Red Rising

Players: 1-6
Ages: 14+
Time: 45-60 Minutes

Red Rising is a hand-management, combo-building game based on the futuristic dystopian novels by Pierce Brown.

Enter the futuristic universe of Red Rising, based on the book series–specifically, the first trilogy–by Pierce Brown featuring a dystopian society divided into 14 castes. You represent a house attempting to rise to power as you piece together an assortment of followers (your hand of cards). Will you break the chains of the Society or embrace the dominance of the Golds?

Red Rising is a hand-management, combo-building game for 1-6 players (45-60 minute playing time). You start with a hand of 5 cards, and on your turn you will deploy 1 of those cards to a location on the board, activating that card’s deploy benefit. You will then gain the top card from another location (face up) or the deck (face down), gaining that locations benefit and adding the card to your hand as you enhance your end-game point total. If at any point you’re really happy with your hand, you can instead use your turn to reveal a card from the top of the deck and place it on a location to gain that location’s benefit.

If you enjoy Fantasy Realms (combo-building), Libertalia (hand management), and Gugong (removing and gaining cards), we think you’ll enjoy Red Rising. You can follow along on the Facebook group and on BoardGameGeek.

Components

• 112 character cards (65x100mm; 21 of the Collector’s Edition cards have gold foil)
• 6 asymmetric House tiles (65x100mm blackcore)
• 1 board (410x284mm)
• 1 wolf-head tray and lid
• 60 helium tokens (red gems)
• 60 influence tokens (plastic cubes; these are metal cubes in the Collector’s Edition)
• 1 Sovereign token (this is gold-painted metal in the Collector’s Edition)
• 1 crescent moon first-player token (this is gold-painted metal in the Collector’s Edition)
• 1 custom Rising die (22mm)
• 6 fleet tokens (plastic ships; these are metal in the Collector’s Edition)
• 6 card holders (only found in the Collector’s Edition)
• 1 scorepad (50 pages, double-sided)
• 6 reference cards (65x100mm)
• box (296x296x70mm; the Collector’s Edition box has gold foil, spot UV, and individual numbering)
• insert (cardboard in the standard version and custom plastic with lid in the Collector’s Edition)
• 1 multiplayer rulebook
• 1 Automa rulebook
• 30 Automa cards (25 cards are 57x87mm and 5 cards are 65x100mm)

If you have the retail version of Red Rising, you can upgrade it with many of the Collector’s Edition components via this pack.

There are a total of 123 big cards (65x100mm) and 25 small cards (57x87mm). While the insert and card holders are designed to fit sleeved and unsleeved cards, we don’t necessarily recommend sleeving these cards. You only shuffle once per game (minimizing wear and tear), the cards are made from durable linen-embossed ivorycore, and the reflective nature of sleeved cards may impede your ability to see icons/text from across the table. Also, if some of your cards get worn down after hundreds of plays, just fill out our replacement parts form and we’ll help out with those cards.

Reviews and related media can be found here. The game is also available digitally on Tabletopia. A handy web-based scoring app is here.