Rolling Heights has players throw meeples into a box and hope they land on their feet.

Is this game trying to get us to hate ‘lazy workers’?

Roll Your Meeples, Build the City.

It’s the 1920’s and your career as a general contractor is about to take off. You have just started your business in a rapidly expanding city.

Rolling Heights Game Overview

Quick Rules Summary

Players throw their meeples into a box and can ‘reroll’ those that land on their back. When half or more of their meeples are on their feet or side they stop.

Mainly, those that land on their feet provide a couple of resources of their matching type, and those on their side just one. There are other colour meeples that provide different abilities, including straight-up points.

Players then spend resources to buy new building tiles and place them in the city, or add resources to a building trying to complete it.

How do you win?

Building tiles in certain spots awards points as well as completing buildings. You also score a personal goal which will award points for completing a challenge. There are also 3 public goals that players can score.

Most points wins.

Main Mechanisms

Well, throwing the meeples into the box Pass the Pigs style for the resources and then managing those resources are the main two mechanisms.

There is also tile placement of course.

USP

Throwing the meeples is a unique way to generate resources and abilities.

Theme

It’s been done a lot. You’re a contractor/architect/city planner etc

Setup

Put the boards out and line the outside with tiles. It was pretty straightforward.

Components & Artwork

Everything is really nice. The meeples were really good quality as are the building parts as simple as they are. The graphic design is pretty good and the art is nice,, as minimal as it is.

Ease of Teaching

The game is easy to teach. There is a fair bit going on but it’s all very simple.

You have the private and public goals to aim for if you’re unsure which tile to take.

Similar Games

Strangely, with the private and public goals and building tiles that score for adjacency, I thought of Suburbia. Then another player at the table said that too.

You can go with any village/town/city builder, there are a lot.

Rolling Heights Review

Positives

The components are really nice, both the meeples and the tower pieces.

The board starts to look really good as it builds up.

The planning and combing scoring is really fun.

The meeple rolling is fun and unique, however…

Negatives

…there is a bit of luck involved there.

When you put a piece in its place on a tile, you can’t see how many need to be in that stack because you just covered it. There is a little bit showing you how many cubes you need in each stack but it’s tiny.

It’s expensive for what it is.

Summary

A decent game where you’re going to want to feel lucky to do really well.

Jesta ThaRogue