The year 2025 marks the 40th anniversary of Dr Reiner Knizia’s career as a board game designer – his first published game, Complica, was released in a magazine in 1985 (although he’d self-published games before then as well).
Since then, Knizia has designed and published over 800 games and expansions, many of which are critically acclaimed. Put simply, Reiner Knizia is the landscape on which all other modern designers build their houses.
To celebrate Knizia’s career and back catalogue, Meeple Mountain are taking things back to basics to consider the ABC of Reiner Knizia: one game for each of the 26 letters of the alphabet.
This time: The Letter ‘V’.
V – Viking See-Saw (2021)
Sometimes with our Knizian Alphabet, we’ve used letters to discuss more than just the specific games associated with those letters. The Letter ‘E’ discussed Knizia’s use of historical themes. The Letter ‘K’ looked at the awards Knizia has and hasn’t won. ‘H’ and ‘M’ dove deep into Knizia’s deployment of satire. The Letter ‘O’ explored how a changing world frames art in a different light. ‘Q’ wove alternative narratives together to consider how we view Knizia’s career and the useless nature of simple stories. The Letter ‘U’ ventured outside the box to examine those games found in books, magazines and collections, considering what it means to be a ‘game’ and scrutinising the magic ‘800’.Some letters of the alphabet have covered the big hitters, the games that built Knizia’s reputation and cemented his name in gaming history. Games such as Ra and Modern Art and Tigris & Euphrates and Through the Desert and High Society and Samurai and Pickomino and Lord of the Rings and Lost Cities and… well, you get the idea.
And then there are some letters where we simply want to discuss what my North American colleagues might term ‘a really neat little game’.
Enter Viking See-Saw, a really neat little game.
In this case, however, I’d like to draw your attention to the dual meanings of ‘neat’, because Viking See-Saw is both clever and compact. It’s Knizia’s best dexterity game, and pound for pound it arguably provides the best game-to-size ratio of any dexterity game of the past decade.
The premise is simple. On the table is a purple boat, tipped with one end in the air. The colour is irrelevant and the mast is more of an obstacle than a decoration, but it works. This is the titular see-saw and whilst it doesn’t look especially Viking-y, it’s a delightful enough prop that nobody cares and few even remember that it should.
In the boat are seven chests and in front of each player is an odd assortment of items. You can guess where you want those items to end up. The first player to add all their items to the boat wins. More likely, the winner is the person with the fewest items when the last chest is removed from the boat as a penalty for tipping it. Knizia sometimes builds timers into his games, and Viking See-Saw follows in the illustrious footsteps of games like Pickomino in this regard.
And really, that’s about it. On your turn you take one of your items and place it on the raised end of the ship. If nothing happens then well done you, that’s your turn over. If the ship tips then you must remove a chest from the ship as a punishment. If anything falls from the ship you take all the items that spilled and add them to your inventory
There’s nowt to suggest anything special going on and yet there undeniably is.
“It’s not everyday that I feel I know everything there is to know about a game in the time it takes for the pizza to arrive at my table,” says Meeple Mountain’s Bob Pazehoski, Jr. in his review of Viking See-Saw, “even less common is believing a game has revealed all of its secrets in fifteen minutes and still being wholly pleased with it.”
The secret is in those assorted items you’re trying to stash onboard. Metal blocks, marbles, viking figures, gem stones. Spheres, cubes and irregular shapes. Even when there are two of a type of shape, they come in different materials. Their size, shape and weight are all different, making tracking the boat’s balance almost impossible. So you take an educated guess. When it pays off, you feel awesome. When it doesn’t, you laugh. Either way is a win.
“The see-saw effect taps into our innate sense of physics,” says Pazehoski, “this exercise in gravitational chicken excites and challenges—briefly—our understanding of how the earth is put together. We think we have it all figured out and that we’ll get away scot free. That’s when we get into trouble. That’s when we laugh.”
And sure, Viking See-Saw won’t sustain you for hours in a single sitting, but then again, it isn’t trying to. It takes moments to set up and teach, not much longer to play, results in plenty of smiles, and comes in a tiny box. The whole thing is just 19 centimeters long, less than 6 wide and barely 3 deep.
Viking See-Saw is part of Japanese publisher itten’s Funbrick Series. Small, sleek and (mostly) white boxes containing quirky games. It was originally published in 2021 in Japan, and only received an English edition 2 years later as a result of a Kickstarter campaign to bring five of the Funbrick games to a wider audience (the others being 3 Second Try, Judge Domino, Ninja Master and Stick Collection). There are another six games in the Funbrick series, but Viking See-Saw is widely regarded, in the West at least, as the best of the bitty bunch. Pazehoski also (mostly) enjoyed Tower of Doubt, and Wonder Bowling gets decent reviews.
Knizia’s interest in bringing games to all the world means that it’s not unusual for him to have games published in Japan before other countries. Ninja Master is the other design of his in the Funbricks series and was, like Viking See-Saw, released in Japan before making it to the West. It’s another dexterity game, this time challenging players’ reflexes as they roll dice into an arena and try to claim items around the outside of the arena based on the faces of the rolled dice. Perhaps not as strong a title as its series sibling, it’s still well worth a try if you can track down a copy.
Viking See-Saw and Ninja Master are two of Knizia’s few forays into the dexterity genre. It isn’t, if we’re honest, a genre that he’s well known for. There are several dexterity games for children in his catalogue – we’ll flag The Amazing/Ultimate Spider-Man Game and Ice Tumble, and Penguin is worth noticing because it’s the stacking precursor to Penguin Party. But there aren’t many other Knizian dexterity games that really stick in the memory, unless you count the physicality of the Dutch auctions in Merchants of Amsterdam and it’s 2025 update Merchants of Andromeda.
Despite this relative dearth of options, Viking See-Saw being his best from a limited batch doesn’t detract from its many strengths. This is a game that stands out in the competitive dexterity genre, bringing a boatload of charm and character to enhance its balancing joys. It is, utterly and completely, a really neat little game.
Venturing into the Venerated Vault
We vacillated in our verdict for ‘V’: Knizia’s oeuvre in ‘V’ isn’t vast or varied, but there are valid versions of this article where another game was victorious.
Vampire – Sometimes referred to as a multiplayer Lost Cities, 2000’s Vampire sees players collecting sets of different suits, with the weakest set or meld being discarded in each suit. It’s a lesser-known Knizia, but you may well encounter it in the near future as publisher GameHead are bringing it back in 2026 as Wild Magic. There isn’t a huge amount of information about the new version, but the art looks rather lovely and it extends the player count down to 2. Here’s hoping that it fares better than the ill-fated Invasion of the Garden Gnomes, which was a previous reimplementation with special powers that failed to gain enough crowdfunding support in 2017, just before the ‘Reinerssance’ began.
Vegas – We’re including 1996’s Vegas purely because of the name ‘Mary Chip’, the in-game character who moves from gaming table to gaming table to award the golden chip to the player with the majority of tokens at the table. Combining area majority and push-your-luck mechanisms, Vegas was reworked in 2001 as Maginor, adding spells and mages. With the number of little-known Knizia gems being unearthed and polished up at the moment, Vegas might deserve another look. Just make sure that Mary Chip returns, please?
Vinculum – In 2014 the Doctor of Mathematics partnered with publisher SimplyFun to create ‘speed maths the game’. Named after the line dividing the numerator and denominator in a fraction, Vinculum is all about fractions. Very much an educational game, Vinculum challenges its players to reduce and expand fractions to quickly find matches among the fractions already on the table. It’s a game of mathematical mental dexterity.
Voodoo Prince – First released in 2017, Voodoo Prince is a trick-taking game and very nearly the main feature for the Letter ‘V’. The aim is to take tricks but to do so as late as possible in the round, without being too late. There’s clearly something about this design as in 2020 it was tweaked slightly to create Marshmallow Test and in 2026 another tweak sees the formation of a mid-point between the two previous games in the form of Piñatas.
–
And so we vacate ‘V’. Were our views valid? Do you value our venerable voice and are we virtuosic in our valiant vision? Or was our verdict vague, vain and valueless, and you envisage vigorous vengeance? Reveal your version of events in the comments below and visit the rest of the Reiner Knizia Alphabet here!
