Rolling Realms Redux is a roll and write game which has you playing a several of your favourite games in a single session!

A realm is a mini-game card based on the mechanics of another popular board game. So instead of just one ruleset, you’re juggling several different scoring systems at once.

What stays consistent across every realm is the resource system where you’ll collect and spend pumpkins, hearts, and coins to mitigate bad rolls or gain extra dice, and the ultimate goal of gaining as many stars as you can. How you earn those stars though changes from realm to realm.

How to play

A mulitplayer game lasts 3 rounds, with 3 random realms in play each round – so you’ll visit 9 of the 12 available realms each game. 

Each round has 9 turns. Each turn, roll the two CHONKY dice and all players use the same values to mark off elements of their realm cards. Each dice needs to be used on a different realm, so there are lots of careful decisions to be made about the best way to use your dice. 

Each realm will allow you to collect resources which can be spent at any time for bonuses:
🎃 Pumpkins let’s you change dice values or play a second dice into a realm you’ve already activated that turn
♥️ Hearts let you gain extra dice matching the value of one of the rolled dice
🪙 Spend any number of coins to gain a dice of the value of coins spent, or if the dice add up to exactly 7, spend coins to use one of the dice values twice

Resources are wiped at the end of each round, so use ‘em or lose ‘em! Although any leftovers do give you 0.1 points so aren’t completely wasted.

Each realm will have a different way to gain stars, with a maximum of 6 stars per realm. The player who gains the most stars over the course of the game is the winner.

Solo mode

You can play solo with the multiplayer rules, which I found useful as a way to familiarise myself with all of the realms, however this does make it a BYOS mode.

But fear not, there is a fantastic solo mode included (I expect nothing less of Stonemaier Games at this point).

The solo mode uses a football-league theme (or soccer!) but don’t let that put you off if – like me – you have zero interest in football. What this league format is really doing is simulating players for you to compete against while also letting you gradually increase the difficulty of the game by moving up league tables as your game improves – it’s really very clever!!

There are 5 leagues – you’ll start in league 4 and if you score the most points in a season you’ll move up to league 3. Score the least and get relegated to league 5. Anything in the middle and you’ll stay where you are. The ultimate goal is to get to league 1 but this will happen over many plays of the game.

Leagues take place over 5 ‘weeks’, so 5 rounds of RRR. This is slightly longer that the standard game – it takes me 60-90 mins but you can leave the game between weeks and come back to it if you want shorter sessions.

There’s a nifty little system which works out how many stars your opponent scores for each realm. This is a 60 second job at the start of each ‘week’ and tells you how many stars you need to get in each realm to beat the opponent i.e. score a goal! Depending on the realms in play it’s pretty hard to play a great game in all 3 realms, so knowing how your opponent scores allows you to focus your attention on a couple of realms to get the best score relative to the bot.

My thoughts

I was initially a bit intimidated by the number of realms – and therefore the amount of rules to learn – but each realm is individually super easy to grasp and once you’ve played each once you’re pretty much set for future plays. That said, your first game will be much longer than the advertised 30 mins. While each game is light on rules individually, the combined rules overhead for an entire game is a lot if you’re starting from scratch.

How all of the realms play differently is really clever. As rounds combine 3 realms at random, some may synergise beautifully while others actively fight each other, forcing you to make trade-offs. There’s loads of variability and a realm that you love in one game may be your nemesis in another. On the flip-side, if you’re unlucky and have a whole game of bad combos, this could be frustrating and make the game feel somewhat unbalanced – particularly if playing the bot. 

In a multiplayer game there is zero player interaction – this isn’t something that bothers me (and is in fact a bonus!!) but something to bear in mind if that’s not for you.

The solo mode is really well thought out. I was put off by the football league format initially, but really it’s just used to represent a tournament and league style approach which increases the difficulty level organically as you become better at the game.

I found RRR truly addictive and – while I’m relatively early into my verb and write journey of discovery – this has immediately taken a top spot as one of my favourites of the genre

I don’t generally buy into the hype of ‘promo’ cards or actively seek them out, but you better know I’ll be collecting as many of the different realm cards as possible! This is such a great concept – I want to add in realm cards for some of my favourite games, but also having played realms of some games I’m unfamiliar with makes me want to check out the actual game! Whichever way you look at it, this is bad news for my bank balance…

I’m really having to dig for a gripe or two here, but the pens in my game didn’t work very well and I quite quickly swapped them out for some of my own. But what board gamer worth their salt doesn’t have an abundance of dry erase markers lying around!

Verdict

I adored Rolling Realms Redux and can see it getting a lot of table time in Casa Solo. If you’re a solo gamer who enjoys a longer-term campaign style game, with difficulty that naturally adapts to your skill level (who doesn’t want that?!) then this is for you.

If you prefer to focus on mastering a single strategy and ruleset, versus having to constantly adapt to new rules and combinations of realms then you may not love it…but I still think you should give it a go!

Disclaimer: Rolling Realms Redux was provided to me by the publisher for review purposes, but all thoughts are my own.