The Reiner Knizia Alphabet – The Letter ‘S’

The year 2025 marks the 40th anniversary of Dr Reiner Knizia’s career as a board game designer – his first published game, Complica, was released in a magazine in 1985 (although he’d self-published games before then as well).

Since then, Knizia has designed and published over 800 games and expansions, many of which are critically acclaimed. Put simply, Reiner Knizia is the landscape on which all other modern designers build their houses.

To celebrate Knizia’s career and back catalogue, Meeple Mountain are taking things back to basics to consider the ABC of Reiner Knizia: one game for each of the 26 letters of the alphabet.

This time: The Letter ‘S’.

S – Samurai (1998)

In the late 1990’s Knizia began to look to Eastern culture, martial arts and game design for inspiration. To Knizia at the time, this meant considering indirect force, patience and the redirection of an opponent’s momentum.

The result? Samurai, the second title in Knizia’s famed tile-laying trilogy. Interestingly, Knizia himself doesn’t view the three games as a trilogy and believes they’re only linked by the community due to being three very strong tile-laying titles published in the space of two years.

Set in mediaeval Japan, players of Samurai place hexagonal tiles on the islands of Japan to surround and…

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