Rolling Realms Redux Review

boardgamequest.com:

Back in 2021, fellow BGQ reviewer and all around swell guy James reviewed the roll and write board game Rolling Realms. Published by Stonemaier Games (Wingspan, Scythe), Rolling Realms is an infinitely player scalable game that has you rolling dice and marking boxes in a dozen “realms” themed around Stonemaier games. Overall he thought it was a good game, but held back by its theme.

Fast forward to today and we’ll be looking at Rolling Realms Redux. No, this isn’t a second edition of the previous game. Instead, it’s a standalone expansion that, instead of featuring Stonemanier Games for its realms, focuses on games from other publishers catalogs (and public domain ones).

If you’ve played the original Rolling Realms, you can skip right down to the next section and the gameplay is identical (and fully compatible). For the new, here is a quick rundown of the gameplay.

The twelve realms cards are shuffled and three are drawn. Each player will use these three realms for this round of play, which consists of 9 turns. Each turn, 2 dice are rolled, and players will use those two numbers on 2 of their 3 realms (1 die per realm).

Each realm will have its own way to score points. In addition to that, you’ll also gain ways to earn pumpkins, hearts, and coins. These can be spent to generally manipulate the dice and mark off extra boxes.

After the 9th round, each player’s score on the 3 realms is totaled, and another 3 realms are dealt out (discarding the previously used ones). Another round is played, and after the 3 round, the player with the highest score is the winner.

I originally didn’t pay much attention to Rolling Realms because the theme didn’t do much for me. I don’t actually own very many Stonemaier games, so the thought of rolling dice and playing through cards based on Tapestry, Wingspan, and Euphoria didn’t really appeal to me. But when I heard that Rolling Realms Redux had branched out into other publisher’s games, I was a lot more intrigued.

While I won’t list all