sunblush

For my first review of a board game, I’d like to fea­ture a true clas­sic: Ra, by pro­lific game designer Reiner Knizia. Knizia has designed hun­dreds of board and card games, but among gamers, Ra is widely con­sid­ered to be one of his finest creations.

Ra is a Eurogame with a pasted-on Egypt­ian theme. What I mean by this is that, in the end, it’s really an auc­tion game that could just as eas­ily have been about space ships, dinosaurs, or fine art. It could have been about any­thing else, and it would play exactly the same way. The game­play has lit­tle to do with Egypt, and the theme has lit­tle to do with what makes Ra a great game. The credit for that goes to the game’s core mechan­ics, and that is what places Ra squarely in the Eurogame camp: Its main focus is on the game­play itself, rather than the theme.

I’m review­ing the Überplay edi­tion of Ra, which I own. I under­stand that Überplay is now defunct, but Rio Grande Games has picked up the rights to pub­lish the next edi­tion Ra, and that print­ing will prob­a­bly hit shelves in 2009.

What’s in the box?

In addi­tion to the nicely printed (and short) rules book­let, there is a board, a can­vas bag, “sun” auc­tion mark­ers, scor­ing coun­ters, a Ra fig­urine, and a bunch of card­board tiles (and by a bunch of tiles, I mean a whole lot of tiles).

As it turns out, the board is lit­tle more than a pair of “tracks” for auc­tion tiles to sit on. For­tu­nately, it’s not entirely point­less, as it also con­tains a sim­ple ref­er­ence that reminds how the dif­fer­ent types of tiles are scored. I sup­pose the only other jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for the board is its Egyptian-themed art­work, which can help rein­force an oth­er­wise weak theme. As I’ve already pointed out, though, the theme is of no real impor­tance to this game.

When you score points in Ra, you receive lit­tle “tablets” with quasi-Egyptian numer­als on them. They come in denom­i­na­tions of 1, 2, 5, and 10. A cool way to keep track of how many points you have through­out the game.

The auc­tion mark­ers are wooden “sun” pieces, num­bered 1 – 16. In an auc­tion, play­ers bid with these suns, and ties don’t hap­pen because there are no dupli­cate num­bers. The heart of the game, how­ever, is the enor­mous com­ple­ment of auc­tion tiles, and as I men­tioned above, there are quite a few of those. The dif­fer­ent types of auc­tion tiles you’ll come across are:

How to play (in a nutshell)

Ra is all about auc­tions. Every auc­tion gives play­ers a chance to win a set of tiles. The basic gist is that you can choose to do one of three pos­si­ble things on your turn:

1. Draw a tile from the bag and place it on the board.
2. Call for an auc­tion to begin.
3. Dis­card one of your god tiles and claim a sin­gle tile of your choice on the board.

Scor­ing points

Ra is played in three rounds, or Epochs. An Epoch comes to an end when the Ra tile track fills up, or when every­one has played all their suns. At the end of each Epoch, play­ers score points for the tiles they own. The goal is to have the most points at the end of the game.

Else­where…

In the inter­est of (rel­a­tive) brevity, I won’t get into the details of the rules any fur­ther here, but BoardGameGeek has a down­load­able PDF of the rules for those that are inter­ested in learn­ing more about how the game works. The BGG forums for Ra are also a great resource to check out if you have rules ques­tions, or just want to read what other peo­ple have to say about the game. BGG also has a won­der­ful image gallery of peo­ple play­ing Ra, some of the play­ing pieces, etc.

The Review

Ra is such a sim­ple, smart, easy-to-teach game. It’s just plain fun, and I’d rec­om­mend it to almost any­body, even many non-gamers. It plays pretty quickly, and the press-your-luck ele­ment is fan­tas­tic. Every­one I’ve intro­duced to Ra has loved it, too. Despite the loose-fitting theme, the game is still visu­ally rich. Yelling “RA!” when you want to start an auc­tion is a blast as well. I very highly rec­om­mend Ra.

I would say that the biggest hur­dle for new­com­ers to Ra would be pick­ing up on how some of the scor­ing works, but even that isn’t too cum­ber­some. There’s a cheat sheet on the game board that sum­ma­rizes the scor­ing very nicely, and it’s not too hard to get used to. Like most games, the best way to learn how to play it is to play it.

The bid­ding is stream­lined, and the other play­ers’ suns are easy to read across the table, so you will always have an idea of how likely you are to win those tiles you want. There are often plenty of oppor­tu­ni­ties to bluff or force some­one else to play their high sun too early, set­ting you up to win a big­ger auc­tion later. That is, if the Epoch doesn’t end first!

There is won­der­ful ten­sion in Ra. Play­ers are con­stantly bal­anc­ing the desire to wait and get the best value for their suns with the knowl­edge that they need to get what tiles they can before the end of the round arrives. The game is a tick­ing clock, and every­one feels it.

In con­clu­sion, Ra is one of my favorite games. It’s not a ter­ri­bly heavy or com­plex strat­egy game, and there is a bit of luck/chaos due to the draw bag, but it still rewards smart play most of the time. Most impor­tantly, it’s ridicu­lously fun, and doesn’t take all night to play. In the end, those two things are what makes it so much more likely to hit the table than some other really good games. Even if the Egypt­ian thing was just tacked on at the last minute.

If you enjoyed this review and would like to see more of them from me, please let me know in the comments.

Pho­tos by Kurt Keck­ley and Stan Mamula on BoardGameGeek. Many thanks, guys!

Tags: board game, review