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Alea Analysis #1: Ra (Big Box #1)
Jan. 30th, 2009 11:16 pmToward the start of the year, I noted my intention to play and comment on all 22 Alea Games. January was a bit light for serious gaming, but Wednesday night I finally got started on the project with a play of Reiner Knizia's Ra, the first Alea Game, published ten years ago in 1999.
Ra was one of my first Euro Holy Grails. When I got into the field the old Alea version was out-of-print and it was late 2005 before the Uberplay version appeared. I've since gotten to play Ra 15 times, marking it as my fifth most played Reiner Knizia game (following Lost Cities [54], Carcassonne: The Castle [21], Blue Moon [17], and Through the Desert [16]), my second most-played Alea game (after San Juan [30]), and my 17th most-played game since I started keeping track several years ago. If I group it with like games by tossing out all the games that have received substantial numbers of additional plays due to 2-player gaming with my wife, only Coloretto [24] and the aforementioned Through the Desert [16] surpass it. That marks it as pretty popular in my book.
For anyone unfamiliar with Ra, it's an auction game with an Egyptian theme. There are a couple of unique elements.
First, the auctioning is done in lots, a methodology that Knizia also uses for Medici, Strozzi, Hollywood Blockbuster, and probably a few other games that I'm missing. One bid gets you several items. Even more intriguing, the players decide collectively how to size the lots by either adding to a lot or starting an auction on each turn.
Second, the auctioning is done with set money units. Each player gets 3-4 "suns" labeled from 1-17. In the once-around auction, a player decides whether to bid one of his suns or pass. The auctioneer goes last, at which point the person with the highest bid wins the lot.
Third, each lot includes the sun that was bid on the previous auction, meaning that you're also bidding for your bidding power in the next of the three rounds of play. There's no other game that I can think of that uses this particularly clever idea.
Fourth, the things you're bidding on are kind-of, sort-of set-collection elements, which means that as the game goes on, the value of individual tiles will diverge for different players. I think this is an important element in any good auction game.
Fifth, the length of a round of play can be variable, so if you save up your bidding resources, you can sometimes lose out.
This all mixes together into a very harmonious and still quite original whole. There are just two decision points: whether to start an auction or add to a lot; and which of your sun tiles to bid, if any. However, those decisions points feel very crucial, and as with the best Knizia games, the decisions can sometimes be very difficult. (I suspect this is due to the very limited resources available in your bid tokens.)
As you can probably suss out from my description of Ra thus far, I like it. I find just about every game enjoyable, though the auction (or rather its interaction with the variable round length) can be really harsh. I've had more than one game where I felt like I was totally hosed after the first round of play (though I managed to bounce back despite feeling that way in my game Wednesday night, thanks to 25 points worth of monuments at game end).
The other good elements of the game are that it's short, pretty quick to play, and has a nice rapid fire of turns, so you're never out of action for long (unless you use up all your action tokens). It's also got some nice strategy (as you plan which points you're going for long-term), though its play is largely tactical (as you figure out what you're doing each individual turn).
There definitely is some segment of the population that doesn't like Ra. I'm surprised when someone says it's boring, and I think that those people just don't get the importance of your possible actions. However, I understand people who say that it's too random for them. There is definitely an uncontrollable element, based on which tiles are drawn (and particularly, when round-ending Ra tiles are drawn). However, even more than most random games of this sort, I think your choices are very much of the risk-reward sort. If you go for longer odds than you may (or may not) be rewarded appropriately.
I also suspect some people don't like the fact that it's sort of hard to figure out what you're doing right (or wrong) through your first several games. I'm curious if this is an element that developer Stefan Brück is fond of, as I also feel that Taj Mahal, Palazzo, and Fifth Avenue all have somewhat opaque strategies, while several others, starting off with Puerto Rico take at least a few games before you can figure out what to do. (Their strategies aren't exactly opaque, like the first four I mention, but instead somewhat complex.)
I reviewed the Uberplay version of Ra for RPGnet and gave it a 5 Style / 5 Substance, which is a rating I'd stick it with today. Of the one Alea game I've written about so far this year, Ra is the best:
At this moment Ra is out-of-print, with the Alea version long gone and the Uberplay just a year or so gone. Rio Grande now has Ra on their reprint schedule, and will presumably produce a non-Alea-branded edition, like their Taj Mahal, sometime this year.
Ra was one of my first Euro Holy Grails. When I got into the field the old Alea version was out-of-print and it was late 2005 before the Uberplay version appeared. I've since gotten to play Ra 15 times, marking it as my fifth most played Reiner Knizia game (following Lost Cities [54], Carcassonne: The Castle [21], Blue Moon [17], and Through the Desert [16]), my second most-played Alea game (after San Juan [30]), and my 17th most-played game since I started keeping track several years ago. If I group it with like games by tossing out all the games that have received substantial numbers of additional plays due to 2-player gaming with my wife, only Coloretto [24] and the aforementioned Through the Desert [16] surpass it. That marks it as pretty popular in my book.
For anyone unfamiliar with Ra, it's an auction game with an Egyptian theme. There are a couple of unique elements.
First, the auctioning is done in lots, a methodology that Knizia also uses for Medici, Strozzi, Hollywood Blockbuster, and probably a few other games that I'm missing. One bid gets you several items. Even more intriguing, the players decide collectively how to size the lots by either adding to a lot or starting an auction on each turn.
Second, the auctioning is done with set money units. Each player gets 3-4 "suns" labeled from 1-17. In the once-around auction, a player decides whether to bid one of his suns or pass. The auctioneer goes last, at which point the person with the highest bid wins the lot.
Third, each lot includes the sun that was bid on the previous auction, meaning that you're also bidding for your bidding power in the next of the three rounds of play. There's no other game that I can think of that uses this particularly clever idea.
Fourth, the things you're bidding on are kind-of, sort-of set-collection elements, which means that as the game goes on, the value of individual tiles will diverge for different players. I think this is an important element in any good auction game.
Fifth, the length of a round of play can be variable, so if you save up your bidding resources, you can sometimes lose out.
This all mixes together into a very harmonious and still quite original whole. There are just two decision points: whether to start an auction or add to a lot; and which of your sun tiles to bid, if any. However, those decisions points feel very crucial, and as with the best Knizia games, the decisions can sometimes be very difficult. (I suspect this is due to the very limited resources available in your bid tokens.)
As you can probably suss out from my description of Ra thus far, I like it. I find just about every game enjoyable, though the auction (or rather its interaction with the variable round length) can be really harsh. I've had more than one game where I felt like I was totally hosed after the first round of play (though I managed to bounce back despite feeling that way in my game Wednesday night, thanks to 25 points worth of monuments at game end).
The other good elements of the game are that it's short, pretty quick to play, and has a nice rapid fire of turns, so you're never out of action for long (unless you use up all your action tokens). It's also got some nice strategy (as you plan which points you're going for long-term), though its play is largely tactical (as you figure out what you're doing each individual turn).
There definitely is some segment of the population that doesn't like Ra. I'm surprised when someone says it's boring, and I think that those people just don't get the importance of your possible actions. However, I understand people who say that it's too random for them. There is definitely an uncontrollable element, based on which tiles are drawn (and particularly, when round-ending Ra tiles are drawn). However, even more than most random games of this sort, I think your choices are very much of the risk-reward sort. If you go for longer odds than you may (or may not) be rewarded appropriately.
I also suspect some people don't like the fact that it's sort of hard to figure out what you're doing right (or wrong) through your first several games. I'm curious if this is an element that developer Stefan Brück is fond of, as I also feel that Taj Mahal, Palazzo, and Fifth Avenue all have somewhat opaque strategies, while several others, starting off with Puerto Rico take at least a few games before you can figure out what to do. (Their strategies aren't exactly opaque, like the first four I mention, but instead somewhat complex.)
I reviewed the Uberplay version of Ra for RPGnet and gave it a 5 Style / 5 Substance, which is a rating I'd stick it with today. Of the one Alea game I've written about so far this year, Ra is the best:
- Ra
At this moment Ra is out-of-print, with the Alea version long gone and the Uberplay just a year or so gone. Rio Grande now has Ra on their reprint schedule, and will presumably produce a non-Alea-branded edition, like their Taj Mahal, sometime this year.