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Chances are that if you’ve transitioned from Monopoly & Uno to the world of ‘real’ board games, Reiner Knizia designed your gateway game. One of the most popular & prolific board game designers, he has over 600 games in his portfolio.

As a designer of mostly Eurogames, Knizia plays around with various themes, most of them abstract and some of his most popular games Ra, Medici, and Modern Art use the auction mechanic to drive gameplay where his background in mathematics is clearly at play in his use of risk evaluation and pricing components.

Armed with a PHD in Mathematics, he has won the Deutscher Spiele Preis several times & has also won the Spiel Des Jahres, which is the Oscar equivalent in the board game industry.

This award winning designer has every kind of game under his belt, from simple two player games, games for kids & heavily themed games like his first one, Lord of the Rings, which incidentally was also a cooperative game. He brought concepts of tile-laying, bidding & auctioning into board games apart from other mechanics and various themes with games like High Society, Lost Cities, SchottenTotten, Tigris & Euphrates, Amun-Re, Samurai, to name a very few of them.

Knizia’s games have the unique features of being quick to grasp while throwing players into an immersive atmosphere where the role-playing aspect takes over the rules. This feature is not incidental; it is a deliberate design ploy, as he likes to keep the rules minimal and comprehensible so that the basic principles are understood without diluting the theme.

Over his illustrious career, he has designed games over many genres with a wide range of complexity levels that allow for multiple strategies to get to the winning place. The design and artwork for his games can be a bit dry and utilitarian but hardcore fans will insist it doesn’t detract from the excellent game play his games offer.

Bored Game Company is the best place to buy board games by Reiner Knizia.