REVIEW: ROLLING REALMS REDUX Gets the Party Rolling
NOTE: This review only included the multiplayer play, and not the single player mode which is included in Rolling Realms Redux. Also, please excuse the title pun, these things write themselves sometimes.
In this climate of multiverse media boom, it is no surprise to see a similar concept come to board games. This roll and write game takes twelve board games and genres and puts them into a more straightforward roll and write game. While Rolling Realms Redux seems simple at first because of its few components, the actual gameplay can get quite complicated which can be great for board game fans and daunting for people who are far less experienced.
The game consists of players using three cards at a time from their personal set of cards. A pair of dice are rolled which are then used to write numbers, mark sections, or make notes on each card to gain resources and points. This cycle of three cards, rolling dice, and gaining points will happen three times leading to the end of the game. It is very simple in concept overall, the real complications come from the cards, or realms, that players use to gain points and resources.
Each card is based on a different board game. The original Rolling Realms was released in 2021 and came with 12 cards (realms). It had a card for Wingspan, Scythe, Viticulture and nine other fairly famous games. But as the years have gone by, cards have been made for a ton of other games like Trickarion, Roll for the Galaxy, and even recent releases like Wyrmspan. Rolling Realms Redux adds another 12 cards (realms) and gives the players a big enough box and simple organizer to fit all (if not, most) of the other realms that have been released. This variety of board games reduced to a roll and write version of the game is pretty brilliant overall and I am excited to use other realms that match other games I have already played.
Rolling Realms Redux adds a lot of variety to the original game and allows players a space to store it all easily. Now, the actual cards themselves and their themed mini game in which players use the dice can vary in difficulty and approachability. This brings me to one of my major gripes with the game, these cards can get very hard to understand because of how they are written even using the reference book given in Redux. Even though games like Brass Birmingham and Twilight Imperium are more complex and have more rules, I found those games less frustrating to understand than some of these realms. After learning the cards, it was very simple and straightforward to play. I was baffled by their complexity and explanations and I am a bit less excited to play with other people because of how much time it will take to explain each and every realm. This might have been a “me” kind of problem, but I was genuinely surprised and less excited to play the game because of these complexities in just the base 12 cards from Redux.
After learning the cards, the game became easy…almost too easy. In my playtesting, I found that a lot of players would have almost identical actions for the first few turns because it made the most sense with the given rolls. This made the game feel a bit arbitrary and pointless in the first few rounds because of how similar things were because of card combinations and dice being rolled. I can think of some homebrew ideas on how to address and change this, but I was surprised that this feeling didn’t come up in play testing and wasn’t addressed.
While all this sounds like a lot of negatives, I had a lot of fun with the game and other players were excited to play more rounds and try the other realms available (I already ordered a handful of other realms to add to my game). This is a strong roll and write game and will demand a lot more thinking of its players than maybe expected, even if its actual complexity isn’t so harsh after the initial lunge into learning each realm.
