Episode 203: Red Rising

Red Rising is Designed by Alexander Schmidt (II), and Jamey Stegmaier with art by Jacqui Davis, Miles Bensky, Justin Wong and Published by Stonemaier Games Red Rising can be played 1-6 players in 45-60 minutes. Red Rising is based on the book series by Pierce Brown in which you are living in a dystopian society attempting to gain power for your house. In Red Rising you will be spending character cards out of your hand to advance your position and then gain characters into your hand to play later or score for points at the end of the game. The person with the most points at the end of the game wins. The board is seeded with two cards into each location of the board (Jupiter, Mars, Luna and the Institute). Each location has a special ability that will be activated when cards are chosen from that specific location. There are five house tiles (Minerva, Mars, Diana, Ceres, Apollo, Jupiter) and one is randomly given to each player before the start of the game. These house tiles provide special actions when the sovereign token is gained. If you have the house Apollo tile you become first player and also gain an additional turn at the end of the game.  Each player will start with 5 character cards in their hand and then play commences in clockwise order. There are two possible actions to take on your turn:. Leading OR Scouting. If you decide to lead you choose a card to play onto a location by placing it on top of all other cards in that location and if possible you resolve that card's deploy ability which is listed at the bottom of the card. The deploy abilities allow player to do a variety of things, move cards, gain banished cards, gain resources, manipulate other players hands etc.  Then choose the top card from a different location to place back into your hand and activate the ability of that location OR if you don’t like any cards you see that are face up you can take a card from the deck and then roll the die gaining it’s bonus. The Jupiter location allows you to move up on the fleet track which will score you points at the end of the game depending on how far up the track you are, Mars allows you to gain helium tokens which are worth points at the end of the game, Luna allows you to gain the sovereign token and the institute allows you to place one of your player cubes into the institute which will also score you points at the end of the game. If you decide to do the SCOUT action you reveal the top card of the deck and place it on a location and gain the ability of the location (not the cards deploy ability). Play continues in this manner until the end game triggers are met; which are When someone has reached or passed the 7th spot on the fleet track, when a person has seven helium tokens and when a player has seven of their cubes in the institute. When all three of these conditions are met by any combination of players OR if any two conditions have been met by a single player, then that triggers the end of the game. Players will reveal cards out of their hand that show end of game symbols and resolve them in any order and then add up their cards values, which come from their core values in the top left of the card and then also gain or lose points on the bottom of the cards.