Origin Story: Tigris & Euphrates – An Interview With Designer Reiner Knizia

If there would be a Mount Rushmore of board games, Reiner Knizia’s face would undoubtedly be on it. For 40 years, he’s been designing games and the amount of seminal titles he alone has—and still continues to—create is truly mind-boggling: Lost Cities, Ingenious, Ra, My City, Through the Desert, The Quest for El Dorado, Samurai, The Lord of the Rings, Blue Moon, … On his designer’s page, BoardGameGeek lists only an “Abridged List of Notable Games”. But even that one is longer than most other designers’ entire oeuvre. For this episode of Origin Stories, I’ve had the great pleasure of talking with Reiner about Tigris & Euphrates, a game that is not only dear to my heart but also manages to do something that few other games do: stay relevant almost 30 years after it’s initial release. While many details of its design process will inevitably have to stay lost to time, trying to trace the story from its inception up to the currently being crowdfunded new edition by 25th Century Games gave…