Dr. Knizia is perhaps the most prolific board game designer of all time with 700 published games . He is a German game designer who has a PhD in mathematics.

Through the Desert

This game is part of Dr. Knizia’s legendary “Tile-laying Trilogy.” For those who love having a central, shared, interactive space where players contribute to building things up (usually with tiles) in interesting ways, Reiner’s work is arguably the greatest of all time within this genre. With Through the Desert, players are actually placing out two plastic camels instead of tiles on the board. You’ll start with a single camel in each colour and from there you’ll expand your camel clusters. A camel must be placed next to a matching one in your collection and not next to one controlled by your opponent. Mechanically this ensures you can always distinguish who owns which camel. Experientially, it means you can block your opponents from where they want to go. So where do you want to go? Well, to the places that get you points! Sprouting from the desert sands like little point oases are the watering holes, each netting you a tile worth points. A more subtle approach involves lassoing a great patch of land by surrounding it in a string of (identical) camels. Players at the edge can use the edge of the board, letting them grab even bigger areas, others can use the mountain.

Let’s take a minute to appreciate how elegant and clever this scoring system is for giving you direction and options. The randomly valued waterhole tiles and the oases create clusters of attractive, high scoring regions. There are almost always spots with two 3-point tiles next to each other, or close by an oasis. So with the lasso mechanic, this actively encourages you to find regions where there are few camels, so you can loop off as much of the board as possible, and feels very different to the points grab behaviour in the high camel density areas. Now you have mechanically different reasons to be in all areas of the board which creates interesting decisions. The depth that arises from these simple rules is also because of the other players. You are racing to the best spots, to carve out your areas of desert and make them the biggest areas. But you can’t defend everywhere at once. You need to constantly evaluate where your opponents can reach, what you most need to defend this round, what you can afford to sacrifice. It’s easy to see but not easy to work out.