Red Rising Review – Trading Up to a Dead End

Red Rising puts you in the grocery shopping mindset. Imagine you’re in the produce section and picked up five tomatoes, but you notice one has teeth marks. Gross. But that’s OK, return it and get another one. Now you notice another one is still green. You exchange that one too.

These five tomatoes now look great, except for this last one.

It’s only giving you 10 victory points.

Now, there are no tomatoes in Red Rising. Instead, you start the game with five cards. These cards have a base victory point value, an action when you play them, and an end-game objective – that gives you more victory points.

On each turn, you’ll play a card to a location on the board, use the card’s action, and then pick up a different card from another location. Gaining the benefit of this second location.

Of the four locations, you’ll either pick up the sovereign token, or gain a resource: helium, influence, or fleet track advancement. All of these increase your score in various ways, but their main purpose is to drive you to the end of the game.

There are three end-game triggers. When a single player triggers two of them, or multiple players trigger all three, then the game is over. The three triggers are:

• A player owns seven or more helium
• Someone has seven or more influence in the institute
• Lastly, if someone passes seven on the fleet track

That’s everything you need to know. In Red Rising, all of the complexity is in the card’s abilities and how they interact with one another.

Giving and taking

Usually, in combo-building games, you start with a hand of cards and don’t know where the future is going to take you, or what combinations will be revealed throughout the game. Red Rising inverses this expectation by dumping these card combinations on you at the start. Creating an initial pause at the beginning of the game while everyone figures out all the cards they’re holding and those on the market.

From then on, the game flows.

It’s like those stories where someone starts with a paperclip, and over time they keep trading up until they’ve got a car or office space. Where you’re evaluating each card in your hand against what’s in the market. There’s a lot that goes into this decision, but it all comes down to whether or not the new card will earn you more points.

However, this is rarely as straightforward as it sounds.

For example, you might pick up the Reporter, which is worth a meagre six victory points by itself. But if you have the most Helium at the end of the game, it’ll blossom into 35 points. Now you need to ask yourself, who has the most Helium? And will it be me by the end of the game?

This is such a captivating decision to make, and a decision you’re making for every card in your hand. Each time you have to weigh up the risks and change your answers based on the current state of the board.

You also feel great because every time you act on your decisions it feels like you’re trading upwards, and you’re being rewarded with potential points in the future.

I’ve traded Up, now what?

You’ve entered the worst part of Red Rising.

When you don’t want to remove any cards from your hand. You’re able to spend your turn drawing from the deck and placing a card on a location to take action. This puts you one step closer to the end of the game, but it’s boring compared to the fun you were having less than 10 minutes ago.

Unfortunately, I found myself carrying out this type of turn for several rounds before the end of the game.

Like Concordia I reviewed a few weeks ago, Red Rising provides little comparative feedback before you reach the end of the game. Yes, you can tell if a trade you’ve done puts you in a better position. But with everyone else’s hands hidden, there’s no way of knowing how well you’re doing against your opponents.

And you know I hate that.

This lack of transparency makes interactions between players feel unintentional at best, and random at worst. If we take the example of the Reporter card before, someone else might interfere with that objective not because they know I have the card, but more likely because they have another card giving them bonus points for helium.

These incidental interactions left me wondering why I bothered playing the game with other people. It seems their only purpose is to put the game on a timer and to affect a few of the objective cards.

Combine these problems with the random starting hands which can catapult or cripple your score, and it feels strikingly similar to Tapestry. Where the enjoyment comes from seeing what you’re capable of doing, and if you try to play competitively, you’re going to have a bad time.

After all, it’s a Stonemaier game

Unfortunately, because it’s a Stonemaier game, the critics are already coming out of the woodwork. There’s a lot of animosity towards this publisher purely because of their popularity, and how safe the designs are. Despite their excellently produced games, their games never push the envelope.

I’ve already read some pieces that make a big deal of the small issues in Red Rising. Like how big the deck is, which oddly enough, is something I enjoyed. The cards that came out of the deck shaped the game. And because of its size, all of my games had a different flavour, where in some we would be battling for influence, and in others, we were card starved as the market got discarded.

These are just distractions, overall, Red Rising is another good, well-produced game from Stonemaier Games. But those expecting something different, and something unexpected, will be found wanting.