Red Rising Board Game: How It Plays, and Other Ways In

19 October 2026

The Red Rising board game is a card game from Stonemaier Games, designed by Jamey Stegmaier and Alexander Schmidt and based on Pierce Brown’s first trilogy. It plays 1 to 6 people in 45 to 60 minutes. Each player leads a house trying to rise to power, and you build a hand of the books’ characters to score the most points by the end. It is a strategy game about the Society’s colours and politics. You do not play Darrow, and nobody tells the story of the Institute. If what you want is to stay inside the novels as a person in them, there is another way to do that too, and this guide covers both.

Everything said here about Stonemaier’s game is as of October 2026, read from the game’s own page on stonemaiergames.com.

What the Red Rising board game actually is

Stonemaier describes it in one line:

“Red Rising is a hand-management, combo-building game based on the futuristic dystopian novels by Pierce Brown.”

The publisher’s page fills that in. You start with a hand of five cards. On your turn you deploy one of them to a location on the board, which triggers that card’s deploy benefit. Then you take a card back, either the top card of another location or the top of the deck, gain that location’s benefit, and add it to your hand. The goal is the best end-game hand, so the whole game is about which characters you hold together and what they are worth beside each other.

The theme lives in the cards and the castes. The 112 character cards are people from the books, and the page frames the choice the game hands you as a question: “Will you break the chains of the Society or embrace the dominance of the Golds?” There are six asymmetric house tiles, helium tokens, influence cubes, a Sovereign token and fleet tokens, all of which push you toward the same scoring race.

Who the board game is for

The Red Rising board game is a good fit if:

• you have a regular game group, or a partner who likes cards;
• you enjoy combo games where the order you collect things matters;
• you want an evening game that carries the books’ look and names without needing anyone to have read them;
• you like short setup. Stonemaier lists five minutes.

Stonemaier’s own comparison is useful here. The page says that if you enjoy Fantasy Realms, Libertalia and Gugong, “we think you’ll enjoy Red Rising.” Those are tight card games, not story games, and that tells you what kind of evening this is.

It is a weaker fit if what you loved was the story itself. You will not fight through the Institute, stand in Lykos, or talk to Mustang or Sevro. The characters are cards with icons and point values. The drama is the drama of a good hand, and a reader who wanted to be in the book can come away feeling they played something next to it.

Playing the Red Rising board game solo

The box includes a separate Automa rulebook and 30 Automa cards, which is Stonemaier’s name for the artificial opponent it builds into its games. That is how the game reaches its single-player count. You play your turns as usual, and the Automa deck decides what the opposing house does.

Solo Automa play suits someone who likes puzzling at a table alone and wants to improve their score. It does not add story. The opponent is a deck, and its job is to compete for the same locations and cards.

Playing it online

Stonemaier’s page says the game “is also available digitally on Tabletopia”, the browser and app platform for board games. It also links a web-based scoring app, which helps at the table because the end-game count is the fiddly part.

The digital version is the same game. It is the way to play with friends who live far away, or to learn the rules before you buy a copy.

Other ways to play in the world of Red Rising

The phrase “Red Rising game” covers two different wishes, and the board game answers only the first.

• You want a strategy evening in that world. Cards, houses, colours, points. Stonemaier’s game is built exactly for this.
• You want to be in the story. Walk the mines of Lykos, sit in a Gold dining hall pretending to belong, decide who to trust when the house you joined starts eating itself. That is the reader’s wish, and it calls for a roleplaying game rather than a card game.

There is no official tabletop roleplaying game for Red Rising listed on the publisher’s page, so a group that wants one usually adapts a general system and writes its own setting notes. That works, and it takes a game master who is willing to prepare the Society between sessions.

Playing inside the novels as your own character

The third way skips the rules. You give a narrator the novel itself, and it reads the book before you start: the places, the people, how they talk, what each one knows. Then you make your own character and type what you do. There is no list of options and no deck. You might be a Red helldiver who has just watched the surface, a Pink servant overhearing too much in a Gold household, or a Grey legionnaire posted where nothing should happen.

This is what LLM RPG does. You upload a copy of a book you own, as a .txt or .epub file, and it builds an atlas of that book’s world before the first scene, so the narrator keeps names, places and the caste rules consistent with what the author wrote. You are shown what the reading costs before anything is spent. Because it works from the text rather than a preset, it works for Red Rising, for Golden Son and Morning Star, and for the later books with their very different Solar System.

Pick it if the thing you miss after the last chapter is the world, and you would rather be somebody in the Society tonight than learn a rulebook.

It is weaker for a group at a table. It is a written story you read and type, one player at a time. It also needs the book file, so you use your own copy.

If you are here for the dystopia, our guide to the Hunger Games game does the same for Panem, and the Dune roleplaying game guide covers another series built on houses and a brutal hierarchy. For the wider field, see AI roleplaying.

The options side by side

How to start playing inside Red Rising tonight

If playing inside the book sounds like your kind of game, this is the whole path.

1. Try it with no account. Open a ready-made world and play five turns. A few minutes tells you whether typing your own actions suits you.
2. Sign up with your email if it does. You get a one-time code, no password. The current plans are on the pricing page.
3. Upload the book. Choose the volume you want to live in, as a .txt or .epub from your own copy. The narrator reads it and builds the world.
4. Make your character. A Red miner, a Brown cook in a Gold house, a Blue pilot with doubts. You are a new person in the book’s world, so you can be anyone of any colour.
5. Type what you do. “I keep my eyes down and count the guards at the lift.” “I ask the Obsidian at the door who she answers to.” The narrator answers in the world’s voice and remembers what you did, including the lies you told.

When the board game is the better choice

If you have friends coming over and want a game everyone can learn in one round, buy the board game. It is a well-made, quick card game with the books’ art and names, and it needs nobody to have read a page. If you play alone and enjoy beating your own score, the Automa deck gives you that. If your group is spread out, Tabletopia puts it on the screen.

A written game fits a different evening: you have just closed Morning Star, you are not ready to leave, and you want to walk the Society as someone the books never followed. That is the moment it was built for.

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