YORKTON – KNJO is an arrival to the gaming table that proved a bit hard to fashion a strong opinion of for myself and usual abstract strategy partner Trevor.
The issue is that the game in question is sort of a take of two stories.
On one hand the version of KNJO in question is from www.woodideas.store – located in Odesa, Ukraine. As the name implies they do wooden games, and that is always a positive with this writer.
Check out the website and you will see quite a range of games but to-date we’ve only seen and played KNJO from designer Erick Reyes.
Now Wood Ideas has done a nice job with KNJO – not up to the beauty of wooden games from Clemens Gerhards which does the ‘Cadillac’ of wood games (games that we proudly have including ConHex / Aronda / Avverso / Flügelrad / Fendo.
That said they are a bit more ‘tabletop showpiece’ in nature than say the fine smaller wooden game efforts from David McCord and New Venture Games.
In the end KNJO looks nice, but aesthetically is a bit of a mix. It could use the top square edges bevelled, and the balls in black are very unevenly coloured which detracts a bit too.
Then there are the cubes which determine movement that have well-hidden and strong magnets to hold them in place – very nice. And the numbers which could simply mimic dice in markings are more ‘modernistic’ in nature and that adds some panache.
Overall the board presentation is quite nice and we will look forward to other games in the future from Wood Ideas.
As for the game itself KNJO is a ‘make-four-in-a-row’ game of which there are a plethora.
But this one has some freshness.
Each player has six pieces on the board – wooden balls in this edition. They move based on the value of the row they are in – shown by the aforementioned magnetic wooden blocks.
You move a piece orthogonally in any direction and combination, this tile must move the number of squares indicated by the numbering tile that indicates its row, which is located at the side of the board.
The move can go over the same spaces – which is counter-intuitive – and seems to detract from game play somewhat although it keeps the game moving because it can bog down when pieces get trapped by the lay-out.
Adding to the strategy here are a number of ‘holes’ in the grid – spots pieces can’t move through, or over.
The neat thing is that after a move you switch up two of the movement blocks based in the previous move.
Ultimately, you can feel the freshness here that is heightened by wood board presentation, but it remains a four-in-a-row effort which is perhaps so over done that it holds KNJO back from being great – stuck solidly in the only good zone.
