I haven’t been entirely idle in this unfortunate hiatus. Most notably, I got to try out Reiner Knizia’s Ra at demo night at the local gaming store. Read on for the mini-review-esque thing; the quick summary is that I bought it really quickly.

The game in a nutshell: There is a stockpile of tiles. Various tiles are worth various numbers of points in various combinations, too complicated to list here. Most are worth at least 1 point when all is said and done; under the right circumstances, they can be worth about 3 or occasionally 5. Each player has a fixed number of “suns,” which are opportunities to bid. On your turn you may either draw a tile from the bag and put it in the pool of exposed tiles, thus increasing the stakes, or you may initiate an auction for the entire pool.

When an auction occurs, the suns are ranked by precedence, and the highest played wins the auction; your sun is then expended, and will go to the winner of the next auction; you win the sun used to win the previous auction, although you can’t actually use it until the next round of the game. Thus, no matter how powerful your suns are, the number of auctions you can win per round is fixed at 3.

In an auction, there is only one round of bidding, and the auctioneer has the last privilege to bid. That’s the good news; the bad news is that if nobody else bids, the auctioneer must. So a player with weak suns will want to initiate auctions frequently, to keep the auctions from being worth too much, but not so frequently that he is forced to squander his strength on worthless prizes.

The last wrinkle of note is that some of the tiles contain the titular icon of Ra. These initiate an auction, but the drawer is not obligated to bid; furthermore, after a certain number of Ra tiles are drawn, the round ends, and when the last Ra tile is drawn the round ends immediately without an auction. Thus, even if only one player has suns left, he must still decide: Bid now? Or keep drawing and hope the round doesn’t end and make the remaining suns worthless?

The thing that sold me on Ra is the number of times that I remarked “Wow! That’s a tough decision!” In particular:

• Should I initiate an auction? Will someone bid on this, and if not, am I OK being stuck with it?
• Should I bid on this? Is this sun I’m getting in exchange OK? Can I get more points by waiting, or should I take the gains in front of me?

And they come fast and have important consequences. It’s tense from beginning to end unless one player gets a runaway victory through good luck.

Next time: Why Ra has caught on so well in my gaming group.