App O' The Mornin': Reiner Knizia's Poison Review

Reiner Knizia’s Poison, a 2005 card game later re-themed as “Baker’s Dozen,” has been given a fairly plain port by Griptonite Games.

The game is solo-only for one player and 4, 5, or 6 AI opponents. Right off the bat Griptonite missed the boat by leaving out multiplayer elements, which are precisely what this game needs to give it some spark. The AI only has a single setting, and that setting is “always choose the right card.”

The game is played around three cauldrons. Each player has a clutch of cards in red, yellow, and blue, each with a number value: 1, 2, 4, 5, or 7. The goal is to shed all your cards to the cauldron by playing on matching colors, without pushing the total number value over 13. If you do exceed 13, then you claim all the cards in that cauldron, earning one point for each card. Since the game is won by the person with the lowest score, you want to avoid taking piles whenever possible.

There is also a green “Poison card” which can be played to any pot. It has a face value of 4, but counts as 2 points when calculating the score.

This is an interesting riff on Hearts and other trick avoidance game, and a has similar strategic element. As he often does with Rummy games, Knizia has taken a familiar theme and put an interesting spin on it. The app version is a competent implementation of the game, but it’s rather short in the feature department. It's certainly a good way to play an interesting game: it just doesn’t play like a $3 app.

App O' The Mornin': Reiner Knizia's Money Review (App Version)

Whenever I review an app version of a tabletop game, I plan to post a review of the game itself as well. I did this yesterday, in my coverage of Gryphon's reissue of Reiner Knizia's Money!.  (The exclamation point doesn't appear on the box, but seems to appear everywhere else.)

This is a pretty simple review, since the app is a straight-up port of the original game. It plays like a version of any common card game in the app store, with cards laid out on a green felt table and crisp, clear graphics. Your hand is displayed along the bottom of the screen, bids are made simply by touching the cards and hitting the "bid" button, and lots are collected by sliding your bid on top of the desired cards.

From the very beginning, I was pleased the look and control of the game. It offers a respectable AI with a choice of difficulties, and the option to play with 3 or 4 players. The screen layout precludes a fifth player, even though the tabletop game itself supports up to 5. The apps also lack any multiplayer features. It doesn't even have pass-and-play.

Even with maximum available RAM, the app can slow down at times, and has erratic pauses. It's otherwise stable, and I have not yet encountered any hard crashes. The developers used the same engine for their conversion of Knizia's High Society, and I don't find that game slowing down as much as a Money.

Despite these limitations, I still enjoy the Money app, largely because it's just a good game. If you're not sure about laying out the fully $25 for the conventional version of money, then $3 will give you a taste of what it's like.

Eurogame Review: Reiner Knizia's Money!

Reiner Knizia is so prolific that even great designs sometimes slip through the cracks. Case in point: Money!. Initially released in 1999 (by Goldsieber in Europe and Rio Grande in America), it didn’t really find its audience. A small Rummy/bidding game wouldn’t have attracted a lot of notice in a year that saw Tikal, Torres, Union Pacific, Lost Cities, and Ra (the last two being Knizia designs), and I honestly don’t remember even seeing the original version of the game.

We have to thank Gryphon Games for bringing it back into print as the first entry in their Bookshelf Series. They’ve provided it with a handsome production in a compact box at a reasonable price ($25), and even made it the flagship release for their line of Apps.

Since this is a set-collecting game with a bidding element, there are some mechanics that are familiar from other Knizia games. The theme is based on currency trading, as you try to build sets from among 7 different types of global money. The cards are designed to look like different real and imaginary currencies, with 9 cards in each set. These cards break down into different denominations: 3 each with a value of 20 and 30, and one each with a value 40, 50, and 60. One of the currencies represents Chinese coins, each worth 10.

Players have a starting hand of 7 cards, and turns are defined by bidding. Each turn, two new lots of currency go up for bid. There are 4 cards in each lot. Using the cards in hand, players can bid any amount for the right to choose the first lot. The high bidder can select either of the lots, replacing that lot with the cards from his bid. Second highest bidder chooses next, and so on.

Lots are replenished from a draw deck, and then the bidding cycle begins again. The goal is to focus on buying lots that will build a single kind of currency with a face value greater than 200. Any currency in which you have less than 200 points at the end of game results in 100 points being subtracted from your final score. Having all three 20s or 30s also helps, since they earn you a 100 point bonus.

The game is simple to scale from 3 to 5 players merely by removing 1 type of currency for each player below 5. It’s easy to teach, and plays in 20 to 30 minutes.

As in Knizia’s Lost Cities, Money! requires you to make difficult decisions. It all comes down to choosing the right sets to build, and unloading unfinished sets to avoid the point penalty. There isn’t as much room for pain in Money! as there is in Lost Cities. Start the wrong dig in Lost Cities and you’re going to feel the loss no matter what. Collect a bad lot in Money! and you can unload it in the next turn, and even benefit by allowing it to pad out your bid.

A number of factors have pushed this to the top of the pile during family game nights. Aside from a couple of scoring steps, there is nothing really complex about the rules. Anyone who knows how to play Rummy will figure it out right away. The bidding adds an interesting element of strategy, as you watch what other players are taking and try to place bids that will get bad cards out of your own hand without benefitting someone else.

The appealing theme, high production values, easy-to-learn rules, and a decent amount of player interaction make this one a winner. Tomorrow morning, we’ll take a look at the App conversion to see if it captured these qualities in handy portable form.

App O' The Mornin': Reiner Knizia’s Samurai Review

Samurai is one of Knizia’s more popular designs. Along with Tigris and Euphrates and Through the Desert, it’s part of his “tile-laying trilogy,” all published in 1997 and 1998. Although some of his other games featured similar tile-laying mechanics (most notably Ingenious), these three had a different feel to them, if only because they replace abstract design with historical themes.

In fact, theme doesn’t matter all that much in Samurai, except to lend the game some flavor. This is a pure area control game, with up to four players taking turns laying hexagonal tiles on a map of medieval Japan. The goal is to exert the most influence on map areas bearing figures representing religion (a Buddha), the military (a helmet), and labor (a peasant). It works this way:

Players get a selection of tiles, and draw more as they expend this selection. Each tile has an image and a number from 1 to 4. The image represents the kind of influence that tile exerts (religious, military, or labor), and the number represents the strength of that influence. Samurai tiles are wild cards that can influence all three types of figure.

There are also “fast play” tiles, depicting a ship for control of sea hexes, a ronin to act as another (albeit weaker) wild card, and a “figure-exchange” tile to move figures on the map. You can place one standard tile per turn, and any number of number of fast move tiles.

The goal is to place tiles to surround the figures. When the figure is totally surrounded, the person with the most influence captures that figure. Influence is measured by the total value of matching or wildcard tiles that are surrounding that figure.

For instance, you place a samurai worth 3 and a ronin worth 1 next to a helmet figure. Your enemy places a samurai worth 2 and a ship worth 1 next to the same figure. Since you have more influence on that figure, you capture it and add it to your final total.

The game is played until all of one type of figure are captured, or there are four ties for figure control.

If all of that sounds a little fussy and complicated, have no fear. The App comes with a terrific little three-part tutorial that explains everything, as well as complete rules. Since it sets everything up and helps direct you towards legal moves, it’s all very easy to learn.

The graphics are quite nice, and the interface manages to compress a lot of control and information into a limited space. Four players can compete, either a single player with 2-3 AI opponents, or humans. The app has a full range of multiplayer features, including pass-and-play and turn-based online with push notifications.

All-in-all, a great new addition to the Knizia library.

App O' The Mornin': Monumental

What the?! Knizia again? Is he trying to corner the App market?

Well, if he is, he's doing a bang-up job, because even the relatively flaccid Knizia Apps (Poison, Robot Master) are still pretty good.

Although the Mayan graphics and exploration theme of Monumental call to mind Lost Cities, the game is a completely new design by Knizia for the iPhone/Thouch. Yes, it’s another set making game, but Knizia always manages to do something fresh with the format.

Monumental uses a mechanic that would be difficult to recreate in a conventional card game. Two sets of 12 empty spaces (3 columns by 4 rows) are split by a column of 4 tiles. As you slide each tile into one of the empty rows, another falls. The goal is to make sets of tiles matched by rune design, number of ruins, color, or any combination of the three, with more points award for more complete matches.

Although it’s a simple design, maximizing points requires pre-planning and a steady pace, making it a thinking person’s alternative to Bejeweled.

App O' The Mornin': Knights of Charlemagne

Reiner Knizia has a few core design ideas that he’s revisited (repeatedly) over the years. Some people complain that he’s just doing retreads of his own material, but close examination reveals this isn’t quite so. He often tweaks and re-themes an old design, but something fresh usually emerges. Standard card games like Rummy, 500, and Gin are all the same basic game, yet each plays differently. The same nuances emerge with many of Knizia’s design.

Also, a lot of those games go out of print. Knights of Charlemagne was only released 4 years ago, and it’s no longer available. It was really just a tweaked re-theming of a Knizia design from 1995, called Tabula Rasa. It, too, is long out of print.

But Knizia has two games that never go out of print: Lost Cities and Battleline. In keeping with our theme, Battleline itself was a new version of Schotten-Totten. Are you still following me?

All of these games have Rummy as their bedrock: you’re drawing cards in order to collect certain suits. The fun is in their special rules, themes, and nuances. Knights of Charlemagne is a close cousin of Battleline, and if you’re looking for a Battleline-type experience on your iPhone, this is the game to get.

Play is very simple. Players are dealt cards numbered 1 to 5, in 5 different colors. A row of ten tiles divides the two players: 5 numbered tiles, and 5 colored tiles. Players place cards on either the matching color or number to “claim” that tile. When the game ends, the person who has the most cards on a tile earns points for it. Although the cards are bit too small, this is still a clean, fast-playing implantation of classic style of game.

Knizia is heavily represented on the App store, with more games arriving at a steady clip. The latest are High Society and Medici. I’ll be taking a look at all of them in the upcoming weeks.