Esteemed designer Reiner Knizia has created over 700 published board games. If we reprint one of these board games a month, it will take us just over 58 years to reprint them all. By that time, fans will be clamoring for a new printing. We will never need to design another board game, ever again.
Obviously, that's not a realistic future, nor one that we want - the best board games in the world come from a diverse array of designers. But it's an amusing hypothetical that demonstrates just how productive and prolific Reiner Knizia has been. Ra: The Dice Game and Rheinländer, two reprints being crowdfunded on Kickstarter by 25th Century Games, aren't even the only Reiner reprints to have been announced this year.
That being said, they are the most recent, and they're still games worth getting excited about. Ra: The Dice game is a Yahtzee-style dice-roller based on Knizia's beloved set collection strategy game, Ra. It's a quick and digestible luck-based board game, and it's very telling that the most egregious complaint that online reviews can think to make is "it's not as good as the original Ra". First published in 2009, Ra: The Dice Game was nominated for several prestigious gaming awards that year.
Rheinländer is one of Knizia's less well-known games, and opinions on it have been more divisive over the years. It's an abstract strategy game where players act as dukes attempting to build on and rule over land surrounding the river Rhine. Fans of the 1999 board game will assert that it's a hidden gem, but many existing reviews refer to it as one of Knizia's more fiddly, inefficient designs.
In a BoardGameGeek forum thread, the publisher confirms that "there are no changes to the core gameplay" of Rheinländer, "only the introduction of the new modules which you don't have to play with or can mix and match in based on your preferences". Many of the components have had a visual overhaul, however, and the board is now apparently double-sided to remove unused spaces for smaller player groups - which solves a major complaint many players had about previous editions.
Less information is available about what might have changed in the Ra: The Dice Game reprint, but presumably it also remains faithful to the core game. You can find out more information about both games on the Kickstarter page, where 25th Century Games is also selling copies of 2024 Tudor trick-taking game The Six of VII, as well as a variety of imported board games.
What's your favorite Reiner Knizia game? Will you be backing this Kickstarter? Share your takes in the Wargamer Discord.