Ra

Ra is an exceptionally simple and elegant board game. Players typically can only choose between two options on their turn. The first option is to draw a tile from a bag and add it to an increasing pile of tiles on the game board. The second is to declare Ra which starts an auction for all the tiles in play. You either choose to increase the value of the pile, or you decide the value is great enough for the bidding to begin. What makes Ra so interesting is how much depth and strategy emerges despite having only two choices per turn. Conceptually, if a player just played randomly, they would choose their best option 50% of the time which makes its depth appears limited.

Ra gets around this with its turn length. Since turns are so simple, they move pretty quickly, and an actual game of Ra (while played in less than an hour) involves a very large number of turns. There are too many individual turns for a player choosing randomly what to do to have any likelihood of maintaining pace with a player who is constantly choosing his best action.

Furthermore, a player has limited funds (in Ra, his funds are represented by Sun tiles). Every time an auction occurs, players must judge the worth of the tiles to the Suns they have acquired appropriately. This also isn’t trivial. The game is split into 3 rounds, and each round is of a varying length (when enough Ra tiles are drawn, the round ends). Some tiles are worth more to you at the beginning of a round and some are worth more at the end. If a player doesn’t have a civilization tile at the end of a round, for instance, he loses 5 points. Towards the end of a round, civilization tiles become much more valuable to players who haven’t gotten one yet, whereas early in the round players can assume their chance to get one will come up before the round ends. Nile tiles run the opposite direction. They are only worth points if a player has a flood tile. In the beginning of a round, they are potentially valuable because a player could still pick up a flood later in the round. If the round is almost over and a player has no floods, Nile aren’t likely to yield much. To play well, a player must understand what the tiles up for auction are actually worth to him, and also what they are worth to other players.

Judging the worth of the tiles to particular players gives probably the most interesting dynamics to the game. If a tile on the board is particularly valuable to a player who has high Suns, calling Ra early can force him to spend a high sun on a smaller sum of tiles. But there’s always a danger: if you start an auction that everyone passes on, you are required to bid on it, potentially spending a sun on tiles you don’t want. To play the game well involves figuring out when you can force other players to make bad bids while opening up the best bids for yourself. This becomes interesting because all information in the game is public. Each player knows who has the highest Suns (and will be waiting for big piles) and who has the lowest Suns (and can push on smaller piles). Each player also knows which tiles you have. They know that monument on the board will be a three-of-a-kind for you meaning its much more valuable for you than anyone else. Ra makes the information easy to process, as well. All the suns are low numbers so they are easy to keep track of, and the scoring rules are simple requiring a trivial amount of math. The game is built with the expectation that you can see the value of a pile to all players at all times.

With this, however, comes a big caveat for Ra. It’s only an interesting game if you’re playing with interested people. If other players don’t understand or don’t care how valuable given tiles are to them, you won’t be able to force them to spend big Suns on a smaller number of tiles because they won’t see the worth. If everyone is playing to win, the strategy and depth can be pretty astonishing. Even if it’s a groups first time playing, if you want to play well it won’t take long till the game starts to click. What makes Ra a fun game is that it’s never overwhelming because you only have a choice between two options, but it’s also rarely simple because the choice between those two options needs to be backed by careful observation of the game’s state. This is achieved through simple but dynamic scoring rules and public information that is easily digestible.