Rebirth Review

Three years ago I wrote a post about whether Reiner Knizia could stay relevant as a modern designer, you can read that post right here. I had my suspicions that maybe he was starting to find it difficult in an ever-expanding hobby. I should have known better than to doubt him, as not only did he design one of my favourite games of last year in Cascadero (read the review here), he also snuck out Rebirth right at the tail end of the year. I’ve got to tell you, if I’d played it enough times before I wrote my Game of the Year article, it might well have won the medium weight category. Yes, I think it’s that good.

Rebirth is set at some point in the not-too-distant future. Society has collapsed for reasons and you, as the leaders of the remaining clans, are trying to rebuild and reclaim Scotland and Ireland. You build settlements and food & energy farms to score points while trying to claim castles and aim for special bonuses and end-of-game scoring objectives. As with many great games, the map is divvied up into hexes. Taking your turn is as simple as drawing a tile blind from your collection and placing it in a hex. Any empty hex you want, as long as it’s a legal move. Settlement tiles have to go in settlement spaces, while energy and food farm tiles can go in a space that’s either blank or has the same symbol printed on them.

Easy peasy, Reiner Knizey.

There can be only one

You’ll play your first games on the Scotland side of the board in all likelihood. It’s the standard mode when compared to the advanced Ireland side. For your first turns, the game feels like a big blank canvas and you’ll make a lot of early placements next to castle spaces and cathedral spaces. Cathedrals are nice and easy. Stack one of your pieces on any already there and claim an end-of-game scoring card. Castles are where things get tasty.

If you occupy the majority of hexes around a castle space, you get to plonk one of your castle pieces on it. Castles are big business. Each one you have on the board is worth five points at the end of the game, and control swings back and forth during the course of the game as majorities swing in one direction, then the next. The competition gets fierce too, as some of the end-of-game cards reward you for occupying the majority of spaces around various castles and cathedrals.

At first it seems like the only logical way to play is to try to keep locking down castle spaces. Every castle you have at the end is five points gained for you and five points lost for your opponents, but this being a Knizia game, there’s more than one way to skin a haggis. Take farm scoring for example. Every time you put an energy or food farm tile on the board, you score a point. If that new tile is adjacent to any other tiles in your colour of the same type, you score a point for all of them. Let’s say you manage to group eight energy farms together. You score 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and finally 8 points for each subsequent tile, resulting in a whopping 36 points in total. More than seven castles are worth in fact. That’s a lot of points.

Choosing which way you want to play goes hand-in-hand with the goal cards you get from cathedrals, so in one game you might be aiming for bonus points for the largest food farm, but in the next the cards that come your way want you to claim lots of castles. It throws enough variety and things for you to think about at you without ever becoming overwhelming, and that matters. I should say at this point that Rebirth is a game for just about everybody, so keeping things clean and parseable is important, and Reiner has done a stellar job of doing just that here.

There’s nary an animal alive that can outrun a greased Scotsman

So said Groundskeeper Willie in The Simpsons. Rebirth is similarly fast. Once everybody around the table knows how to play the game, you can get this one set up, played, and back in the box inside an hour. That’s crazy, especially for a game which doesn’t feel like one of those start or end games for a games session. Rebirth feels like a fully-fledged experience, and I love it for that. My son is part of a generation brought up on fast-cut Youtube videos, so unless he’s really invested in something, keeping his attention on one thing for any length of time can be tricky. He really likes Rebirth.

Rebirth falls right into that Goldilocks zone when it comes to the length of the game. Again, this might not sound like a big deal to you, especially if you regularly play your board games with a group of people who are happy to sink hours of their time into a game with you. If, however, you have a family or close friend group who aren’t yet convinced of just how amazing board games are, Rebirth is perfect. There’s nothing too convoluted to explain. The ruleset is light, and there’s not so much to try to remember that it interferes with your planning and strategy. You can just show people how to play, and they can get on with it.

How many of your hobby games can you say that about?

---

---

It also helps that every turn feels exciting. You can see opportunities to do something cool with every tile you pick up, and it’s exciting. In a lot of the games I play, I don’t always get a lot of turns. In Merv (read that review here) for example, you get 12 turns for the entire game. In a three-player game of Rebirth I get to take 34 turns! It feels great to be so involved in every turn, and the lack of downtime will have players trying to jump the queue to get their tile down. It’s a hoot.

Final thoughts

I wrote an article asking whether Reiner Knizia could stay relevant, but I shouldn’t have bothered. Sure, he has a few stinkers out there, but he makes so many good games, even now in 2025. Rebirth is yet another example of his brilliance, and that’s all that I really need to say. It’s a beautifully made game, with more of the great Rewood pieces we saw in Kutna Hora, and little touches like the 100 and 200 balloons that jigsaw into place on your clan tile, and the rounded corners on the main board. Small things which don’t really affect the game, but add the level of polish and finesse it deserves.

I’ve waxed lyrical about Rebirth and barely even touched on the Ireland side of the board and the changes it brings. The unknown bonus tiles add an almost irresistible impetus to explore more of the map, and the shared, first-come, first-served objectives really spice up the competition. It’s familiar enough to still be the same game, but different enough to feel fresh, and a little more meaty, raising the game to be worth its £40+ price tag.

I like to be balanced in reviews and point out negatives where I see them, but in the case of Rebirth I’m really struggling to find a downside to talk about. My first plays were with copies of the game with ‘deluxe’ components which include opaque bags for each players’ tiles to draw from, which was great, and is easier than flipping them all face-down in front of you. On the flip side though, the replacement VP markers are big balloons which don’t let you share a score space with another player like the cardboard tiles do, so it’s swings and roundabouts.

The year is young, but I tell you what. Other games are going to have to go some to top this when it comes to accessible, medium-weight games. Rebirth is wonderful. Go and get it.

You can buy Rebirth from my retail partner Kienda right now. Make sure to sign-up for your account at kienda.co.uk/punchboard for 5% off your first £60 order.