Red Rising (Standard Edition)

The basic gameplay is extremely simple, either place a card from your hand on a location, activate the card's special ability, and gain a card from another location, or place a card from the top of the draw pile on one of four locations, then gain a resource worth points in the end game based on your choice. The real meat of the gameplay is building a hand of cards worth lots of points. Each card has a base point value, but gain end-game bonuses and penalties based on the other cards in your hand and other conditions.

Some interesting decisions to make while playing but not amazing. If you can get it on deep discount it's worth a play or two.

It is a decent game, but lacks complexity. A fun enough time for a casual group of players.

This game was a lot more thinky than I had expected it to be. It made me like it even more than I thought. The process of building your hand and the decisions to make are really enjoyable. Which card do you take? Where to place it? Watching what your opponent is doing and trying to stop them while advancing your own score is a great tension.

The game is a lot of fun. It's an interesting puzzle to try to manipulate the board state with the cards in your hand while trying to keep (or reacquire) certain cards for the endgame.

Games can last from anywhere between 45-90 minutes. It's a deck building game. It has a lot of replayability because of the number of cards that the game provides. I hope that they make expansions in the future, but at the moment the base game will give you enough fun to hold you over.

Well designed hand management game. Requires higher play counts for ideal game play, but is super fun and easy to learn with quality components.

Love the artwork, love the theme. The play mechanics are interesting. Amazing that the huge deck of cards is all unique. It makes the strategies in this game fluid and really fun.

Fun game that if you have read the books is amazing.

I've played this game about four or five times with my son since we got it. Neither of us read the book series, so we weren't familiar with any of the characters or backstory, but that didn't really matter. The first game was a lot of getting used to the mechanics of the different locations and the constant in-and-out of hand cards. There's a lot of strategy involved trying to figure out which ones to keep, which ones to deploy where, and which ones you might be able to deploy and then get back, while always looking to add more than five cards to your hand. The first game took the longest and scored the highest (in the high 200s), and successive games were shorter, with each player having to strategize about when to trigger the game end. It's a lot of card-reading, but we didn't mind that so much. Overall pretty great, exceeded expectations, and I'll probably take it to my board game group at some point to try playing it with more than two players.