The Red Rising board game is currently the most astonishingly under-priced tabletop game I’ve seen in years. It’s got a decent 7/10 review score average on BoardGameGeek, it’s a generally well received adaptation of a book series I’ve had recommended to me approximately 9,345 times – and right now you can buy it for $10.99 on Amazon.
That, in itself, is wild. Sure, it may not be a contender for our all time best board games list, but Red Rising – based on US author Pierce Brown’s exhaustingly popular sci-fi book series of the same name – is surely an absolute steal at 11 bucks.
A pretty accessible, lightweight strategy board game, Red Rising is driven by card play and hand management, with victory tied to the set of character cards you’ve collected into your hand by the end. These include lots of recognizable names and lore from the novels, but there’s no actual story, and no spoilers.
Each turn, you’re either playing down a card to trigger various point scoring effects, then drawing another from the deck to replace it – or (if you already like your hand) just flipping the top card of the deck and placing it somewhere.
There’s a fair bit more depth of strategy underneath, to do with which card combos you’re looking to recruit into your hand, how you go about getting them, variable player goals based on which of the setting’s Houses you’re playing as, and more. But ultimately it comes across to me as a pretty attractively easy-going strategy title, especially as it plays in under an hour and even more especially because it’s going for less than the average lunch.
Why is that, exactly, I wondered? As someone who’s forked out well over $100 for big ugly war board games many times – not to mention collecting several Warhammer 40k factions – I’m hardly the kind of tabletop gamer that only buys deals, but still, my curiosity cannot withstand a discount of this magnitude.
The best clue I found was a comment from Red Rising’s designer – Stonemaier Games’ head honcho Jamey Stegmaier – in a 2023 Board Game Geek forum thread. Responding to a fan asking why the game was so often discounted, Stegmaier wrote: “Red Rising is our 4th bestselling game ever, but distributors ended up with more copies than there was demand for, hence why some retailers are selling the game for such a low price.”
Whatever the reason for the season, though, if you’ve been after a relatively quick playing, lightweight strategy game with simple mechanics but deceptively complex strategies on offer – I think it’ll be a while before you see one as cheap as this.
That said, tabletop game deals abound at the moment – for example, we’re tracking the best card game deals in Amazon’s Big Spring Sale
Source: Wargamer
