Battle Line Review

Reiner Knizia is one of the few game designers who truly know what it means to do a lot with a little. There are designers who make fun, simple games, and designers who make those massive, sprawling, complex games that we gamers have come to love. But rare is the designer who can give you an experience with fewer rules than the former but somehow more depth than the latter.

Take Battle Line: it’s essentially a modified standard deck of cards, and you’re pretty much just creating poker hands over against an opponent’s attempts to do the same. More difficult combos like straight flushes and threes of a kind beat simple ones like pairs, flushes, and the like- easy. And there are no goofy turn structures or gimmicks: you play a card, and then you draw a card. Easy and simple.

In classic GMT fashion, it looks plain and pragmatic.

And yet, because of the game’s brilliant structure and dual paths to victory, after a few turns, you really do feel as though you’re trying to break through your opponent’s line. You’re probing for weak points, checking to see if you can bust through on their left or right flank before your line buckles in the middle. Players are tasked with rallying soldiers at the appropriate part of the line, hoping their formations end up being superior to their opponent’s.

The game allows victory through either winning the majority of all nine control points or else breaking through the enemy’s line with three that are adjacent. This creates all kinds of intriguing head games as players must deduce whether a seemingly anomalous play on their opponent’s part was a ruse or a setup for a later coup. On the offensive side of things, players have to decide early whether they’re going to go big for the 3-flag victory or if they’re going to play their cards slowly, waiting until they’re ready to break out with the big offensive. Every card play reveals some information to the opponent, meaning players are best suited to wait for their big plays until the enemy commits first. This part of the design creates that lovely, patented Knizian tension.

If I have a complaint, it’s that it doesn’t quite have that feel of big, daring movies that the superficially similar Lost Cities does, where every turn is shooting yourself in the foot or helping your opponent. Battle Line doesn’t feel quite as tight, especially in the opening moves, when strategy is more opaque. There are a few turns near the beginning of the game during which the play can feel almost arbitrary, even though seasoned players will undoubtedly find varied strategies to employ even during these early, open turns.

But once the battle lines form and the midgame kicks into high gear, the game’s tension is unparalleled. This dynamic also casts the game into a memorable narrative arc. What begins as a handful of soldiers lollygagging around waiting for a battle to start ends in a thrilling finish, where committing to a battle one turn too early or holding back one turn too late can mean defeat. These late turns represent Knizia at his very best, and are more enjoyable than most any other two-player card game out there.

Pictured: the game in high gear.

The Battle Line reimplementation added a deck of Tactics cards to Schotten Totten’s design, on which it was based. While it does feel anti-Knizian in its additional layer of unneeded complexity, the deck of cards can add some spice to what is otherwise a dry experience, even for Knizia. It also injects the game with an additional decision point, daring players to draw from the versatile Tactics deck when they really need to be pulling troop cards. While the Tactics cards are typically a diversion for the experienced player, they can help you out of a jam, so it’s not a bad idea to pull one or two if you have some breathing room. So while the Tactics cards don’t take much away from the design, they don’t add all that much either. It matters not either way of course, since you can just decide to play without them if they’re not your cup of tea.

By focusing on what makes a two-player duel the death work, Battle Line strips away all the nonsense of typical card games, leaving only brilliance. It’s a classic card game that will go down as one of the good doctor’s very best, rivaled only by some of his other masterpieces like Lost Cities and Blue Moon.