REVIEW: ROLLING REALMS REDUX Gets the Party Started

NOTE: This review only includes multiplayer, not the single player mode that is included in Rolling Realms Redux. Also, pardon the pun in the title, these things sometimes write themselves.

In this climate of multiverse media boom, it is not surprising 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 due to its few components, the actual gameplay can get quite complicated, which can be great for board game enthusiasts and daunting for people who are much less experienced.

The game involves using three cards at a time from your personal set of cards. You roll two dice 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, eventually ending the game. It is very simple in general concept, 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 came out in 2021 and came with 12 cards (realms). It had a card for Wingspan, Scythe, Viticulture, and nine other pretty popular games. But as the years have gone by, cards have been made for a bunch of other games like Trickarion, Roll for the Galaxy, and even recent releases like Wyrmspan. Rolling Realms Redux adds 12 more cards (realms) and gives players a box large enough and a simple organizer to hold all (if not most) of the other realms that have been released. This variety of board games boiled down to a roll and write version of the game is pretty brilliant overall, and I can’t wait to use more realms that match other games I’ve played.

Rolling Realms Redux adds a lot of variety to the original game and allows players to have a place to easily store everything. Now, the actual cards and their themed mini-game where players use dice can vary in difficulty and accessibility. This brings me to one of my main complaints about the game, these cards can become very difficult to understand due to how they are written even using the reference book provided in Redux. While games like Brass Birmingham and Twilight Imperium are more complex and have more rules, I found those games to be less frustrating to understand than some of these realms. Once I learned the cards, it was very simple and straightforward to play. I was baffled by their complexity and explanations and a little less excited to play with other people due to how long it takes to explain each individual realm. This may have been a “me” issue, but I was honestly surprised and less excited to play due to these complexities in just the 12 base cards in Redux.

After learning the cards, the game became easy… almost too easy. In my playtesting, I found that many players would have almost identical actions for the first few turns because they made more sense with the given rolls. This made the game feel a bit arbitrary and unhelpful in the first few turns because of how similar things were due to the combinations of cards and dice being rolled. I can think of a few homebrew ideas on how to address and change this, but I was surprised that this feeling didn’t come up in playtesting and get addressed.

While this all 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 out the other available realms (I’ve already ordered a handful of other realms to add to my game). This is a heavy shooting and writing game and will require a lot more thinking from its players than you might expect, although its actual complexity isn’t that hard after the initial dive into learning each realm.