It isn’t uncommon to hope for a particular card and never see it. It can also be easy to confuse golds and yellows, browns and coppers, silvers and grays. There’s far more material here than you’ll plumb in a single session drawing through half the deck takes longer than expected. I’ve seen a few complaints over the thickness of the deck and the range of the game’s suits. How do you chart that course? Who do you toss away? What sort of equilibrium do you strike between taking a chance and concluding that your hand is good enough to win? Board games thrive on these processional exchanges, and Red Rising is full of them.Īccording to my Red Rising consultant, “Darrow on Mustang” is appropriate to the setting. The card you’ve just played, the safe harbor of the decent hand you’re pulling apart, is vulnerable to being stolen away by a rival. The cards you want are right there for the taking, but that means they’re also available to your fellows. You’ll need to make three or four swaps before the whole thing comes together. Putting out a particular card will let you take a chance on something else, but it’s only a chance. Players often reach a sort of second-act equilibrium: your hand is finally pulling in decent numbers, but with a few tweaks you could nudge them even higher. Leaving behind any hope for deeper insight, Red Rising’s card-swapping is packed with moments that are very gamey, but in the strongest sense of the word, requiring constant trade-offs, even sacrifices, to rack up a massive score. It may be disappointing that it says nothing about class struggle, oppressive systems, or how the adrift and the misplaced may find their place in rebellion, but it’s also not unexpected. After all, it accomplishes precisely what’s asked of most board game “themes”: a mnemonic, some art, references for the sake of references, there to function as a reminder for fans of the book series, so that when you draw Antonia, who earns extra points when held with The Jackal but loses points with Victra or Sevro, those who know these characters will say, “Ah yes, of course, that makes perfect sense,” and have an easier time dredging these particular characters from the deck or spotting them once they’re loosed into the wild of the board’s four columns. It isn’t exactly a dystopian hellscape, although I’m inclined to be conciliatory toward Stegmaier’s adaptation on that front. Under ideal circumstances, each swap brings you closer to a hand full of point-sputtering synergies. Strip those away, though, and that’s the gist: play a card, gain a card. There are the requisite abilities to trigger and bonuses to earn, split between fleets and helium and influence, all of which have less impact than their evocative titles would suggest. You play a card to one of the board’s four columns and then take a card from another column. Red Rising’s central idea could be described as card swapping. Since these cards were dealt at random - and since the deck is rather thick - their likelihood of working together is infinitesimally low. To answer the question you’re probably already asking, there are fourteen suits in total. Just to pull two random examples from the deck, Ragnar, an obsidian-suit assassin, is worth 20 points, plus an additional 10 if with an orange card and another 10 if with Sefi, a specific character buried somewhere in the deck the Nanny is a brown-suit assistant worth 10 points, plus 5 more for each silver, white, and copper suit in your hand at the end of the game. There’s their core value, which they’re always worth, and then there are one or two additional values that will trigger once they’re paired with the correct cards. More importantly, these characters have victory point values. That’s my assumption, anyway, since this game is named Red Rising and Jamey Stegmaier’s favorite series is Red Rising, and any conclusion besides a direct connection seems tenuous. Every card depicts a character from Red Rising. Five, I think, but don’t hold me to that. Trackers, markers, cards - yep, it’s a board game!īear with me while we discuss the minutiae of professional networking.
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