Rolling Heights

I have a soft spot for AEG, and in general I appreciate that D’Clair tries new things without fear. But experiments do not succeed simply because they dared to exist. Rolling Heights is one of those cases where boldness turns into monumental failure. Which is a shame, because the idea of a Suburbia-style game with bag building could have been perfectly respectable.

At its core, you are trying to develop your neighbourhood, placing things such as homes and parks so that they fit together. The ambition of building, say, a park next to your houses is clear enough as a goal. The problem is that the game decided to put a pile of meeples that I have to roll between me and this basic act of urban planning.

Those meeples are the mechanism that makes the game work, but also the mechanism that makes my patience resign. After the fifth time you roll them, the process has neither charm nor tension: it simply grinds your nerves down. The comparison between us at the table also ended in a perfectly clear picture of my disaster, since I wound up at double score behind the others.

And as if that were not enough, the artwork takes the game, lines it up at five metres, and executes it. The colour choices and the sizes are punishment, especially for my particular mix of myopia and presbyopia. I left disappointed, humiliated, and with a vicious migraine from trying to make out what I was building. From me, that is an emphatic NO.