Game Preview: Keltis x3: Erweiterung, Kartenspiel, BMM

By W. Eric Martin
February 3, 2009

Designer: Reiner Knizia
Publisher: Kosmos
Players: 2-4
Ages: Varies
Playing Time: Varies
Release Date: February 2009 for Die Erweiterung and BMM; March 2009 for Das Kartenspiel

Gamers have come to expect the Spiel des Jahres winner to unleash a torrent of expansions and spin-offs onto the market. The 2003 winner Alhambra has seen five expansions and two somewhat related games bearing the Alhambra name; 2004’s Ticket to Ride has had a half-dozen standalone games and supplemental items; designer Michael Schacht has spun off more than a dozen items, from standalone games to single cardboard tiles, for the 2007 winner Zooloretto.

Despite multiple standalone games and more than a dozen expansions, Klaus-Jürgen Wrede’s Carcassonne from 2001 qualifies as only the secondmost riffed-on SdJ winner. No, the prize for empire building goes to Klaus Teuber’s The Settlers of Catan, which is still being transformed in new directions by Teuber and publisher Kosmos more than a decade after the game’s 1995 SdJ win.

Given that history from Kosmos, it’s only natural that the company’s 2008 winner, Reiner Knizia’s Keltis, will have three related items shown at the Nuremberg Toy Fair in early February 2009. “[Kosmos] mastered the extension to perfection,” says Knizia, “so now it’s custom to do something. After the winning was announced, I had a long conversation with the people at Kosmos because we wanted to do something, but what?”

Keltis: Die Erweiterung

Knizia and Kosmos brainstormed a long list of possibilities, then pared the list down to an expansion for the base game as well as two smaller, standalone titles – a card game and a “bring-mit-mich” game – that remix the game play of Keltis in new ways. “When you do an expansion, a brand expansion, the question is always what is the core of the game and what can you change,” says Knizia. “I believe the core of the game of Keltis is the card mechanic because it has a dual excitement or challenge. First of all, I have a hand of cards and sometimes I would rather not play one but wait on it, so how long do I wait before I play it? It’s the conflict within myself, the internal conflict. Next is the competition with the other players because there is always something for which you’re racing forward, the stones or other things, and there is also the race for when the game ends. Do I need to act now? How long can I wait? There is the internal and external challenge, and that for me makes the Keltis game, so I kept the card play and number range, and therefore the basic feel of the game.” (For more on the design and development of Keltis from Knizia, read this BGN article.)

Thus, for Keltis: die Erweiterung, the expansion to the base game, what has changed is the gameboard, along with the tiles and other items that go on it. “Through the new tiles, we can introduce a lot of new features,” says Knizia. Not to mention, he says, that people are sometimes disappointed when they find nothing but a board in an expansion.

On this new gameboard, which is arranged portrait-style rather than the landscape orientation of the original, the five independent arcs on which the players move their pieces have been replaced by a network of intersecting and overlapping arcs. Says Knizia, “There are still multiple arcs going upward, but after moving 2-3 spaces on the red arc, it suddenly swaps into something else, allowing you to continue on a blue arc or a green arc. You will continue to be confronted with these switches. Do you go left or go right?”

The game is no longer one of how far you can get on one or more tracks, but how you manage the movement of all your pieces. “Blue is no longer directly linked to a particular figure,” says Knizia. “If I’m playing not so optimally, I can suddenly end up with three of my figures on the blue path, and I’ll have trouble getting out of it. I need to react more to my cards. If I have more red cards, I can use the red tracks, but since there is no single red track, I need to figure out how to get on them, and so on.”

With the colors divided across multiple tracks, a player can easily get a figure to the end of the line by playing three red cards, then two blue, and so forth, but Knizia says, “I wanted to make sure that we don’t have a race because then in a four-player game everyone just pushes one figure forward and we’re almost done.”

Two design elements encourage players to balance the movement of their figures along the tracks: First, the point values on the board come in waves rather than being strictly increasing. When you first place a figure, you still start with a negative value, but after moving only a few spaces with that figure, you’ll be on a space worth 5 points. Then the point values drops before rising to 8, then it drops again before settling on 10. “You might be quite satisfied to put a lot of your figures on the 5 level as you’d have good results,” says Knizia. “But when you move again, you want to move to the height of the next wave.”

The second design element to encourage movement by multiple figures is a set of five cairns on the board, with each cairn having a stack of five stones in a particular color. One section of blue track, for example, will have a stack of five blue stones – each with a bonus of free movement or bonus points or an extra card – and when you reach a certain spot on that track, you claim the top stone. Collect stones of all five colors, which will require treks down five different paths, and you’ll earn 10 points; collect three stones of the same color, and that’s worth 10 points, too. Smaller collections are worth fewer points. Says Knizia, “That’s quite a number of points, and that brings topology into the game because you’re not just running anywhere. You can’t ignore the stones of the cairns, so while you have lots of flexibility, you also have lots of objectives of where you want to be.”

This last line – more choices, and more goals – summarizes Keltis: Erweiterung for its designer. “I believe this takes the game just a notch up from the current level of sophistication because I assume people who buy this will have played Keltis quite a bit. They’ll have slightly more of a challenge without making it too much more difficult.”

Keltis: Das Kartenspiel

A card game version of Keltis might seem like something of a contradiction, given that game’s birth from the Lost Cities card game. Designer Reiner Knizia felt the same way initially – but then he started working on possible designs and saw the game moving in a different direction, one that will be familiar to fans of both Lost Cities and Keltis, while also being its own game.

Keltis: Das Kartenspiel, which will consist of 110 cards in a small box, maintains the heart of the Keltis card play: Players have a hand of cards, playing or discarding one card each turn on piles of the same color in an ascending or descending manner, then drawing one card. Since the game includes no board, each player has her own layout of card piles with six (yes, six) discard piles available in the center of the playing area. Each of the five colors includes two “finishing cards,” to use Knizia’s term, and these cards can be played on a stack of the matching color at any time, after which no further number cards can be added to thhat stack; once five finishing cards have been played, or the deck has been exhausted, the game ends.

The game includes two other types of cards in addition to the basic number cards, the first of which are nine stone cards numbered 1-9 that are set on the side of the playing area at the start of the game. “In order to grab one of these stone cards,” says Knizia, “you need to discard two cards of the same value. So if I throw away two 3 cards on the discard piles, I get the 3 stone.” At the end of the game you lose points if you have no stones, and score positive points if you hit certain levels of stoniness.

As for why the stones are included, Knizia says, “This has the advantage of encouraging discarding a bit more, encouraging the interchange of cards. There’s a race for the stones: Do I want to take them, and if so, which ones? I might not want to play a pair of 5s initially, so do I throw them away? Do I ignore the stones and make use of the cards that other people throw away?”

The other type of card is a neutral-colored number card. Says Knizia, “I wanted to give us a little more choice in the game, and these point cards are jokers. You can do three things: You can play them in a sixth row beyond the other five you have; you can discard them to catch stones; and you can use them as a joker and put them into any of your color rows. The trick, however, is that because jokers have so many degrees of freedom, there’s an extra hurdle in that you can play them [on a colored row] only if you match the value of the last card. So if you have a value 7 joker card, you can play it if you have played a 7 in this row. The joker cards give you lots of flexibility and allow you to make long rows, but you need to see that you get the right numbers and in the right colors, which gives interplay between the card elements.”

Since the players have no figures to advance on a scoring track, points are determined by the number of cards in each stack that a player has, thereby representing that player’s advancement on a particular path. Collect 1-3 cards, and you lose points in that color; from four cards on you earn points, with seven cards netting 6 points and nine or more cards 10 points.

Comparing Lost Cities with Keltis: Das Kartenspiel, Knizia says, ”Lost Cities lives from the value of the cards. The 2 and 3 cards are irrelevant; the 8, 9 and 10 cards are important, but they come down only at the end. You cannot play Lost Cities up and down” – that is, with a choice of ascending or descending card values – “because it would not work. In Keltis, each card is worth the same as any other, and the points range never increases linearly. There are waves of points. You cannot make all five colors long, so you have to concentrate on where the number cards are coming. It’s a simpler principle than in Lost Cities, which is much more about the high numbers, which brings more sophistication; in this game, you want to play many cards and race for the stones.”

Keltis BMM

The third Keltis spinoff is the Keltis BMM, with the “BMM” standing for “bring-mit-mich spiel,” a term that translates to a “bring with me” game or travel game. Kosmos has introduced dozens of mitbringspiels, to use another term for the series, in recent years, and the company has thirty(!) new mitbringspiel in its Nuremberg 2009 line-up. These games come in small boxes, are relatively inexpensive, and are typically pitched toward a younger audience than the typical Kosmos customer. Imagine them in a huge bin as POP (point of purchase) items near the cash register in a department store, and you’ll have a good image for what Kosmos intends for the series. Whether Kosmos is reacting to the sluggish worldwide economy or simply opening new markets for its games is an open question.

For the Keltis BMM, the cards have been replaced by tiles and their number cut to 55. “Cards or tiles doesn’t make a difference,” says Knizia, “but the tiles make for a nice layout in a small game.” Players don’t have a hand of tiles in this game, but instead spread out all the tiles face-down. On a turn, you pick a tile, reveal it, then either add it to your stack of that color – going in ascending or descending order as in all Keltis games – or place it face-up in the center of the table, giving any player, including you, the opportunity to draw and play it on a future turn.

Keltis BMM is spiced up through special actions, which are printed on the various number tiles, and you receive an action only when you add the tile to your stack. Some tiles have clovers, for example, and adding a clover-laden tile to your stack lets you take another turn immediately. Other tiles have 1-3 bonus points. Still other tiles have stones, and as in other Keltis games, not collecting enough stones will cost you points at the end of the game. Says Knizia, “You have a 1 and 3 tile, then draw the 8 stone of the matching color. Do you put it in the middle and hope to take it later, or half destroy your length and take it now? The extra features are the main excitement and challenge.”

Each color has a different distribution of special actions. “You can play primatively and just build long rows, but once you look at the special features, you get tempted to deviate from your plan. That’s what I find particularly exciting about it.”

While Keltis is available in twelve languages – German, French, Dutch, Greek, Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian, Italian, Polish, Spanish, Korean and Slovenian – it’s not clear whether the expansion and companion games will appear in any language other than German. “Bringing these games to market in only half a year was a lot of effort on all sides, and I essentially dropped everything for three months and worked only on these games,” says Knizia. “For now Kosmos decided to market these games in Germany, then talk with people in Nuremberg and see what the international situation will be.”

More Keltis to Come?

Admittedly some gamers will find three new Keltis games to be three too many. Knizia understands this reaction, but he’s happy with how the games have turned out. “Some people feel that such things are negative; I have a strong opinion that such things need to make sense. It’s not making an expansion for the sake of expansion or making more money, but do I have something which can stand alone, which has its own justification? It’s not just a variation and you say, ‘Why do we need this?’ This, for me, is the major decision point. It has to have its own right of standing there, and I claim that for all three of these games. Otherwise I would not have done them.”

To further explain his point of view, Knizia mentions his Medici, Medici vs. Strozzi and Strozzi. “This is a trilogy, so to speak, and these games are linked together through a common thread, yet they’re three independent games,” he says. “It’s sometimes nicer to have a line than to have two independent games. There are so many novelties today that games really have difficulty getting to the foreground. You need to do something for the games. Sometimes people put expensive licenses on top of them; another way is if you have something with the brand, you try to do something with the brand. The master of brand management is Monopoly, which has sold and sold and sold. In Germany, it’s still the best-selling family game every year, which shows what you can do with the brand.”

With that said, it’s safe to assume that you’ll be seeing more bright green boxes in the months and years to come…

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