Wholly Knizia

Dr. Reiner Knizia is a name synonymous with board games. Even if you haven’t heard of him, you’ve likely played one of his designs; according to Gemini, he has created more than 800 games. Whether it’s Ra, The Quest for El Dorado, Samurai, or Huang, he’s everywhere.    We even had a lovely sit-down with him recently to discuss his highly successful career.

Whale Riders excited me because it comes from a power duo: Knizia on design and Vincent Dutrait on art. Dutrait’s work has become increasingly easy to spot as I’ve gone deeper into the hobby, and here his contribution is excellent. The thematic art is rich, depicting Indigenous Arctic tribes using handsome whales and other massive sea creatures as mounts. But despite that pedigree, this is not one for the Knizia hall of fame.

Ice Race

In Whale Riders, players take two of five possible actions each turn, moving between ports, buying goods, and completing contracts for money and pearls. Play continues until all the pearls have been purchased from the home area, giving the game a race-like structure from start to finish.

Goods in the market are replenished as they are bought, but new tiles can introduce storms that…

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SHASN: AZADI is a box full of gimmicks. Those gimmicks are equal parts corny and high-minded, clever and ham-fisted. The area majority mechanism that is used to tally points is, frankly, pedestrian and simplistic. But, in spite of it all, the game is ambitious, and I admire games that are high-minded, even when that highmindedness has flaws.

Hegemony this ain’t

And that’s a good thing. AZADI is trying for something explicitly political—it is about the construction of political blocs more than it is about forcing players to accept the roles and bounds of its simulation. From where I sit, Hegemony: Lead Your Class to Victory’s conception of political economy and class is at best misguided and ignorant. AZADI doesn’t presume to gamify and fragment class struggle, casting players as some fake-o thinktank concept of the “middle class” and the “state.” Instead, players are a political ideologue constructing their own ideology out of what will best get them into the big chair. More on this in a moment.

The way you win AZADI is by forming majorities. In the version that I’m reviewing, you have a modular dual-layered map with holes in it for player pieces. Each map tile has a crosshair hole  (volatile area) and a number reading something like 11/21. Players get points for having majorities, which…

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I played a lot of games in 2023. The best of those games, by a sizable margin, was Hegemony: Lead Your Class to Victory, designed by Vangelis Bagiartakis and Varnavas Timotheou and released by the two men under the Hegemonic Project Games banner. A bold effort in almost every way, Hegemony did an excellent job of simulating a real-world environment and mixing that with a number of different gaming systems. The end result now resides on BoardGameGeek’s top 50 all-time games and has hit my table for nearly a dozen plays; as an event game, it’s tough to beat.

Those accolades put a big target on the back of Hegemonic Project Games’ second design, World Order. Varnavas and Vangelis were kind enough to send a review copy in advance of the game’s full release, and it was pretty easy to get the members of my review crew to line up for plays.

I tempered expectations a bit here. I thought Hegemony was a classic example of “lightning in a bottle”, an asymmetric negotiation game that really did play differently from faction to faction, which landed in a January dead zone after working through a big pile of games from the year before. Could Hegemonic Project Games do it again with World Order? My main hope was that…

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Cross Bronx Expressway, GMT’s third release in the Irregular Conflicts series, is not for the weak. It is exceptionally complicated, even by the elevated standards of a COIN title. A frequent refrain amongst the GMT faithful, and an accurate refrain at that, is that the rules aren’t all that complicated once you get over the hump of learning them. Not so here. For my first game, I gathered three of the finest gaming minds in New York City, all of whom had read the rules in advance, and it still took an hour or two to get things started. This is no doubt in part a function of the theme, the civic management of The Bronx across the latter half of the 20th century. It’s easier to keep rules in your head when they don’t use words like “coalition,” “partner organization,” and “Census Round Audit.” You may find yourself scratching your head and wondering why you didn’t go back to school to get an MB(oard game)A.

Work your way past the daunting exterior and you’ll find a game that is a fascinating mix of the exceptionally confrontational and the utterly inscrutable. Cross Bronx Expressway is a hard game to talk about as a game, in part because the gamic elements are relatively slight in view of the whole. Designer…

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