For starters, if you are not familiar with the rules of Robber Knights please refer to cggritt's excellent review at http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/114452 for a detailed rules breakdown.

THE INTRODUCTION

Assuming you came back to this review after reading the other (thank you), I feel a little bit of backstory is necessary. Feel free to skip ahead to the next paragraph if you just want to get to the meat of the review. The games I buy and play are primarily for quality time between my wife (heretoforth known as The Happy Wife), and therefore must be quality 2-player games with little confrontation (we'll call it the F-U Factor), a little luck, and some light strategy. Some games that make The Happy Wife smile are; Settlers of Catan, Carcassonne, and Alhambra. My "Happy Wife" series of reviews is to present to you my experiences with these games based on those crieria.

I realize that this review has not been submitted in a timely manner, as proven by the fact that the first reviews for this game were published over a year ago. I have been eyeing this title since then, but was always weary of it (see F-U Factor above). After a year of buying all of the other games in the isle first, and having birthday money sitting in my pocket waiting for a Caylus Magna Carta to arrive instore, I finally broke down and bought Robber Knights.

THE SETUP
I read through the rules quickly. They are well written and made clear what the goal of the game was. After arranging the tiles B through E, and setting aside pile A, for The Happy Wife and myself (setup takes about 2 minutes) we settled in. At the start, from pile A you choose which 2 tiles to keep in your hand, and which 2 to lay as starting tiles. This caused some confusion, since The Happy Wife DOES NOT, under any circumstances, read rules. I tried to convey the basic goal of the game, in order to help her decide which pieces to choose, but in the end we decided that learning by playing is the best method.

THE PLAY (the Technical Bits)
Since you have 2 tiles in your hand at all times, you are afforded a very small amount of planning. Each time you play a tile, you pick up another, and you may do this 3 times per turn. We found that using all 3 turns often left one of us with fewer tiles at the end of the game. The 3 tile limit is a nice way to make sure that the first player isn't just laying tiles for the next player to control.

The main goal of the game is: lay down towns and villages, and take them over with knights that originate from your castles. To occupy towns and villages, you must place a knight on it. Each castle produces up to five knights, and all of the knights from that castle must travel in a straight line. Up to 4 knights can occupy a space when you are finished moving them, meaning that any space with 4 knights on it becomes impassable from that time on. This is one way to guarantee a tile will remain under your conrol. However, it is often possible to weakly control up to 4 tiles (plus the castle) by only leaving 1 knight behind. This, however, leaves your territory more vulnerable to your opponent. If they can place a knight on top of your knights, they now control that tile. This see-saw of control can (and often does) continue until there are 4 knights on the tile, or until terrain or board-size limits, make it impossible to play more knights to a tile.

Terrain is used to hinder your opponent as each tile needs a certain number of knights left on it as you continue onto the real target. Plains add a little distance, while little difficulty (only need to leave 1 knight behind). Mountains take a lot of knights (3 knights) to pass, so are often only worth the expendature for the most worthy targets. Lakes cannot be passed. As the game progresses, you realize that "useless" terrain tiles that you played early on only to draw more useful tiles, are now obsticles that you will need to contend with. As a side note, forest terrain is used to make a town, village, or castle more costly to control (2 knights), and I thought that a separate terrain piece would have made a nice addition, if not an uncessesary one.

One interesting factor of the game is the "board" size that changes based on the number of players. In a 2-player game, your play area may only be 7 tiles high by 7 tiles wide. In our first game, we neglected this rule as we were getting a feel for the game, but imposed it in our following games. Playing without the limit allowed for a Carcassonne style "you build over there and I'll build over here" sort of effect. With the 7 tile board size, the game begins to take on a rather claustophobic environment where every tile can effect many plays to come, and it is near impossible to play unwanted tiles out of way. We really enjoyed that aspect of the game and welcomed it, although may use no-limit as a variation in future games.

THE WIFE, F-U FACTOR and DREADED STRATEGY
The pseudo-randomization of the tiles allows for a little bit of luck to creep into the game, but never much. You know that AT LEAST every 5 tiles, you are going to find a castle. Starting with one is a nice touch too. The strategy is light and satisfying. You feel silly for making a less-than-optimal move, but never feel like you've lost your chances to win. In the same manner, since the see-saw control aspect of the game is such commonplay, you never feel slighted when an opponent takes control of your tiles. In many instances, I chose to control several tiles, rather than place 4 knights on 1 tile to gaurantee conrol, and therefore I allowed my opponent to take it. There is litte, or no F-U involved. Since it is easy and simple to take control, you dont much care that you lost control. Through the game, it was never obvious who was going to win, and the spread at the end was never was never more than 5 or 6 points.

As for strategy, I have made it a point to mention to my wife when she might make a "better" placement than she is going to. She'll often use this advice to make more informed choices later on. We play much happier together because of it.

AND FINALLY.... THE CONCLUSION
What started as a "quick little review for a quick little game" became as deep as the strategy for the game itself. The game took us 5 minutes to learn the basics, but every time we play we learn how to optimize the terrain, and our pieces. We have also noticed that with each game, our combined score keeps going up, which seems to indicate that we are utilizing our tiles and knights better as we learn. At 15 minutes per person, per game, Robber Knights can easily be used to fill small amounts of time with a lot of enjoyment. I think that adding more players would create an even more challenging enviroment with many more opportunities to control or be controlled, at the cost of the game taking longer to play.

The Happy Wife score: 7 smiles out of 10. We enjoy the game quite a bit, but can think of other games we would rather play for an afternoon. As a filler, its an 8 or 9.

NO REALLY... IT'S OVER
Beyond that, I hope that you will post and let me know what you think of The Happy Wife series of reviews. Let me know if there are things that you think that I should have mentioned within the confines of the criteria I am using. Also, if you have a game that you want to know the Wife's opinion on, let me know and I'll see what I can do.

Thanks for reading

Jugg