If you’re reading a review of Reiner Knizia deep cut Ratzia, I figure there’s a good chance you are already at least passingly familiar with the game Ra, the Egyptian-themed auction game with strong push-your-luck elements first published in 1999. Ra is regularly considered one of the greatest board games ever published. It has a hardy rating of 7.7/10 on Board Game Geek, and sits at #117 in their overall rankings. Not too shabby for a game that came out nearly 30 years ago, and that success is certainly deserved. Ra is a terrific game.

Neither Ratzia, nor its previous iteration Razzia!, are so fortunate. Both are held in comparatively slight esteem. Ratzia, a mafia–themed auction game with strong push-your-luck elements, is rated a 6.8 on BGG as of writing, and sits low enough in the rankings that the actual spot doesn’t warrant mentioning.

I find this curious, because Ratzia and Ra are effectively the same game. I do not mean to say that they are similar. No. They are, rule-for-rule, the exact same game. There are a few extra tile types in Ra, but that’s it. These two games are more closely related to one another than Hitchcock’s Psycho is to Gus Van Sandt’s shot-for-shot remake of Psycho, which at least had different actors. So why this discrepancy…

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