Red Rising from Stonemaier Games – Review

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been playing Red Rising, one of the newer board games from Stonemaier Games. For whatever reason, I never felt that Red Rising fit into the mould of games that Stonemaier was creating and publishing, and even after playing, it definitely feels different. While many of Stonemaier’s previous games are deep dives that can take up to a few hours to complete, Red Rising – based on a popular book series – is fairly quick after you’ve learned the ins and outs of all the cards you’ll be playing.

Out of the Box

Out of the box, you get what you’d expect to get from a Stonemaier game. I had the collectors edition of the game which came with metal pieces – so premium! – but even the base version looks very impressive. The cards are of the highest quality, as is the rulebook, starting player token, influence cubes, starships, and more. Stonemaier NEVER skimps on the production value of their games, so whether you get the base version or the collectors version, you’ll be happy with the product you receive.

How to Play – The Bare Bones Overview

In Red Rising, players attempt to build the best hand of cards possible. The concept to winning, having the most victory points, is pretty easy to understand, and even on our first play through we were playing within 10 minutes. After dealing each player a hand of 5 cards, and determining which faction each player will be, the game begins. Factions will allow players to obtain certain bonuses throughout the game when a specific action happens, which keeps things varied and gives each player a slightly different tactical approach.

The cards generally depict various people, and each is placed into a category denoted by a certain colour. There are gold cards, blue cards, red cards, etc. I mean really, there are a TON of cards. Each card will have an end-of-game point value in the top corner, and additional point opportunities or end-game actions on the bottom. For example, you might have a certain pilot for a ship who’s worth 25 points on his own. However, if you obtained the co-pilot card, you might earn an additional 15 points at the end of the game. There are many instances like this, but also different ways to score. Sometimes, the additional points only come if you have no other coloured cards of that type in your hands; or may be you card scores a ton of points, but you get negative points for every discarded card in the game. There are hundreds of different card combination opportunities, and maximizing what cards you use and which you keep can be difficult.

See, on each turn you’ll take a card from your hand and place it in one of the 4 faction spaces on the board, covering up the card above it (only leaving the other cards title, colour, and points value showing. Then, the player will either choose a card on one of the other three faction spaces, and earn that faction bonus (moving ahead of the flight path, getting a helium token, etc.) or take a mystery card from the top of the draw pile and roll the dice to see what bonus they receive.

Players continue to do this, using some cards for their bonuses while keeping others for scoring. There is an opportunity to gain more cards as you play, but having more than 7 will begin netting you negative points at the end of the game. While there are many other rules to the game, this is the basics of it.

Is It Worth It?

Red Rising was a hit each and every time we played. The easy to understand nature of the game made it very accessible to a large audience. When playing with new players, games can run a bit slow as players read each and every card available to them before deciding on an action. Obviously, the more you play, the more you’ll know about the cards and what kind of strategy you want to use, but in those early rounds and early games, things definitely drag.

There’s also rarely a point in planning out your strategy because depending on the number of people playing, the board is going to look a lot different by the time your turn comes around, which means being able to think on your feet quickly, and change strategic direction, is key to winning. And again, this also slows the game down, sometimes to a crawl.

Still, Red Rising is yet another Stonemaier game you don’t want to miss out on. It’s just too good to pass up.