Weeks and Barnes Talk to Reiner Knizia!!!

The man who designed Pikomino is not over rated at least in my mind. I love that game.

Yes, you are right. The real challenge with this interview was to decide what to talk about he's done over 600 games. I had Pikomino and Beowulf sitting right in front of me but didn't get to them. Just no enough time.

MattDP wrote: Fantastic job guys, but still think he's overrated as a designer. A few absolute gems like T&E, Ra, a slew of very forgettable medium weight euros and a handful of vastly overrated games including Samurai and LotR.

That said, I suspect most designers are overrated if you judge them over their whole careers. Almost all of them are remebered for a few high points amidst a sea of briefly popular games. So perhaps I'm being uncharitable.

I don't have a Reiner Knizia game in my favorite top 20 games. But Knizia would be one of the first game designer I'd put in the game designer hall of fame. Sorry for the baseball reference but Knizia is more of a Cal Ripkin or Derick Jeter who got into the baseball hall of fame because of consistency and longevity rather than putting up crazy home run numbers over a couple of seasons.

Wow! What a coup!

Bullshit on him being overrated. I may not love most of what he's done, but it's impossible to not be impressed by what he's trying to communicate and how he's doing it in any one of his games. The fact that his games read so dryly on paper but do tend register some sort of emotional response (granted, some more than others) is all the proof one needs to make the claim that he designs with feelings and themes in mind. Add the fact that he's responsible for so many games that have proven to have staying power, yeah, he's first in the designer hall of fame. We're always saying that some game has replaced another one for us...You never hear some one say they're replacing Ra/T&E/Lost Cities/LOTR:TC/etc. Hell, as much as I love Omen, I still think Battle Line is top dog due to how pure of an experience it is.

This is fantastic! Great job, fellas, and Steve, awesome song at the beginning!

Wow. This was unexpected. Gave me a warm feeling towards boardgaming that I hadn't had in awhile. Thinking about it, I have more Knizia games than I do from any other designer. Though his titles may not be my absolute favorites, I like them a lot. A whole lot. I would totally put him in first ballot. My favorites are:

Battle Line
Kingdoms
Colossal Arena
LotR: Confrontation
Lost Cities
Beowulf
Lord of the Rings

I've never played T&E and am interested in Blue Moon Legends (can I get a recommendation? I don't hear much about it.)

One thing I've come to learn about myself the past few years boardgaming is that I actually prefer, what some would call, slightly abstract boardgames. TITAN, Manoeuvre, Neuroshima Hex those sorts of games. And well, A lot of Knizia's are like that as well which may be why I have and enjoy so many. For pure AT, I like to create my own characters and such (Blood Bowl, RPGs, etc), but for boardgaming I find I like the more chess-like, maybe even euro-style of play.

Again, great job here!

It is hard to talk in generalities when the man's designed hundreds of games...But the element that I most admire about many of the games of his that I have played is that they are so focused and efficient. He has a restraint that puts just enough into the game to deliver the theme and/or setting but avoids any sort of heavy-handedness. And that restraint is something that I feel has been sorely lacking from game design for a while, though there has been a bit of a resurgence of it as of late.

Really looking forward to listening to this!

Gave me a warm feeling towards boardgaming that I hadn't had in awhile.

That's a great compliment and exactly what I was going for and in fact I told Michael that I didn't want this to sound like an insurance seminar or a corporate thing , more a fireside chat.

Amazing song, great interview and obviously a great subject. Thanks for putting the effort in, guys - great listen.

EDIT - to be honest, when I saw the headline pop up on Facebook, I actually assumed it was going to be a comedy bit of yours Weeks. Very pleasantly surprised.

As someone who seemed to have the most run-ins with Weeks, I'll say that the reason for that was that I knew he was talented and capable of really doing great things for this site and the AT cause, but always wanted to piss that away trolling the shit out of everyone and biting every had that dared to feed him.

This podcast is proof of what he is capable of doing--being entertaining and actually a positive force for the hobby.

Excellent work, Steve.

.....aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand he's back. Hide teh cock.

I love a lot of Knizia's work and dislike a lot of it, too, but Ra is a staggering accomplishment in purely mechanical terms. I think Adel Verpflichtet is still my favorite Euro auction game, but the mechanical "engine" of Ra's gameplay is truly some next-level genius. It's also a great three-player game (I find it challenging finding games where playing with three doesn't result in some weird imbalance)

Mr. White wrote: Battle Line
I've never played T&E and am interested in Blue Moon Legends (can I get a recommendation? I don't hear much about it.)

Blue Moon Legends is absolutely worth a purchase if you like the other Knizia card games you mentioned. I also like its two (out-of-print, but easy to find and usually cheap) antecedents, Scarab Lords and Minotaur Lords.

It makes sense that Ken is back (at least for the next ten minutes) given the renaissance that F:AT is undergoing.

Calling Knizia "overrated" is...weird to me. You may or may not like X or Y number of his games...but ultimately if criticism of the games medium stops at "do I like/don't like this game", then that's a pretty low bar. What Knizia did and now does is really very much unlike what anyone else is doing in games design. He is one of the very few game designers that I would regard as an artist in the same sense that someone like Warhol or Bowie are artists. The intent is very clear, the creative objective might shift but is always consistent, motifs might return but are iterative rather than repetitive and there is always a drive to innovate some aspect of what has come before.

There is also a commercial side to Knizia that isn't anything like what anyone is doing or is, quite frankly, capable of doing. You can grouse all you want about the minor releases, the licensed contract work he's done, the reskins...but there is likely no games designer in the business that has been as successful at creating a brand name and parleying that into financial and criticial success at the scale he has. He can do very commercial and even workmanlike designs, but the he can turn around and do something like Tower of Babel or Amun-Re. There is a versatility in his work, across the catalog, that you just don't see in other designers. And yet, everything has his authorial stamps. Given the volume of his work, not everything can be on the level of T&E or Ra. Dr. Knizia would be the first to tell you that, I believe.

It doesn't matter if you don't like LOTR or Through the Desert. Those games are phenomenal pieces of design. There isn't anything "bad" about them, at least if you care about design qualities above petty genre or dogmatic expectations.

Rediscovering Knizia last year was one of the things that kept me from completely burning out on games...after so much Kickstarter garbage and all of these designers straining to recreate childhood memories of playing certain kinds of games or simply bundling mechanics and applying a "theme" that amounts to nothing more than pictures, it was so rejuvenating to play things like Modern Art again with fresh eyes...and finally getting that the kinds of meaningful theme, subtext, economy and artful qualities I always want in games were always there in his work.

Michael Barnes wrote: It makes sense that Ken is back (at least for the next ten minutes) given the renaissance that F:AT is undergoing.

I guess I'd better use my ten minutes wisely.

Agree with everything Barnes said. I have always been a fan of Knizia's work. Yeah, his old stuff was "better" to most of us gamers. But still, even if he never made another game, the depth and breadth of his offerings are almost incomprehensible.

I did this geeklist years ago about Knizia, and my feelings really haven't changed any.

boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/19669/ameriga...theme-and-why-do-his