Rising Cultures Review: Yeast: The Board Game

[music] [music] >> Hey everybody, I'm Tom Vassal and today we're taking a look at Rising Cultures. Rising Cultures is a two-player game. It has a really cool cover. If you you're looking at the reflection of the river, it's a different civilization. In this game, there are four civilizations and you are going to pick two of them.

It's a two-player game and face off against each other. You each have your own asymmetrical deck and you will be working back and forth to get victory points. Here's how it plays. In this game, each player is going to be playing with various factions. Um in the game, there's four different factions.

They're very asymmetrical. So, let's say I play a Persian, I'm playing against Rome. You're going to draw some province cards and put them out in the middle of the table. These are from a deck randomly, but you'll put them in order. So, you can see here two is the lowest number, so that would be first, while 14 is the highest.

Because each round you're going to be fighting over these provinces and they will get better as time goes by. Players are going to have a deck of cards and you're going to be starting with some cards and you're going to pick some starting resources. You'll put them down underneath your board. I'll talk about that in a bit later and the other card goes on top of your deck.

The way a round works is players are going to get four cards each round. They can draw these cards. They will start with some coins and it's possible as the game goes by that you'll get things that give you an income of coins. But, you're going to have these coins and you can spend a coin to redraw, put some cards in the bottom of your deck and such.

But, let's say I stick with the cards that I have. We're going to go back and forth. Each player is going to be playing three cards and then the fourth card you'll put on top of your deck so you can draw it again for a future turn. What can you do when you play a card? Well, one thing is you can discard the card.

It doesn't matter what else is on the card and take two coins. Another thing you can do is you can add to your military. Every card is a military symbol, you'll turn the card upside down and stick it here next to your military. Now, you'll notice here that right now my military means I have one of those shields.

If I added another military card, now I have a bonus, I have two shields and a sword. And this matters because at the end of a round we're going to look at a province and whoever has the most symbols shown in that province. So, right now I have a total of three towards this. There are other cards that will give you bonuses towards it, but whoever has the most will win this which will be worth victory points at the end of the game and also will give you a bonus.

This one for example gives me a brick, but whoever wins it will also lose their last military card that goes to their discard pile. You can also add a card down here to the bottom of your board as resources. This will give you more resources. The resource that right now I have one wood, two brick, two stone, one gold, and when I play this card, I will instantly get a coin, but that's not a permanent resource, it just instantly gives it to me.

This matters because you're going to want to build cards from your hand. You have buildings and you have leaders. You can only have one leader in play, but you can have as many buildings as you want. To build this building I need two wood and two stone. I have one wood and two stone. So, I can always pay two coins to get any resource I'm missing.

I will now build this and this is going to give me the barracks which at the end of the game is going to give me one point for every red card that I have. And that's how the game is going to work. You're going to look, sometimes they give you immediate benefits, sometimes they give you long range. This guy gives me income for my equal to my military strength.

Many of them are going to give you end game victory points as you play them and each of the decks has a different focal point to it. Whenever you build a card, you do not spend the resources that you did to build the card unless you're using the coins for missing ones. However, when you're done, you can optionally go up a level and and just take one of these cards and turn it over, the last card that you have in your building line here, and place it and now you've gone up a level in technology.

And you can see all of these are going to give you bonuses. And in fact, if a player has a lot of these in line, the these and military, they can get a discount because one of the things you can do as an optional action is go to a golden age, spend a bunch of coins, turn this over, where your bonuses on this side and possibly this side also will get better.

So, players are going to play three cards, put the other back on top of their deck, see who wins the province, go to the next round. After seven rounds, you're going to score the game. Now, I do want to point out that each of the players comes with their own sheet. So, each of the players has a sheet, so this is the one for Egyptian, that explains your cards and your special rules.

So, for example, I am playing here with Persia, so this explains what all these symbols mean. It tells me the difference of the ones on the golden age, and it tells me what my military bonuses are. And then on the other side it explains what every single card does for your faction. And some of the games play very Some of the factions play very differently.

For example, Egypt has Nile cards, where you can put tokens on them and give bonuses to both you and your opponent, and they also are building wonders of the world. And while Rome has a very strong military strength, so you have to decide which of these you're going to play. And that's basically how it works.

>> [music] >> Rising Cultures is a very cool-looking game on this box, a little less exciting in person. I feel like it is uh it it doesn't it's There's a lot of symbols in the game. I'm very glad they gave you those player aid sheets. That's very, very helpful. You'll be living on those things while you're playing the game.

But I will say I felt like there was some rules from the rulebook that were also on those sheets. Like how to upgrade your civilization, I think. There's just there was a few things. I was like, wait, oh, it's on the sheet here rather than in the rulebook. But I'm really glad that they gave those sheets and I will say this for sure, the four factions are asymmetrical.

They recommend you play Rome and and the Persia for your first game and that's definitely true. The other factions, in particular Egypt, but the other factions, they have they have more complex things going on. They feel balanced, but you're definitely going to have to this is a game that you're going to probably do poorly your first time through because you kind of need to know your deck.

You need to know what card and when you draw cards at the beginning of the game, you get to put one you'll draw four and you'll put two out on those resources. You'll put one on top of your deck and one underneath your deck. Well, this game is already forcing you into a hard choice, but you need to know sort of what card I'll need near endgame and that goes in the bottom of the deck cuz I'll be drawing that at the end of the game and that's when I can play this really useful endgame card or what have you.

And anytime you put a card out for resources or for military, you will never be able to play that card again as something else unless you're playing one of the factions. But you're not going to be able to play it as a leader. Also, the leaders, except for the one faction, you only have one leader. But there's multiple in the deck, so which leader will you play or maybe replace later on?

The resource management how you put things out is going to remind you a bit of Seven Wonders. In fact, there's a little bit more of that. You also discard a card for a couple coins. There's a little tile that goes back and forth between the players to show who has the more progress, the green tokens on the side when you build cards out there.

And that mechanism, I think, works really well because as you play a building out there, you can move up on the progress track, but you have to give up some of your resources to do so. So, you you know, once you build a lot of resources, you're like, "Yeah, I can build anything now." But, I'd rather move up that progress track, especially since it makes it easier for me to go to golden age, but also get all these bonuses and possible end-game victory points.

There's not a ton of victory points in the game, so these mechanisms all work together in a finely tuned system. I'm not 100% sure this system is fun. See, that's where that's where this game kind of comes down for me. It's really interesting. It's back and forth, and I played with all the factions, and they really do play differently.

And I definitely know that the first time you go in, you're going to be a bit overwhelmed. But, also I feel like the game kind of tells you how to play each faction. These are the things that you should do. The battles aren't usually particular in interesting, because if you see one person's ahead on the military track, you're like, "Well, they're going to win, so why I I'm not going to waste cards on military, and I'll let them win a couple military things.

When their military gets down, then I'll come back and get them, because now I can use these cards for other things." But, there's this end-game scoring, and some of it could be very big. Again, Egypt is a very tricky one to play. There's like a pyramid, you need to play both cards for it to work, and if you get it off, it's great, but you need to be building for that.

So, this is the kind of game where you need to play almost a practice game, and then in the real game, right behind that. And you also are going to want to get into the differences between them. But, the game also feels small, while feeling complex at the same time. And I fear that the complexity rating is a little higher for how tiny the game is.

Now, on one hand, that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's not a bad thing to have a game go long, I mean I mean short, but also feel deep. There's so few games that do that. But I think that this game also gives the pseudo behavior being deep while it's not really. Yes, you can use a card in four different ways, but building it is always the best option.

Winning the military things out there can be useful, but it's kind of weird if you're playing one of the factions that's really hey, I got a lot of points for fighting doing stuff military and the other opponent doesn't, they get points for building stuff. So, you're almost playing two different games at that point.

It's interesting. You definitely don't want to forget the rule about spending a coin to redraw cards cuz that could be a really big deal as the game goes by, but you also, like I said, need to know your deck inside and out. So, this is going to reward multiple players. So, if that sounds good to you, I think, you know, a 45-minute game that offers some pretty asymmetrical, interesting back and forth, you're going to really like this.

For me, it is a six out of 10. I found it to be interesting, a lot of back and forth. Uh we had a good time in many ways, but we also found ourselves kind of struggling through it. The first game, struggling through it the second game, and I get that you're struggling, you know, a little bit to go farther in the game, but at no point each time I played, I was like, all right, let's try it again, you know, to to get to better games so I can review it, but not because I was like, woo, this is fun.

Let's see what happens next time. It's like, I don't know how I feel about it. I don't know how I feel about it. I don't know how I feel about it. And that's kind of a midway score. It didn't make me dislike it, but I also wasn't that thrilled about it. Also, the history is a little bit very much in the background.

So, I I think some people are going to dig this one, but I think most people aren't. I think most people are going to look at it and go, huh. It's It's fine, and I don't really have room for fine games in my collection. I want the best ones, but your mileage may vary. So, definitely, if this sounds interesting, definitely check it out.

That's Rising Cultures. on I'm Tom Vasel, and you're watching The Dice Tower. >> [music] [music] >> Hey everybody, thanks for watching this video. If you like this review or whatever you just watched, wasn't it amazing? Uh check out our channel, Dice Tower. Uh we have all kinds of things. [music] We review games, we do top 10s, we play games live.

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