It's all Ralph's fault.  One day in 2002, he brought over this game called Ra, designed by some German guy with a funny name.  Something like "Reiner Knizia".  Now I am hooked.  Tigris & Euphrates, Carcassonne, Blue Moon, Tikal, GIPF....

So, am I alone in this addiction?  Any others out there who share this obsession?  Or are you all just artsy roleplayers?  (duck)

Hi Seth,

I'm a big fan of Eurogames in general and Knizia in particular (although I don't get to play as much as I'd like to).  My current Knizia faves are Modern Art (on the lighter side) and Amun-Re (for heavy duty play).

I'm always kind of surprised that Knizia isn't more talked about around these parts: I think a lot of his designs have mechanics which could be, umm, borrowed for use in rpgs.

-Jon

Funny you should mention Amun-Re.  Are you familiar with SpielByWeb?  I play Amun-Re and Tikal there fairly frequently, and I'm always looking for more opponents.

Ooh, neat - I hadn't seen SpielByWeb before - thanks!  I'd definitely be up for some Amun-Re.

I think there's a ton of board game influence embedded in many of the indie RPGs around here.  Certainly in mine.  I know Clinton plays a bunch of them.

I even got Ron "boardgames...meh" Edwards to play Puerto Rico and he had to admit he liked it...Although he did fall asleep part way through RA cuz it was past his bed time ;-)

As an aside...I consider Acquire to be the first "Euro-style" game and it predates the rash of French and German imports by a good couple decades...

Oh yeah, a few in the Snyder closet. It's about as close as Mrs. Snyder gets to geekery (Hey, I DID get her to play Dust Devils in March ... with MY MOM!). We've got the obligatory Catan (settlers, spacefarers, card game) and Carcasonne. Lately, I'm hooked on Ingenious, which I think is a Knizia especiale, but can't remember for certain. Always looking for more fun stuff. (Just got Memoir 44 and Vincent's Bane, aka Ticket to Ride -- Mrs. Snyder loves Ticket to Ride.)

Hey Ralph,

I agree with you about Acquire, but I like to think of Sid Sackson as one of those American artists who's much better appreciated in Europe than he is in his own country.

-Jon

I love Carcassonne. (My inner designer is saying, "There's a roleplaying game in there somewhere" and I think my inner Common Sense Ninja is about to attack him.)

Yes, I've been taken to the pub by Americans and made to play those games. It was fun. I particularly liked the one about evolving cells. Can't remember the name, but you had to evolve attack and defense things.

Graham

I've definitely felt the Eurogame love, although my inner consimmer has been reasserting itself lately.  But there plenty of Euro-hybrids that satisfy the full palate.  Memoir '44 (and now Command & Colors: Ancients), Friedrich, Bonaparte at Marengo, Wallenstein, Struggle of Empires.

On the not-so-consimmy front, I just discovered and fell in love with Railroad Tycoon, and got introduced to a wacky game called H2olland, in which you try to grow and harvest the most valuable tulips.

Folks around here might be interested by Hunting Party from Seaborn Games, which is strange American Fantasy/Euro hybrid with a strong RPG element buried in it.  You have to soldier past the appalling graphic design and illustration to appreciate it though.

Oh.  Mall of Horrors (Asmodee).  Just played it for the first time at Gamestorm.  Sure its sold as a board game (with lovely components and a horribly translated rulebook) but with a slight change in emphasis and packaging, it could have been somebody's zombie survival "story telling" game.

Matt wrote:
Lately, I'm hooked on Ingenious, which I think is a Knizia especiale, but can't remember for certain.

Graham wrote:
Yes, I've been taken to the pub by Americans and made to play those games. It was fun. I particularly liked the one about evolving cells. Can't remember the name, but you had to evolve attack and defense things.

GreatWolf wrote: Yep, that's a Knizia.  He is far and away my favorite designer.  Ingenious is cool, because it can be a light "tea-and-biscuits" game or a brain-burner.

Let's see.

First, I must sprinkle you with pixie dust.

Ingenious is a bit like dominoes crossed with Tigris & Euphrates.

Still with me?

You'll probably want to look at the pictures from BoardGameGeek to understand this.

Each player has a hand of six tiles, which are shaped like two hexes stuck together.  Each hex has one of six colors on it, like this.  (Each color also has a shape to go with it, in case you are color-blind.)

You take your turn by playing a tile onto the board.  Ideally, you play so that you form lines of identical symbols on the board.  So, for example, you play a tile so that you make a line of four blue hexes.  You would score one blue point for each symbol in the line, except the one on the tile that you just placed, giving you three blue points..  Of course, since each tile is capable of forming up to ten lines (five per hex, excluding the side where they are stuck together), it's possible to get quite a number of points from a single play.

If you max out your score in a single color by getting to eighteen, you say "Ingenious" and take another turn.

When you're finished playing tiles, check to see if you have any tiles in your lowest scoring color.  If not, you may discard the rest of your hand.

Then refresh your hand to six.

Of course, you need the classic Knizia twist.  In Ingenious, it's the old "lowest score is your score" trick from Tigris & Euphrates.  In other words, at the end of the game, when the board is full so no more pieces can be played, whichever of the six colors you scored the least in is your final score.

And that's it!

Except, it's not, really.

The game is fairly subtle.  There tends to be a lot of jockeying for good scoring position, and an important part of the game is knowing when it's time to begin blocking off profitable scoring lines from your opponents.  About half-way through the game, since scoring is open, it becomes obvious which colors everyone needs, and then the real blood-letting begins.

But it doesn't have to be cutthroat.  Like Carcassonne, Settlers of Catan, or even Scrabble, the game supports whatever level of bloodthirstiness you want to have.  So you can play it intensely and focused, or you can play it more loosely and conversationally.  My wife and I have Ingenious in our antechamber (nope, not our bedroom) with the other two-player games that we often play.

I have this nagging sense that I botched that description, but oh well.  You can play Ingenious on Brettspielwelt under its German name of "Einfach Genial"

The only thing i have to say in this thread is:

I want to have Reiner Knizia's babies.

There, I said it.

Hi Seth,

Count me as a eurogamer too. Unfortunately my collection of games took quite a hit when I moved from the US to Sweden a few years back, but I'm building it up again. My BoardGameGeek.com collection wheighs in at ~110.

Oh, and my sister works in a toy store, and they just started carrying eurogames, so I will be all set!  :)

TTFN,

Yoki

The New York crew are pretty fond of board/card games. Jungle Speed is, in fact, a French game. We enjoy Settlers and Carcassone of course, but Citadels (another French game) is the other game that really satisfies our deep-seated desire to stab each other in the face. Other games we like to play: San Juan, Princes of Florence, St. Petersburg, Power Grid (a personal favorite), and Hoity Toity.

RoboRally and Samurai Swords gets some play too, but I think they're American and don't count.

RoboRally is indeed American and the reason for Magic: the Gathering existing at all.

I think it got reprinted last year!

Shrug.  Doesn't really matter to me.  I'm not that much of a snob...about this...

Roborally was one of my first boardgame purchases, back in 1995.  My copy has the pewter miniatures.  Some of them are still intact.

Yeah, I'm a huge board gamer.  We play on Wednesdays (and roleplay on Fridays).  Puerto Rico remains one of our favorites.  I tend toward the crunchier end [Power Grid, Tigris & Euphrates], while many of the others tend toward Settlers, Carcassone, and the like.  It's all fun.

We recently picked up Santiago-- a game about farming and bribing the overseer.  It's popular but still in its first flush. I'm interested in seeing how it ages.

Settlers and Carcassonne are really big in Germany. I like them well enough. Much better than Risk or Monopoly, at least. Ingenious is my favorite at the moment as well. But I'd rather play more Rpgs.

- Frank

See, the problem that I have is that pulling out a board game is WAY easier than playing an RPG, even those that set up quickly.  There's a different part of the brain that engages, and at the end of a long day, it's harder to engage in improv creativity than pure competition.  A pity, but true.

I definitely sympathize with the boardgame versus RPG equation.  Boardgames definitely seem to deliver way more oomph per energy invested much of the time.  Still, I think I'm trapped in an intermitent reward cycle with RPGs.  I keep coming back to them despite frustration.  Fortunately they've been delivering well of late.

I haven't played RPGs for a long time, mostly because of my discovery of eurogames.  However, I am thinking about running an RPG for my wife and soon to be 5-year-old daughter but I haven't found an appropriate one yet.

quozl wrote:
I haven't played RPGs for a long time, mostly because of my discovery of eurogames.  However, I am thinking about running an RPG for my wife and soon to be 5-year-old daughter but I haven't found an appropriate one yet.

rafial wrote:
I definitely sympathize with the boardgame versus RPG equation.  Boardgames definitely seem to deliver way more oomph per energy invested much of the time.  Still, I think I'm trapped in an intermitent reward cycle with RPGs.  I keep coming back to them despite frustration.  Fortunately they've been delivering well of late.