RA

I was introduced to RA a couple of months before attending Essen Spiel in 2025. At the largest tabletop gaming convention in the world, which essentially serves as a massive marketplace for buying new games, I only came home with one. That one game was RA, the Pharaoh Edition by Reiner Knizia. Originally published in 1999, RA has truly stood the test of time. In the tabletop gaming world, Dr. Knizia is widely known as the master of auction mechanisms, and RA is at the top of the list. It's an auction and set-collection game that immerses players in the world of ancient Egypt, with simple rules and an endlessly replayable experience.

On your turn, you can perform one of three actions: draw a tile from the bag to add to the board for the upcoming auction, invoke RA to call a voluntary auction, or spend a God tile to claim a tile of your choice from the group of tiles on the board. If you pull a red RA tile from the bag, an auction is immediately triggered, and the game moves closer to the end of the current epoch (round). The progression of the epochs, tied with the triggering of auctions, creates a consistent push-your-luck feel. Before spending your high-value sun disks (currency), you want to wait for an auction with the right type of tiles to build high-scoring sets in your personal player board. The trade-off is that you don’t want to run out of time in the current epoch and end up stuck with unspent sun disks. This push-your-luck trade-off forces players to balance their ideal strategies with what’s available to bid on.

RA’s auction mechanisms are brilliant. Each player starts the game with a mathematically balanced, finite number of sun disks to spend in auctions during each epoch. If you win an auction, you not only collect the tiles on the table, but you also exchange the sun disk you bid with for the sun disk on the table, placed there from the previous auction. Therefore, you’re not only bidding on the tiles to create sets, but you’re also bidding to set yourself up for the next epoch. The always-changing sun disks keep the game strategically self-balanced.

What I love the most about RA is the number of layers each decision affects throughout the game. Every tile type scores differently, and you must secure certain tiles to avoid getting negative points along the way. You can only bid a single time during each auction, so the game flows quickly while forcing you to weigh every decision heavily. Simultaneously, you must read your opponents’ player-boards to understand the types of tiles that they’re targeting because a group of tiles that does little for you might be exactly what the player beside you needs to score a lot of points.

RA is a classic. More than 25 years after its initial publication, it's easy to see why so many people still consider it one of the greatest auction games ever designed.

-Mark Krabben

June 30th, 2026