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Kramer and Kiesling (Great Designers) · Pick Up and Deliver

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Welcome to Pick Up and Deliver: the podcast where I pick up my audio recorder as I step
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out the door and deliver an episode to you while I walk around.
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I'm Brendan Riley.
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Well, good morning listeners.
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It's a lovely day here in suburban Chicago.
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The birds are chirping.
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The commuters are on their way to work.
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I'm out for a little stroll.
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So I'm looking forward to talking to you today about some games and I realize it's been a
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while since I've done a Great Designer episode.
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In fact, looking back at my podcast notes, I have not done a good job of marking which
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episodes are Great Designer episodes.
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I'm actually going to go back and tag those as part of my episode cleanup today because
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when I need to be able to see like, who did I do an episode about?
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And right now the only one tagged is Phil Walker-Harding.
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And I know I've done episodes about Vladimir Suchy and Martin Wallace and Richard Garfield.
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But I don't think as far as I can tell that I've done one about Wolfgang Kramer or Michael
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Kiesling or their combined duo performance as Kiesling & Kramer.
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And since I played a game recently designed by the pair, I thought this is a great opportunity
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to discuss it.
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So what I thought I would do today is just sort of go through a list of Wolfgang Kramer
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games from highest rank until I've reached about the halfway point on the walk.
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Then I'll switch to Michael Kiesling games and do the same thing.
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Basically I'm just going to talk about which of their games I've played, which ones I really
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enjoy and why.
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So that's what we're doing today.
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It's a Wolfgang Kramer, Michael Kiesling thing.
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Now the only thing I really know about Wolfgang Kramer is that early on in his design
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career he put the score track around the outside of the board.
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The game that I'm most familiar with or first familiar with that did that was Ticket to Ride.
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But the idea of having a score track that goes around the outside that you move your score
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piece along, that was his innovation.
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And apparently was such a big deal at the time that people in the industry often call
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that a Kramer track.
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So good on you, dude.
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All right.
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So the first game, his highest rank game is El Grande.
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It's a rank of 92.
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It's from 1995.
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Now this is a game everybody still talks about.
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The board game brawl or the board game barrage people are particularly enthusiastic about
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El Grande.
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But when I hear people talk about it, they still talk about what a great game it is.
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I haven't had a chance to play yet.
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And frankly it doesn't sound like my cup of tea... too fighty.
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But I do generally play as an omnigamer.
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I think if people were setting up this game to play, I would definitely give it a try.
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If nothing else, it's in the top 100.
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I feel like if I can play everything that's in the top 100, I'm doing a pretty good
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job.
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El Grande I have not played.
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Next highest ranked is the Princes of Florence, 259.
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Now I have the older edition of this or had, did I sell it?
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I can't remember if I sold it or not.
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No, I think I still have it.
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Princes of Florence is... ah! no I did sell it.
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I did sell it.
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It's a tile lane game where you, an auction game where you are building your Palazzo and
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hiring different kinds of experts to build out your area.
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I thought it was a pretty interesting game, well made.
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I had a good time playing it.
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That said, the theme is pretty tired, you know, oh, you're a European noble person.
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Okay.
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The graphic design on the original edition that I had, I did not like.
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And just overall it was a game that I thought was good if somebody brought it and said, hey
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we're playing Princes of Florence, you want it?
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I'd be like, sure.
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But it's not a game I'm going to choose over many of the other games I had.
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So it didn't make sense to keep it in my collection.
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That's the argument I'm offering for myself.
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If it's not in my collection anymore, I guess it still could be in which case, oops.
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But let me see, have I logged it as not in my collection anymore in Boardgamegeek?
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Oh, it still says in collection, previously owned.
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Okay.
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So I have, in fact, sold it or said that I was selling it.
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Next up Tikal is one of the famous mask games.
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I have not played that although our game club does have a copy.
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So it's something I should try at some point.
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That's Rank 337.
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Downforce, Rank 417.
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This is a car racing game.
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And the interesting part of it is that you own one or two cars and then you're betting on
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these cars.
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And you help the cars move by playing cards.
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And a big part of the game is just sort of moving cars in a way that somebody else can't
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move the car that they want to move is kind of the big thing.
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So it's a car racing game.
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I think it's fine.
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There's not a whole lot.
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I mean, it's very tactical and I'm sure you can get really good at it versus not being
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good at it.
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It's a fine time and again, it goes in the category of sure I'd played if somebody's getting it
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out, but not a game
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I'm all that keen to get.
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Though I think if I found a copy I'd goodwill for three bucks.
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I would pick it up, mostly for my game club at school, but not a game I'm driven to
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own.
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Downforce.
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Next up Coliseum.
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I hear a lot of good things about Coliseum, but I have not had a chance to play it myself.
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Rank 618.
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Rank 5 I don't know what that is.
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Torres ranks 726.
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Now this is a game I do have.
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I bought it pretty early in my board game buying in my modern board game, buying career
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which started in like 2010 maybe.
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That's when I really started like starting to buy games occasionally and pay attention to
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the hobby.
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I don't look back at when tabletop was on.
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When that was when that was on the air, I was diving into the hobby again.
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I mean I've been in board games my whole life but sort of a modern incarnation.
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I think I got it in a math trade because I'd heard it's good.
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And it is really good.
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It is an action selection game.
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It's one of the first games I played that used action points and you had a number of different
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things you could do on your turn with your action points.
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And you have these little cards that let you do stuff and you're building these towers
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and the person who sort of builds the best towers are the most successful ones earns
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the points.
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Somebody who just recently played Porta Nigra which I'll talk about in a future episode.
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I guess I'm giving away something for the top of the stack.
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Whoops.
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I can you can definitely see it.
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Well for one thing you can see the literal inheritance in Porta Nigra because it's got
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the little bricks that are a key part of Torres.
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But Torres has this really interesting mechanism where you're trying to take control of these
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towers and you're moving your little knights around.
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It's really good.
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I like it a lot.
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And definitely played if you get a chance.
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It looks like there's the current cover in Boardgamegeek has a new cover so it must have been
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republished.
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I have the older one.
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I don't know if I have the 1999 version but it certainly feels older.
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All right.
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Continuing on, Mexica, another of the mask games I haven't played.
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Coal Baron, Nope.
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Palaces of Carrara.
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And actually have the Palaces of Carrara.
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I picked it up in as a used sale but I haven't played it yet.
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So it's on my to play list.
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Maharajah.
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Actually somebody at my game club just played this the other week.
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Linko
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I don't know what that is.
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Paris.
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Not all that well reviewed didn't get to play it.
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Hacienda.
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Java.
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The third of the mask game.
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Wandering towers.
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That's a game I keep seeing at my Board Game Store.
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And it looks pretty cool.
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It was a little more expensive than I wanted to pay for a game and no much about it.
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But we designed six nimit.
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Oh, we just got to Porta Nigra.
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Rank 1475 on Boardgamegeek.
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It was pretty fun.
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We'll talk about it more in another episode.
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But well worth a look if you get a chance.
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Asara, I don't know what that is.
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Re-nature.
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That's a game I saw a number of times on the shelf.
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I don't think I noticed it was a Kramer game.
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It looked interesting but again, you know, there have been a whole bunch of nature themed
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games in the last few years.
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So it's sort of white noise.
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Pueblo, I don't know what that is.
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Adventureland.
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Adventureland is one of those games I heard about a lot.
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I think Richard Ham, Rahdo, really liked Adventureland and talked it up a bunch.
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But I didn't hear much about it from anybody else.
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So I know what to say about that.
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Savannah Park.
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This is a game that got just the... a barest hint of buzz when it came out in 2021.
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I think it came out at Essen.
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I remember there was a little bit of buzz about it.
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I think it's Capstone Games if I recall.
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And people were just excited about like, "Oh, this looks really neat."
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But then I didn't hear anything about it after.
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So I don't know if it did get much saturation.
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I mean, we are in a land of just... or a time of just so many games that it's harder to
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get a get traction.
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Sealand, I don't know what that is.
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Coal Baron the card game, Cuzco, Heimlich and Company from 1984.
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Huh.
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That's life.
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El Capitan is another game I've heard a lot about.
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I wonder, does he like games that start with EL?
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He's got El Grandet.
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And now El Capitan.
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Which looks like it's about sailing, not about a mountain, Nauticus, Take 5, which I think
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Take 5 is like six-nimate or related to six-Nimmt.
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Tikal 2, apparently they may have a sequel.
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Daytona 500, expeditions around the world, top race, merchants of Middle Ages, Kaimum.
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1994's Big Boss.
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I saw somebody did a video of this.
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It looks like it just... I was like, "Isn't this just Aquire but less interesting?"
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I mean, I haven't played it so first impressions, first impression from watching a video for a
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minute.
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But it looked a lot like it wishes it was a choir or sounds a bit like a choir.
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I'm just sort of skimming through now looking at other things called Aura Park, I think
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was a sequel to Savannah Park.
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So you must have done six-Nimmt too, which is a game a lot of people really like.
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I have not.
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I've only played it once or twice on board game arena.
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So, there are a number of games that I just mentioned that I have played from Wolfgang
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Kramer.
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There might be more, but those are the ones that I'm seeing that are the sort of top ranked
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ones.
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I'm down and... Oh, we'll stop with this one.
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Vampire Queen.
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Vampire Queen is a ladder climbing card game that I have a copy of.
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It's an interesting one, really easy to play.
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It's ranked 6,000, so it's at least ranked.
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But we're the try if you get a chance.
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So, Vampire Queen will be the one I'll stop on.
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All right.
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So, now what I'm going to do is I will switch over to talking about Michael Kiesling, or...
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That's how I say it anyway, Kiesling.
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So Michael Kiesling is a much less prolific designer, at least in terms of how many of his
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designs show up on board game geek.
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On board game geek, Wolfgang Kramer had something like 600 designs, and Michael Kiesling
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has 95.
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So, real slacker there.
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I first came across Kiesling, I think, in the widespread coverage of Porta Nigra, actually.
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I may have encountered his name before, but it seems most likely that that is where I first
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encountered him.
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Because when Porta Nigra came out, I recall it got... I definitely heard a review of it on
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Dice Tower, or they talked about it.
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I definitely heard it on the secret cabal, and I definitely heard it on
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Blue Peg Pink Peg.
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So, those three together, it was definitely in my... on my radar.
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And Rahdo probably talked about it as well.
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So, that's sort of where Kiesling would have come into my purview, and then any other games
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that he made that are... so let's jump into his games and see what I have to say.
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So, his top rated game, rate number 74 of all time, is Azul.
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Azul is a great game.
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This is one I've talked about a number of times here.
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I've recommended it.
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I've done a duel.
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An Azul duel.
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It is a great drafting game where you're drawing tiles from a series of discs and placing them
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into these... onto these other discs called shops and basically just developing the... trying
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to score by collecting certain numbers of tiles in the right order.
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It's really fun.
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It's a great game that starts off relatively low conflict, but then there's a moment of
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shift, especially in a two-player game, where suddenly...
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of the choice, like, do you actively determine what you're taking to try to stick somebody
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with tiles they can't use, or even worse, do you like... like there are times where there'll
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be a sort of brings-person ship where you have a huge pile of tiles that's developing
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and whoever gets stuck with this is going to lose a lot of points.
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It's great.
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That's Azul.
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Number 180 is Azul Summer Pavilion.
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This is the third in the Azul line.
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It's the second sequel.
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This is my wife's favorite, although I will confess we do not have Azul Queen's Garden.
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Basically when Stained Glass of Cintra came out, the second one, the reviews were mixed and
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I played it and I didn't think that much of it.
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Then Summer Pavilion got pretty good reviews and that is in fact our favorite.
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The Queen's Garden one, it sounds a lot like Calico to me.
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Like so much like it.
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I don't know if I need another game that does that.
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But Calico already does that.
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That's sort of where we are with the Azul sequels.
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There's Master Chocolatier which just changes the theme of Azul from Mosaic in Portugal
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to Chocolate.
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Not really a game change, so I didn't buy that either.
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But Summer Pavilion is great.
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It changes what you're doing just a little bit.
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It changes the scoring conditions a little bit.
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It's less aggressive.
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It's harder to stick somebody with tiles they can't use.
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Pretty good.
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It's Azul Summer Pavilion.
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Then we got Tikal.
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I mentioned that one before.
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Heaven and Ale is a game that got a lot of buzz when it came out.
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It definitely was on the category of things I'd like to try at some point.
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But it's just never crossed my transom. When I have a chance to try it.
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But I definitely would.
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This would definitely be a game I'd pick up used or if I found it at a Goodwill I would
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think of it as a jackpot.
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Definitely a game that gets a lot of love.
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That's Rank 343.
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Heaven and Ale.
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He's the Azul Stained Glass of Cintra 431.
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Vikings at 596.
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This is not a game I've played.
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Vikings.
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I've seen it in a number of places and it looks like it might be fun.
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I mean, anything that's got like a Viking long chip on the cover looks cool.
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But yeah, so that is a game I would like to try if I got a chance.
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About no much about it.
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Then we have Azul Queen's Garden.
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673.
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I already did my Azul spiel.
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And we have Torres again.
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723.
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Now if I was paying attention to designers I might have noticed.
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The Kramer and Kiesling design Torres together.
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Because I definitely had that before I heard about Porta Nigra.
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Before the Nigra is probably the first time where I heard about Kramer and Kiesling.
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They were already a famous design duo when Porta and Nigra came out.
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In fact, that was the beginning of Stronghold's Great Designer series, which they had a series
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for a while that they were doing.
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I think that Porta and Nigra was on there.
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I think they did a car game, Kraftwagon or something, maybe.
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And then they did Auztralia with Martin Wallace.
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So they've done a number of games.
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I don't know they did more than three or four.
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Oh, they did an Uwe Rosenberg game.
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I feel like maybe Cottage Garden.
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That the Stronghold was doing this thing where they were trying to have one game from each
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of these great designers.
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Porta Nigra was the one there.
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There's Mexica again, Coal Baron, Palaces of Carrara, Maharajah.
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Seems like the same list.
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Riverboat.
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So Riverboat is a Kiesling one.
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Now this is one that I definitely would play if I had a chance.
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It's very well reviewed.
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It's often mentioned.
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I think it's hard to get used.
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The shut-up and sit-down folks really like it, which makes the game very hard to come
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by in the use market.
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And it sounds like a neat race game.
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I think I would probably like it better than something like Downforce.
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But who knows, maybe it's very similar to Downforce.
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We have Azul, Azul Chocolatier, linko, Paris, Java, wandering towers.
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Here's Porta Nigra again, Asara, Renature, Miyabi.
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I don't know what that is.
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Pueblo, Adventureland, Sansucci is definitely a game I've heard of.
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It's ranked 7.1 on board game geek.
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So that's not bad, but I don't know anything about it.
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Savannah Park called Coal Baron the Card Game.
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Cusco, that's life, Nauticus is not a game I'm familiar with.
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Tikal 2, Cavom.
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Nope, I don't know that one.
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Just skimming through these to see if there's any other games I recognize from Kiesling.
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No, I don't think so.
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And I've gotten up to rank 7,000.
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So about the same place that I stopped with Kramer.
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So Kiesling has a slightly narrower window of games he's designed on his own.
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Most of the games that he's really well known for.
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He designed with Kramer with the exception of Azul and its many spin-offs.
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Which, I don't know, when I heard about Azul Master Chocolatier, I was sort of like,
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oh, this reminds me of the Hudsucker Proxy now.
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If you haven't seen the Hudsucker Proxy, you should.
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It's a weird and delightful movie from the Coen Brothers.
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This maybe their fourth movie or something.
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It's pretty early.
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Stars Tim Robbins and Paul Newman as business types.
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Tim Robbins plays sort of young hick from the city who has an idea for a new toy and the
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idea is a hulu hoop.
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And part of the joke of the game, part of the joke of the movie is that his idea when he shows
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it to people, it's just a piece of paper with a circle drawn on it.
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And he says, "you know, for kids."
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And then of course the hulu hoop becomes very popular and he becomes famous.
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And then he basically, like every idea he has after that is variations on the hulu hoop.
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Like he has one that's weighted with sand.
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He's got one that, whatever.
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He's got a bunch of different variations on the hulu hoop.
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And part of the joke is he doesn't have any other real ideas.
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All his ideas are just variations on the hulu hoop.
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I don't think that's true with Michael Kiesling.
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We've just talked about a number of different games that are well liked and popular.
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But I can't help but notice half of his highest ranked games are Azul or variations on Azul.
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Now please don't interpret this as a shade throwing.
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No shade here.
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I certainly would throw lots more stuff at the wall if people were eager for a thing I made.
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If I made Azul and they're like, we'd love to see some more Azul.
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And then people like that too.
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Why wouldn't you keep doing that?
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At least in part as a way to keep your name out there.
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Keep people interested in the things you're doing.
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You could try new stuff.
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I mean, Azul Queens Garden is such a different game from Azul.
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It's not only the lightest relationship, honestly, from what I've read.
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But the design pedigree is a little smaller there.
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Nonetheless, Kramer and Kiesling are a renowned duo who have made a lot of different games.
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And doing this really does make me want to take a look at the mask trilogy, particularly
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because I definitely have Tikal and maybe Java available to me in the board game club library.
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So yeah, that would be really fun to do.
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Well, that brings me to the end of my walk.
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That Kramer and Kiesling game is your favorite, which Kramer game is your favorite? which Kiesling
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game is your favorite?
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I want to know all three of those.
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And you can tell me by going over to boardgamegeek guild 326 and posting in the forums
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there.
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I'd love to see it.
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What other great designers do you think I should spend a little time talking about?
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I'd love to hear that too.
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You can let me know also on the board game geek of forums or you can send me a direct message.
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Wombat929 is my username on board game geek.
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Or you can email me Brendan at RoutaboxGames.
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Well, thanks for joining me.
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on my walk today.
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I hope your next walk.
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is as pleasant as mine was.
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Bye-bye.
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