haven’t actually reviewed many of Kramer’s games, though he’s one of my current favorites.
My Reviews: El Grande (A), Torres (A), Maharaja (B+), Java (B+), Mexica (B+), The Princes of Florence (B), Saga (B), Category 5 (B-), Sunken City (B-)
Interviews: Games International (1990), Game in the Box (2001), Gamewire (2004), Interviews by an Optimist (2005)
#3: Klaus Teuber
Finally we come to Klaus Teuber, Eurogaming’s kindly uncle. His games are very approachable, but surprisingly are outside of the norm for German games. Where most German games are lightly themed, his aren’t, and where many try and reduce randomness, Teuber happily uses dice. In many ways Teuber’s games are closer to modern French designs than German ones (a topic I’ll return to in a future article). Nonetheless a lot of the success of Eurogames — both in Germany and in the United States — is due to the singular influence of The Settlers of Catan.
For that reason, Teuber is inevitably the “Catan designer”. Catan makes up at least half of Teuber’s output, and definitely most of his better-known games. Besides the core game, and the Seafarers and Cities & Knights supplements we also have historical scenarios, licensed versions, and even full variants like The Settlers of the Stone Age and The Starfarers of Catan. Most recently Teuber has stepped away from whole-blown Catan system, but he continues to use the same basic idea: randomly produce resources, manage them, and build new stuff with them. Anno 1503, Candamir, and Elasund all fall into this later design period. A more general way to describe most of Teuber’s output is “resource management games” but that’s really just code for “Catan”.
A few of Teuber’s older designs including Barbarossa and Hoity Toity have been reprinted recently. They’re a bit old and creaky — and as far from the German norm as Catan — but still quite good games. Oddly enough his two other hit games were originally meant to be part of a mega-Catan game. The game that became Entdecker would have shown the settling of the island, The Settlers of Catan that island’s development, and then Domaine the warfare that followed. Entdecker and Domaine, however, are totally distinct from Catan-like mechanics, and in fact are each quite stand-out games in their genres (exploration and warfare) and I personally think they outshine the more popular Settlers.
Reviews: The Settlers of Nurnberg (A), Entdecker (A), Domaine (B+), Elasund: The First City (B+), Barbarossa (B+), The Settlers of Zarahemla(B+), The Kids of Catan (B+), The Settlers of Catan (B), The Settlers of Canaan (B), Anno 1503 (B), Hoity Toity (B), Starship Catan (B), The Seafarers of Catan (B-), Candamir: The First Settlers (B-), The Settlers of the Stone Age (B-), The Cities & Knights of Catan (B-), The Settlers of Catan Historical Scenarios I (B-), The Starfarers of Catan (C+), Oceania (C+), The Settlers of Catan Card Game (C+)
Interviews: Gamewire (2004), Catan Online (2005)
Note on Review Ratings: A few caveats on these rating links: note that my letter grade incorporates both the components and the gameplay, though at an approximate 1:2 ratio. Also note that it’s hard to keep this sort of rating accurate over years of reviews, so the resultant rankings may not be 100% accurate, though I’ve tried my best (and indeed have gone back and revised a few reviews once I saw everything together for this article). In addition, these listings don’t try and be complete; they’re a combination of my actual reviews, plus a few ratings I felt comfortable throwing out for stuff I’ve played but haven’t reviewed (yet).
Author’s Note: I’ve reviewed lots of games by these authors since. I’ve opted not to add links for all of them in the original article, but you can read my complete corpus of reviews about: Reiner Knizia (currently 56), Wolfgang Kramer (currently 8), or Klaus Teuber (currently 40) over at RPGnet.
More generally, I think that Klaus Teuber is the one designer who hasn’t held up for me through another 5 years of play — probably because he is outside of the German norms. A lot of his newer Catan variants have ended up running too long for me. Beyond that, I play Reiner Knizia the most (and I suggest you click on the Reiner Knizia tag here, as it’ll lead you to articles from my-year-of-play-Knizia, in 2008) and I respect Wolfgang Kramer’s games the most — but often don’t get them to game nights because of the obnoxiously large box size of my favorites. See my rant about boxes. —SA, 1/3/11
