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Rebirth—why the best board game since 1980 sucks

Rebirth is the new Knizia tile layer that just came out. It's a tile laying game in the vein of Samurai, Through the Desert, Blue Lagoon, and Havalandi—I've also seen comparisons to Kingdom Builder, Ticket to Ride and Carcassonne.

It’s great.

I mentioned on BGG that it had easy rules.

Someone said that Blue Lagoon had more straight-forward rules which made me reply:

That’s true. We had an issue in our first game when my friend didn’t know whether the wood pieces counted for majorities like longest coastline or surrounding cathedrals (they don’t—only cardboard counts).

But with Rebirth you can just start playing and explain the rules as you go (on the Scotland side) which isn’t possible with Blue Lagoon because since there are two phases, you need to know what you’re going for, and it’s even more point salady which, while that adds to the game’s depth and replayability it also means that it’s hard to do your best right out of the gate without having gotten a feel for the relative values of things. Basically you need to understand the entire game, both phases, the four different placement rules, and down to the detailed multi-step scoring sheets before you can start playing. I love Blue Lagoon, I just like Rebirth better.

I do have an OK teach for Blue Lagoon, but with Rebirth it’s way easier since all I need to do is give someone their supply, tell them to remove two pieces and say “you don’t have these but you can look at them”, then as everyone pulls pieces one by one you can explain the three types of pieces as you go, and explain castles and cathedrals as they get activated, and soon enough you’ll have explained all three types and they know the game.

The problem is how tie-breaking inside the game works—something you do all the time when playing, for scoring castles and settlements.

This one is on the dev team for explaining it weird.

playing last is bad
farms beat houses
more houses wins cities (but doesn’t matter for castles and cathedrals)
and the mission cards since “ties are friendly” a lost castle can count as a won one if you are “tied” which is really confusing

It would’ve been more consistent and easy if a farm (whether energy farm or food farm) was worth ten houses. Then you’d just tally up and you’d only need the “playing first is good” tie breaker. That would not be isomorphic with how the game works currently because in the game as released, a 2-house is the same as a 4-house for castles but not for settlements.

Also instead of ties being broken in the order of who played there first, which would’ve been great but introduced memory state, it’s almost-but-not-quite that since it’s “last loses ties so being clockwise next after the last player is good”.

This means that if Moira, Charles, and Max are playing and Charles plays first, then Moira, then Max, if they all used the same house-amount, Moira will win the tie since she’s clockwise next to Max even though Charles played first. This is really bad. It’s worse than Samurai’s end game scoring.

So the tiebreak system I’d want is instead:

farms (whether energy or food) are worth ten houses for castle purposes. Settlements can’t have farms in them.
settlement tiles are worth their house-amount both in settlements and for castle purposes.
ties are won by playing first. You just gotta remember. Or make a note. Or have some completely different tiebreaker than “be clockwise first from whomever played last”.

So if beige has an energy farm, a food farm, and a 2-house settlement, that’s 22 houses worth for controlling a castle and if blue then has three food farms there, that’d be 30 for the win of that castle.

This is a huge flaw in the game. 😔

What’s good is how easy it is to understand where I can play and how I best can use the tiles I draw in a multipurpose way that feels like I’ve got options. There’s no camels-and-leaders system or huts-and-settlers system, just random tiles but only three types (and the Ireland side has many more either-food-or-energy-can-go-here spaces) and instead of a rule like camel riders or huts (or ice holes like Hey That’s My Fish or Meridians) to promote go-like grouping, it’s the chain scoring system (you get more points when placing your new farms next to your old farms of the same type).

This is my favorite new game so it’s too bad about that clunkiness around ties. 😔