Check out this great article at Touch Arcade on Reiner Knizia and the iPhone. For those of you who don't know, I'm sort of a board game geek (along with the rest of my family) and we all regard Knizia as the master of creating fantastic games. His trademark style are games where your winning score is the total of the weakest element of your strategy--ignore one aspect of the game and you're going to lose. It's all about balance!

Now he's developing for the iPhone, which is great news for all.

Reiner Knizia holds a PhD in mathematics, and is credit with publishing over 500 different puzzle games, many earning various awards worldwide. Developing his first game at the age of 6, Knizia left a job as a boardmember of an international bank in 1997 to pursue game designing full time. Since then, he has been admitted to the Gaming Hall of Fame and redeveloped several of his old games along with creating new games for the PC, home consoles, and iPhone.

His latest iPhone game, Topas [$1.99], tasks players with placing colored domino-like tiles on a game board in three included game modes. To place tiles, you drag them around with your finger, and tiles can be rotated by tapping on screen with another finger. Tiles are placed on the board following a few simple rules: They must be placed with the whole tile fitting on the game board, every tile must be placed next to another, and the aligned gems on the tiles cannot total more than 8. Points are awarded for the number of gems lined up with each tile placed, and Topas has Agon online leaderboards for each of the game modes.