Rebirth by Reiner Knizia

Let’s back up a second - what even is the Spiel des Jahres?

Starting in 1979 an award was created to celebrate the Game of the Year. That’s literally the Spiel des Jahres, translated from the original German.

A jury of German speaking critics from Germany, Austria and Switzerland debate which of the games released in Germany in the prior 12 months are worthy of the title of Game of the Year. The precise details of the scoring are not known outside of that jury, but at least they judge games on the following 4 criteria:

The process is aimed mainly at family games - the first winner being the somewhat arithmetic-heavy Hare and Tortoise, later winners including Catan, Carcassonne, Ticket to Ride, Dominion, Codenames, Azul, and many more. You’ve likely heard of many of these absolute juggernauts of games - did they win Game of the Year due to their success? Or is their success due to winning Game of the Year?

However, fairly early on it was noted that there’s a distinction between family games and children’s games, and the jury definitely wanted to recognise excellence in children’s games. Lord knows there is enough children’s slop out there masquerading as games. So, in 1989, the Kinderspiel des Jahres was born - Children’s game of the year, first awarded to Gute Freunde, and later to Loopin’ Louie, Chicken Cha Cha Cha, The Magic Labyrinth.

Over time word got out that, you know, boardgames are a pretty fun and complex pastime. In 2006 a special award was granted to Caylus, as the jury felt they could not let this amazing game go unrewarded, but that it was a touch too complex to really be considered a family game.

In 2008 Agricola got the same treatment, despite being literally a game about growing a family and a farm for them to live on and feed from, this is no family game.

In 2010 World Without End (a follow up to Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth) won the rather confusingly named “Game of the Year Plus” Footnote which just begets the question, game of the year plus what?

The jury must have agreed because in 2011 they finally created the Kennerspiel des Jahres, or the Connoisseur’s Game of the Year¹ - a new category for those games considered just too complex to really be a mainstream family game, but deserving of recognition nevertheless. The Kennerspiel des Jahres has been awarded every year since, and that brings us straight back to this week’s announcement: That Rebirth is the Connoisseur’s Game of the Year 2026.

I used to think of the Kennerspiel des Jahres as the ‘complex’ game of the year, but I’m not sure this bears out - probably because my threshold for complexity is certainly higher than average.

Rebirth is only a 2 out of 5 for complexity on the BGG “weight” scale, from about 200 votes. (Only 133 voters weighed in on the subject of player count, but there it has 82% approval at 2-player, 99% at 3-player, and 97% at 4-player.)

My personal opinion - 2 for weight feels just about correct and would be my vote. There’s enough to get your teeth into, not so much that you need to agonise over every turn. I’ve played at 2-, 3- and 4-players, and whilst I have a really minor preference for 3 or 4, this is not a game which needs a Duel version to become a satisfying 2-player experience - it’s already great. Do make sure however that you make the necessary adjustments to play at 4-player, and don’t forget to remove components like I did once until I realised the board would fill too early and I couldn’t work out what was wrong.

A god amongst men. Reiner is an utterly prolific game designer - BGG has 833 entries with him credited as designer (76 expansions, 757 games). Footnote - it’s difficult to say precisely how many games that actually is - the first page there has 3 different Amun-Re games for example and whilst I’m sure Amun-Re and Amun-Re the card game are probably different enough to count as different games, I’m not sure that the anniversary edition also does.

I had the privilege of playtesting for a whole day with him at a games convention in Exeter and I loved the experience. A real what-could-have-been moment was when I was invited to playtest more often but couldn’t commit to the travel needed. Still, I am credited in the rulebook for Ra: The Dice Game and that first taste of prototype gaming set me up for where I am today!

I think I’ve played one other game that feels like Rebirth, and that’s Samurai, also by Reiner Knizia. In both games players are filling a hexagonal map of a territory, looking for control of key areas to score, and are doing so by playing tiles that are drawn from a bag, giving you a lovely combination of playing a strategic game where the strength of your current move is dictated somewhat by the luck of the draw, but there’s no doubt that you will have strong moves available to you at some point.

The tile draw really does make Rebirth more interesting. You see, there’s really two games going on at once in here. There’s a territory game where in the large open spaces you’re attempting to place your food and energy farms. Every time you place a farm tile, you score 1 point for every tile in that farm, meaning a large 7-tile farm will have scored you 28 points by the time you place that 7th tile.

However, it’s hard to go much larger as you will be blocked by geography and other players - some spots on the board can have either farm placed, but some specifically are only suitable for energy farms, and some only for food farms.

Then there are the settlements. Neither type of farm is playable in the settlements, as these are for houses. The map contains various sizes of settlement, usually between 1 and 3, and your bag contains various ‘strengths’ of house tile, from 1 to 4. A settlement is finished when all its spaces are covered in house tiles, at which point the number of houses is counted to see who won the settlement. Complete a settlement all by yourself and you get all the points, otherwise they’re going to split.

This dual purpose of tiles - farms to grow out in the open spaces, and houses to make claims on settlements - means that you have to make plays based on what tile is in your hand right now. Say you draw a tile with 2 houses on. Should it start a claim in a new settlement, close off a settlement that you’re winning, or even finish a settlement that you know will put you in 2nd place in that settlement? That could well be worth it, because the next tile your opponent draws could be a house, and finishing the settlement alone is worth many points!

If you’ve played Go you might get this analogy - at some point in Go the game has broken apart into several fights, different corners of the board requiring different moves, and a lot of the skill in Go is in determining which of the many fights on the board is the most urgent for you to play in right now. Now imagine that when you played Go you drew a card which told you which quarter of the board your next move must go in - it would completely change the nature of those individual fights as you wouldn’t quite be sure when you could play there next, and whether your opponent might be able to play twice before you can respond.

That’s what Rebirth feels like to me, you could be involved in a big fight for territory with a large energy farm, and draw a food farm. How do you use the food farm tile you’ve drawn to maximise the space for your energy farm? Do you try to start a large food farm, or do you try to limit opposing food farms to stop them encroaching towards your energy farm’s growth space?

And that’s before I’ve even talked about the castles and cathedrals. Component wise these are lovely pieces, they’re made from a material called reWood, which is completely made from recycled materials (wood waste and some kind of binding material) but has the moulding capabilities of plastic. I quite like the feel of it too.

Mechanically, the castles and cathedrals give you focal points to place your tiles around, vying for control. Castles are the simplest to understand, control a castle and you get to put your castle piece on the board, and that’s worth 5 points². The control rules are easy to understand once they’re cemented in your head, but they read a little odd the first time:

So, if I have 2 house tiles next to a castle, and you have 1 farm, I’m winning that castle 2 to 1. If you place any other tile next to the castle, you’ll have 2 tiles and I’ll still have 2 tiles, so only then do we look at what’s on the tiles, at which point you’ll be beating me as I have no farms and you do.

Cathedrals introduce another thing to the game, but exactly what depends on which Rebirth you’re playing.

Rebirth has a map of Scotland on one side, and Ireland on the other side, but these aren’t merely different maps for the same game - they have genuinely different features making the game different to play.

Minor differences include Ireland having a 4-tile settlement, and more of the farm spaces being open - meaning they can take food or energy farms. That makes more space for large farms to exist, but at the same time makes them easier to block.

The major difference is in the cathedrals. In Scotland, the cathedrals are focus points on the map that you are rewarded for playing next to at all. There’s no basic need to ‘control’ cathedrals, just getting a single tile of any type next to one is good enough to place your cathedral. Your reward is to draw a card from the cathedral deck, which might be 3 points, or might be a mission you have to complete for 5 points.

A lot of the missions involve controlling a specific castle, or controlling a specific cathedral. However, there are some oddball missions in there like ‘Have the largest continuous group of tiles on the coastline’ or ‘Control the English border’. With 8 cathedrals per player, it’s possible to draw 8 missions and it is certainly possible to complete all 8 if you focus on them, but to do so you’d have to play to every cathedral as early as possible to get those mission cards into your hand. What are your opponents up to whilst you’re doing this? You’d better keep an eye on them!

In Ireland the cathedrals work quite differently. You don’t draw private missions for playing cathedrals - instead there are 8 public missions, and you use cathedral pieces to mark which you have completed, with a higher score going to the player to first complete each one. The adjacency game is still present however, with the round towers that only exist on the Ireland map. Each has a special power, and the locations of these powers are randomised during map setup. Placing next to a tower might be worth points, allow you to take an extra turn, or even place a doubling marker on a mission you haven’t yet completed, making that mission worth double points to you!

I have played the Scotland side of the map more - it’s definitely the simpler side of the game, and as such more approachable for first-time players. However, and I mean this quite sincerely, if either Rebirth-with-the-Scotland-map or Rebirth-with-the-Ireland-map were released as separate games, either would be a fantastic addition to your game collection. The fact they come in the same box is a massive bonus. Kudos to the publisher here, Mighty Boards, for not deciding to sell Ireland as an expansion.

To sum up, I think any Kennerspiel des Jahres winner is worth your time, I have played 9 of the 16 recipients and loved 8 of them. Rebirth is certainly a worthy winner of the award, and Reiner Knizia a very worthy designer to have achieved it.

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