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.
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