Black Rose Wars: Rebirth

With the usual sound judgement of our procurement department, I ended up with Black Rose Wars: Rebirth without even being sure why: I probably mistook it for an expansion rather than an improved reissue, and somewhere along the way I also clicked all-in. When the courier delivered nearly half a metric ton of plastic and cards to the temple, I decided it deserved one final chance before being sent down to the dungeons of oblivion and dust. And as an object, it is genuinely lavish: production quality is through the roof, and its table presence makes an immediate statement.

We played an honest, plain four-player game of Rebirth, without expansions or extra bells and whistles. The game revolves around spells and cards, so it matters how they fall for you and how the dynamic between players develops. In games of this sort, those details are crucial to how a session feels, and I cannot rule out that this particular distribution was kind to us.

Even so, compared with my last encounter with the madness of the ROTAS box, the experience was noticeably better. The spells feel much more streamlined, the scoring more sensible, and the game length more appropriate. My impression is that the designers really put in the work to address several of the first edition's problems, and the result plays clearly better.

The one thorn is Rebirth's relationship with everything that came before it. The eight boxes from the first edition are, more or less, left staring at you, since there is no upgrade kit. The Price of Progress. Still, as a straight Rebirth experience and as a production, this is a very, very good time.