Released back in 2018, does the dice worker placement game Rise to Nobility warrant the title of ‘hidden / forgotten gem’ here in 2023? Possibly, but with one major caveat…
Rise to Nobility / Rise to Nobility: Beyond
Designers: Vojkan Krstevski, Ivana Krstevski, Maja Matovska, Toni Toshevski
Publisher: Final Frontier Games
2018 / 2019
How to Play:
In this dice worker placement / engine builder game from Final Frontier Games originally published in 2018, you’re striving to prove your worth in the land of The Five Realms in the eventual hope of gaining a place on its Stone Council. Starting the game with a predetermined ‘reputation’ level that can increase and decrease as the game plays out, each round sees you rolling five dice and using as many of them as you wish as long as their combined value doesn’t exceed your current reputation level.
You’ll then start placing those dice out onto the main board to broadly:
• Claim a ‘settler’ card from a shared display - different races of settlers to choose from - humans, elves, dwarves and more.
• Visit different ‘Guild’ spaces on the board to obtain various resources - resources that ideally will match those that are displayed on your settler card(s).
• Grab a house for 5 coins to put your settlers in - using up your gathered resources, house the settler, gain VP, move up a ‘nobility’ track and generally feel good about yourself.
…and repeat.
After a few rounds, you’ll likely have housed a handful of settlers and be sufficiently far enough up the nobility track to have triggered the right to start claiming ‘stone council' tiles. Use a die to claim a stone council tile that matches one of the races of the settlers that you have previously housed, pay the tile’s cost and claim its victory points. Crucially however, decrease your ‘reputation’ level, which will make future dice rolls all the more tighter - so best not to go in too early or too heavy on these VP earning stone council tiles.
…and repeat some more.
There are a couple of decent enough wrinkles as you go. Want a settler card? The value of the die that you place will need to be equal to or higher than the one that is already placed there (the solo mode sees some arbitrary blocking of spaces with other dice). Want to purchase a house? Your die will have to be equal to or lower than the value of the die you place. Want lots of one particular resource? Go ahead and use a high-valued die and reap the immediate fruits. Maybe, though, you want to think about the longer-term game and use a lower-valued die to gain resources: you might get fewer resources in the here and now, but you do then get the right to put out an ‘apprentice’ or two onto the board, which will earn you some coins at the end of each round, as well as getting you additional resources for no additional costs next time you visit a Guild. Better start getting that coin/free resources engine built then eh?!
There are also a couple of other spaces on the board for you to use - a market where you can sell resources for coins and a space where you can buy workshops for increasing / decreasing costs depending on the value of the die you use. As well as getting you some victory points and a climb up the nobility track, workshops will also trigger when you visit a Guild for resources and give you a secondary bonus for your troubles. Nice.
That’s about it for the base game – there are alternative game modes: a ‘night’ mode and a ‘chancery’ mode but neither are playable solo so they have both saved me on word count here!
‘Beyond’ Expansion:
Released a year later in 2019, and for me it's an essential addition. The Beyond expansion adds in:
• A new ‘Rock Rose’ resource which you gain in a range of ways, most notably as a sweetener of sorts for any dice that you have been unable to use in a round because your current reputation level was too low - mitigating somewhat for any devastatingly bad dice rolls. Rock Rose can be used freely during the game to trade in for items that you might be desperate for - that one additional coin, that much-needed single resource, that one bump up the Nobility track so that you can start claiming those Stone Council tiles etc.
Two new areas to place your dice each round too:
• The Timeless Temple: Place a die that matches the value of the one that is already placed at the temple and place an ‘offering’ (pay the associated cost of coins and/or resources). Not only will you gain an immediate bonus of something useful - perhaps VP, a house to place settlers in, an apprentice to place into one of your guilds, a workshop, a stone council tile, etc - but also at the end of the game you might grab a good chunk of ‘area majority’ VP if you have managed to visit the temple enough!
• The Guardian’s Glade: Fans of tableau building will be very happy as your visits to the glade let you grab a range of cards. Perhaps you will get ‘dwelling’ cards that offer end-game VP depending on how well you met each card’s objectives. Perhaps you will get ‘elder cards’ that offer an ongoing bonus every time its condition is met. Perhaps you will get ‘relic cards’ that can be triggered each round for a one-time immediate bonus. Perhaps you might get a healthy mix of all three!
Solo Headlines:
I’m going to talk a little later in this review about how I feel that Rise to Nobility’s Beyond expansion is all but essential and how it lifts (in my opinion) a middling game into something a lot more enjoyable. While the Beyond expansion doesn’t alter the solo mode at all, I do need to be clear that my enjoyment of the game as a solo experience is purely based on my wider enjoyment of the game with its expansion. With that said…
I really enjoyed this solo puzzle. It’s straightforward enough to explain: at the start of the game (and each round), roll some spare dice and depending on their colour and value, place them out on the board to block spaces. Take a card from the stack of solo objective cards which give a VP target to aim for as well as a goal/win condition to meet (for example, have gained 6 stone council tiles, or have reached a certain point on the nobility track, or have a settler of each type, or have a certain amount of offerings in the Timeless Temple, etc).
Ok, I know it’s not going to appeal to those solo players who want to play against an all singing all dancing point-scoring automa, and it does sound awfully simplistic. But hear me out - I very much enjoyed this one. I think what is becoming more than clear to me as a solo player is that I always enjoy seeing a win condition thrown into the mix. I don’t particularly like win conditions on their own – I’m a VP-loving Euro fan, which probably explains why games like Pandemic and similar 'win/lose' style games are virtually non-existent in my collection. But pair a good win condition with a VP target and I find myself having a thoroughly splendid time. I think it’s probably due to the increased tension - needing to grind up my VP but also having to keep an additional eye on the overarching, non-optional strategic objective / win condition. It’s not quite as tense here as it is in, say, Underwater Cities with its claustrophobic timer ticking down while I furiously try to build my city to the requisite level and hit that (so far unachievable) points threshold. But it’s still a tight and enjoyable balancing act.
What those win conditions also do as they change each game, is force me to change my style of play, force me out of my comfort zone, force me to explore different parts of the game that I might otherwise ignore, and force me to become a better all-round player. While I didn’t feel that there was enough for me to explore in the base game alone, solo games with the expansion saw each game feeling fresh, varied, and distinct - and a decent challenge at that.
It plays in my 60-minute sweet spot too. Nice! Well, 60 minutes in its officially updated ‘7 rounds instead of 10 rounds’ format, but more on that in a second…
General Headlines:
Production quality is excellent throughout - thick cardboard, good quality cards, and a vibrant double-sided board displaying both day and night scenes. Fans of The Mico’s art are not going to be disappointed here with a wide range of unique, quirky, and colourful designs on each and every card. They lift a potentially dry medieval theme into something fantastical and whimsical. That said, the game’s wider setting feels a little disjointed. I know I am in this whimsical land - grabbing settlers, houses, and resources, and generally doing whimsical stuff and the rulebook does make an attempt in the introduction at some wider world-building and scene-setting about the ‘Five Realms’ and its capital ‘Caveborn’ that you are playing in. But if you asked me to explain why I am doing things during the game then I think I would struggle. Reading back on the original Kickstarter campaign, I noticed that two short books for Rise to Nobility had been included which did some extensive world-building. I would be intrigued to read these, and I think it’s a neat idea for other Euro games which can often be a little dry. I enjoyed a similar ‘read this short booklet / story before playing’ approach for Stefan Feld’s fantasy/goblin-themed title Bonfire. More please!
For a game or two, the main flow of the game was charming enough: grab a settler card, grab a house, and grab the necessary resources to place the settler in the house. Rinse and repeat. Having to chew over how best to do that each round with the dice that have been rolled was a decent enough puzzle, but sometimes felt deflating given that dice you can’t use are lost and turns move from either ‘very fruitful’ to ‘average’ to ‘somewhat wasteful’ depending on the luck of the roll. You can always do something - whether it is anywhere near enough for a round is another question. Regardless, after just four plays (if not earlier!), things had become very procedural and repetitive – to the point where I felt that I had seen everything on offer with very little else to explore.
I also got the sense that a little more development might have been a good idea with the base game and that perhaps it had been a little rushed into the hands of eager Kickstarter backers. It’s telling that the Beyond expansion not only contains its own rule book but an updated rulebook for the base game with minor changes that do feel like they should have been picked up much earlier – for example an official shortening of the game from ten rounds to seven. If anyone has played Terraforming Mars with its Prelude expansion which shortens the game slightly by removing the need for those first few rounds of just grinding up your engine from nothing, then you will be understanding why a similar approach was needed here in Rise to Nobility. There are other tell-tale signs that perhaps more development might have been a good thing - surely someone (anyone!) during playtesting looked at the separate, space-hogging board that serves no other purpose than to track VP and thought, “Maybe a VP track can be wrapped around the outside of the main board instead?!”. Just some niggles that you suspect stopped this game from potentially becoming an evergreen…
It’s not that the Beyond expansion brings anything majorly earth-shattering or groundbreaking, but it takes a mediocre base game, makes it feel complete, and in turn makes for a very enjoyable overall experience. There are two main things happening that lift things excellently:
• Firstly, the addition of the new ‘rock rose’ resource. Not only does it offer somewhat of a sweetener when you have a bad roll of the dice, but it also creates opportunities to find other routes and pathways to the thing that you want to do. In the base game, if I needed something and was only one coin or one resource short then it was just tough luck and I had to spend an entire turn just getting that one coin which felt like a waste of a turn. Rock rose brings choices and options and satisfaction - those moments of “oh no, I can’t do that thing I really want to do. BUT WAIT, if I trade in three rock rose for one red resource, then I get to trade that card in which bumps me up that track and gets me those two apprentices I have been needing for ages.” Some might say “isn’t that just making the game easier?” I argue that it is instead making the game satisfying and fun with constant wheeling and dealing every turn to get to where you need to be.
• The wider gameplay elements that the expansion introduces offer more strategic opportunities and more pathways and routes to ultimate success – breaking the repetitive and largely singular route to victory that the base game alone offers. The Timeless Temple is fun – similar to rock rose it’s going to reward you with useful things that you might find elsewhere in the game as well as some bumps up the Reputation track – but don’t snooze too long as spaces on each row of the temple are limited, eventually landing you with moves down the Reputation track. Don’t forget too about the temple’s area majority battle and the resulting VP on offer at the end of the game! However, it’s the new tableau building element - ‘The Guardian’s Glade’ - that really shines and offers so much more to the game: being able to hone in on long-term strategic goals as a viable tableau strategy, or going heavy on ongoing bonuses to help you better exploit your wider strategies, or regularly triggering some massive one-time bonuses – perhaps even doing a blend of all three! The Guardian’s Glade is an excellent addition to the game and comes with a more than healthy stack of cards to try and build into your tableau.
For the solo player, the expansion also comes with a new stack of solo objective cards that offer even more win conditions that exploit all the new features that the expansion brings to the table – taking you off on lots of new delicious quests to find new approaches to a now satisfyingly complete game. However, even in the expansion, there remain a couple of issues that really should have been picked up with a little more care and attention before going to print. For example, some of the solo objective cards require you to use a little common sense or house ruling – one asks you as a win condition to build seven specific things into your tableau, but the main rules of the game dictate that you can never have more than six at any one time. Another solo objective asks you to complete something as part of a module that the rules clearly state is not even compatible with the solo mode. Grumble. It’s not a deal breaker – common sense is easy enough to put in to practice, and the vast majority of things going on in the game plus its expansion are absolutely fine, but it does all once again create a feeling that this game might have soared with a little more attention and development time.
As is stands however, as long as its played with its expansion, I think Rise to Nobility ends up being a really enjoyable solo experience regardless.
At a Glance:
A base game that feels more than procedural and becomes very repetitive after a couple of plays. However, it is completely transformed by its superb expansion, turning what feels at times like an incomplete game into a satisfying whole with plenty of different routes to success. Forget that Rise to Nobility was ever a separate base game and expansion, find a copy of both for what I am certain in 2023 will be a more than reasonable price, turn a blind eye to one or two of its foibles, and ultimately I think you are going to have a really enjoyable solo experience – particularly if you enjoy chasing strategic objectives.
Final Score:
• Rise to Nobility: 6 out of 10
• Rise to Nobility with Beyond: 8 out of 10
Reviewed after 8 plays (4 base game / 4 plus expansion)
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