• Designer:  Reiner Knizia
• Artist:  Leon Schiffer
• Publisher:  Schmidt Spiele
• Developer:  Anatol Dündar
• Players:  1
• Age:  8+
• Duration:  15 minutes
• Times Played:  78

“For One” is a new series of solitaire games designed by Reiner Knizia and released by Schmidt Spiele last Essen.  Each of the games comes with 20-25 variants in the box to keep the gameplay challenging and fresh.  Currently, there are four games in the series.  In For One: Galaktix, you roll dice to advance your rockets along Tracks…In…Space for fun and profit.  In Number Up, you’re placing cards in a 5×5 display and trying to fulfill conditions in each row and column.  In Schwarze Rosen, you’re building a flower bed from domino-style tiles and attempting to maximize your points.  And For One: Kniffel is, as the name implies, essentially solitaire Yahtzee (Kniffel is the name under which Yahtzee has been marketed in Germany for many decades).

Unlike many of my OG brethren, I’m not really a fan of solitaire gaming.  But Kniffel called out to me.  For one thing, I’ve always liked Yahtzee-style games (the version I played with my family growing up was called Kismet, in which the die faces had one of three different colors, permitting more categories to be used.)  I also thought the new game’s central mechanism was clever and interesting.  The fact that each session could be played in 15 minutes or so was also appealing, as I find my attention span for solo games is far shorter than it is with multiplayer boardgames.  Finally, Knizia has long been considered to be one of the world’s leading authorities on dice games, thanks in part to him publishing the definitive work on the subject, Dice Games Properly Explained, back in the 90’s.  This book not only includes every public domain dice game you can imagine, but also features quite a few of The Good Doctor’s original designs.  So if anyone was going to be able to create a solo dice game that would strike my fancy, Reiner had to be one of the leading candidates.

Those are a lot of positive reasons, so I decided to give the game a chance.  After almost 80 games of it, I’m quite glad I did.  Let me give you some insight about why this title was able to overcome my solo-phobia, starting with a look at what you get inside the box.

Components

The equipment for the game is solid.  The colorful box is about 7 inches square, so it won’t take up too much precious space on your shelves.  The small fold-out board is laid out like a Yahtzee score sheet, with 14 scoring rows and spaces for 5 dice in each row.  It’s clearly labeled and, best of all, it lays flat, so that the dice are less likely to shift.  The game comes with 18 small, plastic D6’s, which are well made.  The rest of the components are cardboard, including a rectangular slider for each row.  The upper right corner of each slider is snipped off, so that when you score the row, you place the slider on the appropriate space of the row and the hole shows the score printed on the board.  It’s low tech, but it works fine.  There are also a bunch of other tokens, which are used in various combinations in the different variants of the game.  Even the box’s insert has a use—it forms a well where you can roll the dice and this turns out to be surprisingly useful.  The components aren’t particularly stylish, but they’re very functional and quite appropriate for a game with this low price point.

Here’s what the board looks like:

This should look very familiar to anyone who’s played Yahtzee.  As you can see, the board is in German, as that’s the only version of the game that’s available at this time, but even the most cursory knowledge of that language will allow you to figure out the row categories. For those of you who don’t have the Yahtzee score card committed to memory, there’s an Upper section and a Lower section.  The former consists of the six rows for each die face, plus the Bonus row.  The Lower section has the standard Yahtzee categories:  3 of a kind, 4 of a kind, Full House, Small Straight, Large Straight, Yahtzee (aka Kniffel), and Chance.  Each space in a row can take one die and the numbers shown are the scores you can get from filling out a row.

The rules are in German, of course, as is the booklet which gives the setup of each of the 25 different variants.  Fortunately, there’s an English translation of the rules and the variants available on the Geek and armed with these, I had no trouble playing my version of the game.  This is good, since I don’t think Schmidt has announced when (or if) an English language version of the game will be released.

Here’s another picture, showing the setup for one of the more complex variants, just to illustrate what some of the components look like.

Gameplay

So how did Knizia take a luck-filled classic and turn it into a challenging solitaire game?  By converting a dice game into a dice management game.

There are 25 different variants for how to play For One: Kniffel, grouped into five “chapters” with similar effects.  I’ll begin by describing the base version.

Every variant tells you how many dice begin in your dice pool.  For the base game, you start with 17 dice.  On each turn, you take five dice from the pool and roll them.  There are no rerolls, but you can place the dice in more than one row, as long as each placement is legal.  What’s a legal placement?  First of all, you always place the dice from left to right in each row.  In the Upper section, the rows are restricted to the dice pictured on them—1’s in the top row, 2’s in the next row, etc.  In the Lower section, you can place a die in a row as long as you still have a chance of achieving the combination for that row.  For example, in the 4 of a kind row, placing a 2 in the first space and a 5 in the second space is legal, since you can still make 4 of a kind.  However, if you then put a 2 in the third space, you’ll only be able to place 2’s in the remaining spaces.  The only rows which work differently are the two Straights, where the dice must be strictly ascending.  So the Small Straight must consist of a 1, 2, 3, 4, in that order (it’s the only row which has four spaces, not five) and the Large Straight must consist of a 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, in that order.

Once you place your five dice, you have the chance to score rows.  You can always score rows in the Upper section, regardless of how many dice have been played in the row.  For example, suppose you’ve played three 4’s in the fourth row and you want to score it.  You just move that row’s slider to the third space, which shows the value “12” (3 x 4).  You then put the three dice back in your dice pool and for the rest of the game, you can no longer put dice in that row.  In the Lower section, though, you can only get a positive score for a row if all five of its spaces have dice in them (or, for the Small Straight, all four of its spaces).  Even if, for example, the 3 of a kind has three identical dice in it, it still can’t be scored until two other dice (of any value) are placed in the row’s spaces.  The scores for the Lower section are all fixed, regardless of which dice are placed in them—as you can see in the picture, they range from 10 for the Chance row to 50 for the Yahtzee row.  If you score such a row, you place the slider on the scoring space on the far right of the row and then put the dice back into your pool.  You also have the option at this time of scoring an incomplete row (presumably because you’re short of dice in your pool).  If you do this, you put the slider on the zero space on the left side of the row and then return however many dice were in the row back into your pool.  Your score for the row will be zero.  Whether or not the row is complete when you score it, you won’t be able to put dice in that row for the rest of the game.

After you’ve scored any rows you want to, you repeat the process by rolling five more dice from your pool.  If there are fewer than five dice in your pool at the beginning of a turn, the game is over.  The game can also end if you’ve scored every row on the board.

During the game, any dice you place on a space on the board is eligible to be returned to the pool (once the row is scored), but some dice will have to be discarded.  This happens if you don’t have a legal place to put the dice.  For example, you may have rolled a 2, but you’ve already scored the 2 row in the Upper section and none of the unscored rows in the Lower section can legally accept a 2.  In that case, you’ll have to put the die with the 2 out of play.  If this happens often enough, the game will end because you won’t have enough dice left to roll.

Once the game ends, determine your Bonus score for the Upper section.  This uses a different procedure than for Yahtzee, but it’s a pretty clever one (and one that fans of Knizia will find familiar).  Just check to see which of the rows of the Upper section had the fewest number of dice in it and place the Bonus slider in that position.  So if the first five rows all had five dice in them, but when you scored the 6 row, it only had two dice, the Bonus slider will go in the second position, which, as you can see, is only worth 15 points.  The Bonus can be worth up to 100 points, so this means it can be worthwhile to concentrate on the Upper section.  It was also fun to see the signature scoring rule from Reiner’s Tigris & Euphrates worm its way into this simple game.

Once you’ve done this, determine your score for the game by adding up all the values next to the 14 sliders.  The booklet that explains the rules for each variant also has spaces where you can record your scores.  Every variant lists its scoring goals, including a Gold medal score (so if your score is at least this high, you can say you’ve “won” the game) and lesser values associated with Silver and Bronze medals.

I’ve just described the first level, which is the base way of playing the game.  Each of the other levels adds new wrinkles.  The number of dice in the dice pool varies from 10 to 18.  Some of the levels put requirements on certain categories; others double the points you can earn if you score it.  Sometimes, you have to place dice in a certain order.  The game comes with a yellow die; if you score a category that has a yellow die in one of its fields, its score is doubled and you take back the yellow die, which you can use again.  All told, Kniffel comes with 25 different levels of play, which adds a lot of variety and greatly increases the game’s replayability.

Evaluation

So was Knizia able to overcome my indifference to solitaire gaming?  I’m happy to say that the Good Doctor, that master of dice games, did indeed succeed.  Even the base game is fairly interesting and packs a pleasant amount of decision making in a short timeframe.  But it’s the different levels that make this a worthwhile activity.  Each one requires a different approach and I really enjoy the change of pace.  When I have a spare moment, it’s fun to sit down and rip off 2 or 3 games in a half hour.

There’s obviously a reasonable amount of luck involved—it’s a dice game, after all.  In my first game, before I’d really figured out the basic strategy, just about everything went right for me and I scored 326—good enough for a Gold medal.  In my second game, following the same script, just about everything went wrong and I only managed a score of 141—well below the Bronze requirement.  So the dice definitely affect things.  However, your decisions really do matter in most games and it feels like sound strategy will let you succeed far more than fail.

The dice management is the main challenge of the game.  You’d like to focus on the categories that yield you the highest scores, but you have to make sure you’re scoring categories quickly enough that you’re adding dice back to your pool, so that you always have 5 dice ready to roll.  Dealing with both the scoring and the dice availability is a nice balancing act.  As the game goes on, you’ll usually have to take some chances, although you can increase the odds by maximizing the number of dice values you can work with.  Having a backup plan in case the Dice Gods hate you is pretty important.  None of this requires brain burning analysis, but that wasn’t what I was looking for.  Just a nice short game that gives me a little bit of a mental workout while entertaining me with its varied levels.

There’s really only one thing in the package that disappointed me and that’s the Goal system.  The concept is a great one.  I’ve never cared for solo games where the goal is to top your current best score; what I really want is a way to tell if I’ve “won” the game or not.  So a scoring goal for each level is just what the, uh, Doctor ordered and having lower thresholds cited (for Silver and Bronze medals) makes it even better.  The problem is that it doesn’t seem as if Knizia and/or the development team put in too much effort to accurately set these goals.  For the most part, they seem to be way too easy.  After my first half dozen games, once I’d refined my strategic approach, I ripped off 17 consecutive games where I topped the Gold goal—most of them well above the requirement.  Now I suppose it’s possible that I’m just a Kniffel savant, but it’s far more likely that the goals just aren’t high enough (particularly since others have noted the same thing on the Geek).  But there are other levels where the goals seem quite accurate, or even a bit high.  There’s one level that’s identical to another level, except the first level has a stringent requirement that the second one doesn’t have, and yet the first level’s goals are higher than the second one’s; this implies that the first level is easier than the second one, which makes no sense.  It really would have been better if the Goal system gave you a genuine challenge for each level, maybe one you’d have to work your way toward (and until you do, you can measure your progress with Bronze and Silver medals).  But that’s not the way it works at all:  I’ve topped the Gold standard in about 70% of my games and it’s usually not close.  Actually, a 70% win rate in a solitaire game wouldn’t be unreasonable as long as the victories were close ones and there was tension to see if I could sneak over the line, but it’s not unusual for my scores to exceed the top requirement by over 100 points.  This is definitely disappointing, but I enjoy the game enough to ignore it, even as I easily ace most of the levels.

The other mild complaint I have is with the rules.  For such a simple game, I sure had a bunch of questions after my first read through.  Of course, I was working from a Google translation of the German rules, so that could easily have been the issue, but they definitely made it harder to learn the game than it should have been.  I eventually figured it out, but it made me realize that it isn’t just complex games that have problematic rules these days.

So my first foray into solo gaming in quite a while has very much been a success.  I’ve played all 25 levels at least twice–most of them at least 3 times–and have enjoyed them all.  Leave it to Reiner to figure out how to make a fun solitaire game out of Yahtzee, for goodness sake.  Then again, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised.  I mean KNI-zia and KNI-ffel?  It was obviously meant to be!

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Mario: I’m not that much into Solo-Gaming, but I like this one quite a bit. It offers enough variety to keep you entertained through the 25 levels. I agree with Larry’s comments about the winrate. I also managed to get the Gold standard in all the Levels I’ve played so far (15 to be exact). But maybe the average hardcore Euro strategist like us isn’t the real target audience. Not sure what Google translate made out of it, but I can assure that the German rules are fine (… at least for a German).

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

I love it:  
I like it:  Larry, Mario
Neutral:  
Not for me: