Rise Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review Rise, a city building and track movement game published by DLP Games. In Rise, players are trying to earn points by moving up the various tracks int eh city.

There are some games whose names are so on the mark that you know exactly what you’ll be playing just by hearing it. The Search for Planet X, for instance, lets you know there’s deduction involved. Zombicide is going to have a bunch of zombies. Twilight Struggle is also a good example, as it’s clearly based on the hit series of books and movies as sparkling vampires struggle with other vampires and, most of all, their hearts. Or something like that.

Regardless, no tabletop experience before and maybe ever again will have a name as apt as Rise, a game in which the only thing players do is rise up a series of tracks in order to rise up other tracks.

It’s designed by Remo Conzadori and Marco Pranzo for 2 to 4 players and takes about an hour to play (if everyone is moving super slowly).

Rise is an action selection game with limited resources and chaining player turns. The rules are actually fairly minimal. Each turn, four action cards will be displayed and players will pick which action card they want to trigger on their turn. Each card has two options—a free basic option and an upgraded option that has a cost. For the most part, all of the actions correspond to a symbol that allows a player to rise up a matching track.

A complication to this simple act of selecting an action is that picking a card that will trigger first lets players with later actions activate a school tile They have in their possession. These school tiles—you guessed it—rise that player up a track of some kind. Also laid out in between he action cards in the row are three events which