Ra–The Dice Game

Ah, Dr Reiner Knizia, you are both terribly predictable and wildly unreliable. Your name on a box tells you exactly the sort of thing you’re likely to get, and yet reveals next to nothing about how fun your design will be to play. You’re often accused of churning out games that are too ‘math-y’, yet your name is synonymous with some of the most addictive and accessible games. You have over 500 games to your name, a German designer working in a very German industry… but you live in England. Just who are you, Dr Knizia?

I have decided that Reiner Knizia is, in some ways, the Guided By Voices of board game design. If, like me, you are a GBV fan, you know that they’ve have some amazing tunes. Pick up a GBV album, and you can almost guarantee there will be eleven or twelve great tracks there, better than the average hit rate. Unfortunately, the typical GBV album is about 25+ tracks long, so you have to be prepared to put up with a certain lack of quality control. And so it is with Reiner Knizia.

Ra the Dice Game is a game where… well, it’s something about Egypt. And dice, obviously. You’re rolling the five colourful dice to move or place cubes in different areas of the board. Roll ‘Pharaohs’ and you can move up the Pharaoh track, where the highest gets points and the lowest loses some. Roll ‘Nile’ symbols and you can move up or ‘flood’ The Nile – you gain points the further up you are, but only if you’ve taken the time to ‘flood’ it, that is, add an extra cube rather than move. Rolling ‘Civilisations’ means you can place cubes for points in that area of the board, but space is limited, and where you can place is governed by the colour of the dice. With the ‘Monument’ side of the die you can place cubes on a grid that score in different ways. The ‘Ankh’ side is a ‘wild die’ you can add to other dice to make the combination you need.

The sixth side is big lad himself, Ra. Like Yahtzee, you roll dice three times and then stick with what you get – unless it’s Ra. Those dice get placed on the track at the top of the board. Get two and the Ra token moves closer to the end of his track and the end of the round. Get three and get three points. Four or five means a “disaster” for your opponents, removing their cubes from the board or shifting them.

Each game mechanic in RtDG on its own is a little lacking and not terribly interesting. And unfortunately, when you put them all together, all you have is a handful of not-too-great bits of game, adding up to not a lot. It doesn’t scale very well – three players isn’t bad, but with two it’s over too soon, and with four there’s a bit too much waiting around with uninteresting things happening. It also suffers from that common complaint of the Knizia game – pasted-on theme. Lost Cities, to take another Knizia, is a game where theme is unimportant because the game itself is fine – it’s simply an excuse for some nice art on a solid, entertaining game. But when the game is a bit lacking, you notice that the game has very little to do with Egypt at all, beyond the symbols and very lovely dice. RtDG is not completely without merit – and is actually rather clever – but the decisions you make just aren’t interesting enough, and intelligence of the design doesn’t translate to a fun experience.