The board game Iliad turns a 10-year war into a 30-minute duel

Reiner Knizia’s greatest game, in this reviewer’s humble opinion, is his 1998 title Samurai, a very tight strategy game with very little luck involved. Each player starts the game with the same sets of tiles of varying strengths and powers, placing them on a board of hexagonal spaces to try to gain control of various shrines. It is, like most of Knizia’s games, very mathy, with a theme that’s good but that also isn’t intrinsic to the game itself—so much so that Samurai is getting an entirely new...