Rise to Nobility

The evening ended with Rise to Nobility, an honest, full-bodied dice-placement euro that left me with a far better impression than the designers’ first game, Cavern Tavern. It has that comfortable, substantial feel of a game that gives you plenty to do without scattering in every direction.

At its core, it is about placing dice: you use your dice to claim actions and build your route toward scoring. Its mechanisms connect nicely, and its overall flow feels, to an extent, like Lords of Waterdeep with dice instead of meeples.

Interaction mainly comes from which spaces and actions will still be available by the time your turn arrives, so it has the familiar pressure of a placement game without needing to become aggressive. In the base game, scoring is balanced, but there is also a clear runaway-leader issue: once someone gets ahead, catching them can be difficult.

Fortunately, the variants and the Chancery expansion already included in the base box fix that situation very effectively. The trade-off is that scoring stops being as balanced as it is in the plain base game, but in practice that means Rise to Nobility offers options for different tastes. For me, it is an enjoyable, well-integrated game that is worth playing beyond its bare-bones base form.