Reiner Knizia’s greatest game, in this reviewer’s humble opinion, is his 1998 title Samurai, a very tight strategy game with very little luck involved. Each player starts the game with the same sets of tiles of varying strengths and powers, placing them on a board of hexagonal spaces to try to gain control of various shrines. It is, like most of Knizia’s games, very mathy, with a theme that’s good but that also isn’t intrinsic to the game itself—so much so that Samurai is getting an entirely new theme and name this year with the upcoming release of Hanami from Keymaster Games.
Knizia hasn’t been idle, of course. The field’s most prolific designer had several new titles and rethemed games come out in 2025. Tops among those is Iliad, a new two-player game that shares a lot of Samurai’s DNA, but ultimately plays out differently, including an extremely tense endgame that really makes it a winner.
In Iliad, players place their tiles on a 6×6 board, with each player limited to the alternating spaces in their own color (red or blue). The players have the same 18 tiles: three each with strength 1 through 5 and three “dolos” tiles that take their strength from the opponent’s adjacent tiles. Tiles with strengths 1 through 4 also have an optional action the player can take while placing the tile. Players randomly draw two tiles to place on their two spaces in the very center of the board to begin the game, and then draw a hand of two tiles. On a turn, the active player places a tile from their hand to any space on the board that’s adjacent to at least one existing tile, possibly using the new tile’s action, and draws back up to two.
Each column and row has a unique scoring tile at either end, randomly assigned before each game. When a column or row is filled with six tiles, the players score it; the player with the greater total strength gets to choose one of the scoring tiles, and the other player must take the other. (Some scoring tiles are negative.) If the strengths are equal, the player who placed the sixth tile in that column/row wins. If there are any dolos tiles in the column/row, their value is equal to the sum of the two adjacent tiles in what’s being scored—that is, the two above and below it if it’s a column. A dolos tile adjacent to another dolos tile has value zero, womp womp.
The actions on the tiles provide the heart of the game’s strategy, as you know what tiles you have left—and which ones your opponent has left—but will only have a choice of two to use in any given turn. Those actions include moving one of your own already-placed tiles to any legal space, moving one of your opponent’s tiles in the same way, flipping the tile you just placed (value 4) face down and doing the same with an opponent’s adjacent tile, and trading in one of your scoring tiles for one of the five that were not placed on the board to start the game. What will become evident in your first game, if it wasn’t already, is that you don’t want to place the fifth tile in any column or row and thus set up your opponent to win it on their next turn—or to know they can take it at any time, and thus use stronger tiles elsewhere.
The final scoring in Iliad is very Knizia-esque, which is to say 1. it rewards balance and 2. it’s not very straightforward. The scoring tiles in the game include three each for five different gods, each represented by a different color; two marriage tiles; and several godless (atheist?) tiles with values ranging from -10 to +10 points. If one player gets at least one tile from all five gods, and the other doesn’t, that player wins outright. Both marriage tiles together can take the place of one missing god; one marriage tile by itself has no value. If both players get all five gods, or neither does, then you add up all of your non-god tiles’ values, then add your highest-value tiles from each god, with the higher total winning. The scoring isn’t entirely intuitive, but it allows for some flexibility, and gives the 3-tiles allowing you to swap a scoring tile from your stash with one in the market a ton of value—as long as they come out later in the game. I’ve played this and had all three of my 3-tiles show up so early that I could only make one such swap and got stuck with a couple of -10 tiles at the end of the game. (I’m not bitter.)
Iliad isn’t a Samurai replacement; Samurai works great with two players, and it’s still my favorite Knizia game. What Iliad does is scratch a similar itch with its combination of area control, light long-range planning, and the potential for big swings late in the game if you set up the proper moves. It also plays in its promised 30-minute time once you know the rules, although I don’t think it’s going to get much shorter than that because each tile placement offers so many scenarios to consider. (If your hand was three tiles instead of two, Iliad might be unplayable for anyone who suffers from analysis paralysis.) Out of all of the great designer’s purely two-player games, Iliad ranks only behind Battle Line (also known as Schotten Totten) for me.
