Red Rising (New Edition)

Fourteen castes, every one of them convinced it is the one holding the whole thing together.

Stonemaier's adaptation of Pierce Brown's novels, in which a colour-coded society runs from Gold at the top down to Red at the bottom and nobody is having a particularly good time. Jamey Stegmaier's design does not try to retell the books — it hands you a fistful of characters out of them and asks what you can build. You need not have read a word of the series, though anyone who has will find the card text doing a lot of quiet work.

You hold five cards. On your turn you deploy one to a location, take that location's benefit, then draw from another location or the deck — so every card you play is an opportunity handed to whoever goes next. The tension is that your hand is both your engine and your score, and the cards that combo hardest are rarely the ones worth the most at the end. It plays in under an hour and takes considerably longer than that to stop thinking about.

Perfect for: Anyone who enjoys the particular discomfort of holding a card worth a great deal and doing nothing with it for three consecutive turns.

1–6 players | 45–60 minutes