Review: Red Rising:: Nutshell Review: Red Rising

by shefft

No-Fluff Nutshell Reviews: succinct game reviews that quickly convey the critical points:
Alphabetic Order (Geeklist) || Chronological Order (Compact)

INTRO
This is a card-driven combo-building game of very simple turns but elevated math in which you typically follow a pattern of: 1) play a card 2) take a card 3) take a bonus effect. The goal is to craft a hand of high scoring combos with cards that build on one another's colors, types, or effects. Cards in play are sitting in one of four locations, and when you take a card you get a simple bonus action tied to the location. It is truly all about hand management. The bonus actions help you score some points based on track movement, area influence, and resource collection. Again, the cards are usually key to helping you do that most effectively. You'll be doing quite a bit of reading the unique special abilities of each card, and that's where the meat of the game lies.

PROS
> The setting is established well, and there is some theme without being burdened by it.
> Great artwork and graphic design. Everything just looks really nice on the table.
> Great production overall, and good value for money.
> The designers went to the extra work of designing a solo automa mode.
> The various ways to compete for bonus points using the location actions and the special powers of each player that emphasize one of those are nice touches.

CONS
> Take that targeting a single opponent on some of the cards.
> In a high player count game, the state of the board can change so much before your next turn that attempting to plan ahead can feel frustrating, and can result in some AP and long down time waiting for other players. Conversely and somewhat paradoxically, the board state can in some situations grow stale if the same cards keep getting played and taken back such that there isn't much new to consider and players feel stuck with what's in their hand and unwilling to take risks. Both extremes can happen in the same game as play ebbs and flows, and as a result may be fine for some players.
> Heavy on luck of the draw, with a huge advantage given to players that end up with the few cards that can grant a larger hand size. Cards are by far the biggest scoring power of the game, so this swings final scores dramatically.
> Once you end up satisfied with your hand, you may get into a rinse and repeat cycle of doing simple and less impactful actions just to inch towards the game end triggers, but without having any idea what kind of scores your opponents will be challenging you with at the end nor how much you should further risk. For some players this will feel a bit boring and anticlimactic.

FINAL THOUGHTS
You know how some games are described as tight-scoring Euros? This is probably about as opposite to that as you can get without dice. That's meant as informative and not judgmental as I enjoy many games of both types. I'd probably say this game would work best with only 2-4 players rather than 5 or 6 due mainly to the AP and plan ahead issues. Because of the high luck factor and huge scoring variations it seems like playing several shorter games (fewer players) is more desirable than fewer longer games. Solo mode is fun for a few plays, but does start to lose intrigue after a while. I think age 11+ is probably about right for this one. There are some people that will really love this game, but it just didn't land that well with our group. It isn't quite the puzzly fun that we would have liked to get out of it, but I think I see why many people would enjoy it.

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