It’s 2025, and no, we still haven’t heard word about a Red God release date. In the meantime, though, I’ve been holding myself over lately with the Red Rising board game. Turns out, a conveniently color-coded social hierarchy lends itself not just to timely social commentary, but also to the bones of a terrific board game.
The whole crux of Red Rising, an excellent series of grimdark sci-fi novels written by Pierce Brown, is a futuristic version of humanity that has remade itself — quite literally, via genetic modification — into color-coded castes. Reds comprise the bottom of the ladder, manual laborers consigned to spend their lives mining for helium. Golds, meanwhile, are at the top: faster, smarter, stronger, and wealthier than everyone else. The rest of the social order breaks down into neatly clarified roles — Silvers are bankers, Greens are tech wizards, Violets are artists and journalists, and so on. (You can see the whole hierarchy here.)
The series consists of six novels to date, starting with 2014’s Red Rising. Brown announced Red God, the saga’s seventh and final entry, in 2022. But as of this writing, neither the author nor his publisher, Del Ray Books, have stipulated a release window for the book. The most recent in the series, Light Bringer, hit shelves in summer 2023, meaning it’s been a few years’ worth of a dry spell for Red Rising fans, who may be more accustomed to a regular release cadence than readers of some other popular fantasy books.
But the board game tie-in is right there! Has been for years! And, saying this as a delirious fan of Brown’s series: It absolutely rules.
Red Rising, designed by Jamey Stegmaier and Alexander Schmidt and published by Stonemaier Games in 2021, is a zippy, fiercely competitive tabletop game. Better yet, as an adaptation, it’s deliciously faithful to its source material.
At the start of each game, every player randomly selects from one of six houses associated with the Institute, basically Red Rising’s version of Hogwarts. (The first novel is an archetypical “training at the fantasy war school for kids who can’t fantasy war good” arc.) From there, each player draws five cards from a deck of more than 100, all of which are based on characters from the novels. You finish setting up by placing two cards, drawn from the deck, on each of the board’s four locations: Jupiter, Mars, the Institute, or Luna (the moon).
The general structure of a turn involves placing a card on one location and drawing a card from another. Depending on how and where you place your cards, you’ll make progress toward one of Red Rising’s three win conditions — earning seven helium tokens, earning seven influence tokens, or moving your ship token seven spaces on the “fleet track” segment of the board — and will ultimately earn points depending on how much progress you make toward each. The game ends when one player hits two of those conditions, or when all three are hit by any combination of players.
Where Red Rising gets tricky is the endgame — satisfying the game’s win conditions merely ends the game, but doesn’t actually guarantee you the win.
Every card has a point value. When the game ends, the point tally of cards in your hand counts toward your final score. Cards also have additional requirements that, when fulfilled, grant you even more points. (For instance, the characters Ragnar and Sefi are siblings; if you end the game with both in your hand, you’ll get a higher score.) In every round I’ve played, whomever has the most points in-hand has been the victor — and more often than not has always come from behind. So this isn’t the sort of game, like Catan, where you’re racing to victory. Instead, you’ll often find yourself trying to extend the match until you can get the strongest hand.
Red Rising is a solid board game on its own merits, but it really shines when playing alongside fellow fans of the novels. For the most part, the cards are accurate reflections of the characters they’re based on. Gold cards tend to have the naturally highest point tallies. Red cards aren’t too powerful in isolation, but when you get a bunch of them together, you can amass a game-changing point total.
This commitment to the source material gives a natural edge to those who’ve read the books and inherently understand, say, that Orange cards are tricky or White cards are incredibly rare. But it’s a blast playing with fellow Red Rising fans, shouting in mutual recognition when characters like Nero (“Screw that guy!”), the Jackal (“Screw that guy!”), or Lysander (“[incoherent string of curses that are the functional equivalent of ‘Screw that guy!’]”) appear on the board.
Yes, we might still have to wait some time for Red God — which, to be clear, I’m of the mindset that Brown should take all the time he needs to stick a landing he’s proud of. That’s fine. We can keep waiting. In the meantime, the Red Rising board game is a damn fine holdover.
