After listening to the latest SVWAG podcast, I decided I should try out the scripted TTS mod for Fantasy Realms they mentioned. Fantasy Realms as you may remember is nominated for Kennerspiel des Jahres. You may also remember that it inspired Jamey Stegmaier to make a game about some of his favorite books: Red Rising.
While not a huge fan of Stonemaier games, I was among those who preordered Red Rising because I like the IP and the game features Mars. I didn’t have huge expectations and a first game with my partner quickly proved that the game has a few issues with luck and top-decking. For the record: I enjoyed my solos of Red Rising.
So to compare both games, I played Fantasy Realms 4 times against 2 scripted opponents.
Both games are about the same thing: you get an initial hand of cards, all of these cards are unique. Cards score points in combination with each other and your basic turn is to take a card and “discard” a card to improve your hand. In the case of Red Rising, you do not discard the card but play it to one of four locations that give you other bonuses and playing a card may also give you bonuses and cards block access to other cards that were played to that location earlier.
In Fantasy Realms the game ends after about 5-8 exchanges per player: the discard display can only hold a fixed number of cards, game ends as soon as that is full. So if you start with a good hand, you just watch the others struggle for cards to improve their lot. If you start with a bad hand… it’s a lottery. In both games that deck is pretty big and the probability of drawing the right card from the deck… small. Both games mitigate this by including a number of jokers but in Fantasy Realms the jokers do not usually score any points themselves. In Red Rising there are whole suits of jokers and they do score. The scoring issues in RR are more about how little variance there is and how a huge hand definitely scores more points so cards that allow that extra draw become so much more valuable. Hand size is fixed in Fantasy Realms. SVWAG mentions that scoring for Fantasy Realms takes longer than playing the game–this is true, luckily the TTS mod scores for you. But the issue extends to grokking your hand (a little less an issue with RR but still exists). Some of these cards aren’t trivial in their effects on your hand and the manual doesn’t do much to clear up how they work.
I am unimpressed with Fantasy Realms to say the least and how this game made it to the Kennerspiel list is a mystery to me. 2020 really wasn’t a bad year for games.
I really like Red Rising better now after having played Fantasy Realms. At the size where my collection currently seems to be staying, I plan to keep Red Rising in my collection because a) it is pretty and b) it has Mars and c) the gameplay is unique in my collection. Would I buy it again? Probably not. But I will most definitely not be buying Fantasy Realms.