Mob rules - Reiner Knizia's Razzia goes on sale
Brainy board game at an impulse price
Few people regularly put the words 'German' and 'mafia' together in the same sentence, but Reiner Knizia did and he built a board game around it.
The resulting game - Razzia, a Pocket Gamer Bronze Award-winner - is based on his earlier game Ra.
Both are resource-grabs, with players competing against one another in auction house style bids for desired goods.
It's all good fun to the types who enjoy brainy, mathematical board games - and now Razzia's on sale for 99c/69p, which is a nice departure from its usual asking price of $2.99 / £1.99.
You'll be sleeping with the fishies, see?The allure of games like Razzia is the allure of bluffing and pulling one over on your opponents.
You enter into each auction house showdown with a small pool of different, fixed values to bid and you only have a single chance to bid - or pass - on a given auction.
If an item comes up that you need to win, you'll want to throw your high value bid in, but doing so shows your intentions to your opponents (whom you'll play against asynchronously) - which is where the core of Razzia's strategy lies.
In our review of Reiner Knizia's Razzia, we called it "a solid adaptation of a tense, rollicking boardgame" before we hung a bronze medal around its neck. If you're one who enjoys bluffing, Mafiosi, and games with a heavy emphasis on making snap cost/benefit decisions, you'll want to bid on Razzia before the price jumps back up.
