Right when I’d sworn off writing about any more Bitewing Knizias, they went and got the rights to Qin.

Long out of print, Qin — pronounced “chin,” for those among us who keep stumbling over that Q — is another Reiner Knizia tile-layer, one that effortlessly showcases the Good Doctor’s ability to generate hard stares over a handful of non-matching colors. Now redubbed Gazebo, the original game was about unifying the warring polities of pre-imperial China. In my mind it’s still about that, because merging garden plots doesn’t quite communicate just how ruthless this thing can be.

The fabric map and dominoes are pleasant on the fingers.

Welcome to Warring States Period China a tranquil garden. See? Not the same thing. I guess today isn’t the day that we beat the “Knizia is themeless” allegations.

But I’ll go ahead and say it: winning this game is easier if you think of yourself as a warlord. Your goal has a simplicity only reserved for the vicious. Everybody begins with a certain number of gazebos. In my case, these were wooden discs. In the finished game, they’ll apparently be plastic pavilions. Either way, your objective is to place all of your pieces on the board before anyone else. Barring that, to have the most gazebos on the table when there’s no more room to place anything else.

To accomplish this goal, you place dominoes to make solid blocks of color. These are called “nooks,” all cozy-like, but really they are bands of territory patched together through blood and shrewdness. Making a nook lets you place a gazebo on it, but of course there’s a catch. Dominoes can only be placed next to dominoes that are already on the board, starkly limiting your options. Once there are five or more squares in a nook, it becomes, get this, a “big nook,” capable of holding two gazebos. Much like the swaths of color in Tigris & Euphrates, competing nooks can be bridged, letting one player swallow up the other, but big nooks are immune to these takeovers. Thus one of Gazebo’s core tensions. Either you expand rapidly, establishing as many vulnerable nooks as possible and hoping not to lose too many, or you take measured strides across the map, protecting your flanks with big nooks.

Gazebo uses elevation and density to communicate player strength.

Big nooks. My goodness. I cannot talk about this game in these terms.

To explain why, I want to talk about the maps. There are four in total, two in the main box and two as an expansion, and each has its own features. Every map features what this reprint calls “patios,” spots where gardeners compete to place bonus gazebos. By controlling nooks next to these patios, you gain control over them, potentially letting you place an extra gazebo that turn.

In practice, though, these patios are not anything like patios. They are like besieged cities, ripe with plunder and political import. Controlling patios is crucial to your success, and different maps emphasize their relative value. The first map, for example, has special “fancy patios,” which are large enough to hold two gazebos. Others have “elevated patios,” which can only be conquered when you control at least two gazebos next to them. Regardless of the particulars, patios represent instant flashpoints in the Garden Wars. Rival players can strip you of ownership by establishing their own adjacent gazebos. This produces huge swings, your pieces flying off the board and being replaced by foes.

It’s brutal, in other words. It feels like war, all careful posturing and sudden reversals. There are feints in Gazebo, moments when a single domino can intrude on an opponent’s territory and force them to respond with a blocking maneuver. There are invasions, when a single placement annexes a neighboring nook and thus seizes a patio. It’s opportunistic and nasty. It’s Knizia at his best, not only as a creator of mechanisms, but as an abstractionist.

Click. Clack. Like I’m a villain in a Bond movie.

The beautiful thing about Gazebo is… well, there are many beautiful things about it. But the one that leaps off the table, to me, is the way it resembles one of those time-lapse maps of an empire’s expanding and shifting borders. There’s an elegance here, true, but there’s a hunger to it as well. I’m poking fun at Gazebo when I talk about its wacky new setting, but I’m also a little bit serious. This game demands a certain headspace. Don’t be fooled by its fine Easter dress. That’s armor, baby.

Within that proper headspace, Gazebo is hallmark Knizia. The rules are dead simple, but the strategies that arise from them are anything but straightforward. Some of that depends on its particulars. Which map you’re playing. How many players you’ve gathered. At two, the game is a cutthroat duel. With three or four, there’s some politicking to be done.

Either way, there’s a cutting sharpness to each placement. I’m often impressed by designs that allow players to feel smart. Knizia often does one better. Gazebo, like Qin before it, lets players feel smart because it lets players be smart. It compresses its landscape to a discrete number of decisions. There are only three colors. Only so many spots to place those dominoes. Only one edge case when it comes to disallowed placements. But within that slender ruleset, there’s an ocean of possibility. A battlefield of possibility. It feels good to play. Even better to win.

Each map has its own essential texture.

So, yes, taking the warring states of Qin and transforming them into rival botanical landscapers is somewhat akin to adapting Moby Dick into a killer whale playing with a basketball. Still. Gazebo is Knizia firing on all cylinders, offering a tile-placer that’s simpler than T&E but no less shrewd.

Now if you’ll excuse me, my neighbor has a gazebo I intend to burn to the ground.

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A temporary prototype of Gazebo was provided by the publisher.