Red Rising is a very popular book series by Pierce Brown featuring some great storytelling and action. The books showcase a dystopian future where society has been divided into 14 castes. In that world you represent a house attempting to rise to power as you assemble your followers. Today we will take a look at Red Rising and see how it plays and if it is a game to add to your assembly!
Red Rising is designed by Jamey Stegmaier and Alexander Schmidt. Art by Jacqui Davis, Miles Bensky and Justin Wong. It is published by Stonemaier Games and plays 1-4 people.
Overview
Players begin each game with a hand of random characters and through the game will attempt to add new and different characters, activate abilities or deploy characters into the game. Bonuses can be gained and used throughout the game as well.
The game will end when a threshold combination is reached and the player with the most points from characters and extra point areas will be the winner!
Gameplay
In Red Rising players begin placing character cards into each location and then drawing a hand of 5 character cards. Each player also starts with a random house tile and matching tokens along with 10 influence token. Players place all resources around the appropriate spaces as well.
On your turn you must either use a lead or scout action and resolve the effects or the bonuses. This will lead to a series of actions happening in order as you go down the line.
In Lead players will select a card from their hand to deploy it to a location. This will trigger a deploy ability and then you will either take the top card of a location or draw one fromt he deck and take the approrpiate actions. If a player instead chooses Scout they may reveal the top card of the deck and place it on a location and gain that location’s bonus. This is a good action to take often later in the game to move it toward the end if the cards in your hand are cards you want to keep.
This will continue around the board with players taking a Lead or Scout action until the end game triggers occur and all players have had an equal number of turns. The end of the game is triggered once a player has 7 or more helium tokens, 7 or more influence on the institute or a player reaches 7 on the fleet track. If a player has met two on their own or any combination of players has at least one player meeting all three. The game ends, the scorecard comes out and the game is scored. The highest point total is declared the winner!
Impressions
The game plays in a easy to understand but I feel hard to master feel as you are trying to determine how to get the best combination of cards together. I really like the location bonuses and house tiles that add that extra layer and allow you to move on the tracks or gain tokens to push towards the end game. It adds enough to the game to keep it from feeling like an all hand-managment game.
At times the decision making for this game felt like a lot of pieces all vying for my attention and I didn’t quite know where to focus. There are quite a few paths to take and if you focus in one area too soon you may find yourself switching up as the game goes on. I was surprised to find that it was challenging to really wrap my head around this one early because of all the choices.
Jamie is not shy about explaining that this is one of his favorite IP in books of all time but also it took him some time to get to this particular design. It borrows a lot from Fantasy Realms and it isn’t shy about that. I have played a few games of Fantasy Realms and I think this game may add a bit more than as necessary for that.
Overall I felt like the game had some amazing production and great quality of components but it wasn’t a game I can see playing much from my end. If you love this book series, this will probably be the game for you and if you really enjoy Fantasy Realms or other hand management types of games this may be a hit in your playgroup.
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