Rolling Heights

Additional Bonus Tile Set, Rhado, Tall Towers, (and Snow Geese?)
about 2 years ago – Fri, Feb 18, 2022 at 03:03:46 AM

Now that you’ve seen all the bonus tiles from the ‘John D Clair’ bonus building set, we are proud to announce another building set that you as a backer will be getting for FREE as part of this campaign. This set focuses on the most valuable land in most locations - waterfront property. be it used for business, industry, relaxing, or high-end homes, waterfront properties are always desirable, and so is this building set! 

The Waterfront building set includes one building of each type (Residential, Park, Commercial, Civic, and Industrial), and feature abilities that make those juicy waterfront lots that much better. 

A couple other things to mention. First off, we just got our Rhado Runs Through It today and if you want to see what he has to say about Rolling Heights, here you go! Rhado is a great judge of games and we always look forward to what he has to say. 

Also, folks in the comments have been asking about how steady the cube towers are when built. So this morning, I put together this video - please excuse the camera work, edit, and messy game table. Importantly, you can see, the towers are quite stable! 

Lastly, and 100% unconnected to Rolling Heights, as long as you’re on my personal YouTube channel, take a look at what happened last week when I went to visit a local spot that is a stopover for migrating Snow Geese. The flock this year was estimated to be 120,000 birds. Most of them were hanging out on a lake when a bald eagle took to the sky and things got crazy!!! I just think is cool, so I wanted to share it…

Thanks for backing Rolling Heights and thanks for telling your friends!

Luke the Geese Whisperer

(As I'm posting this after hours here, I don't have access to my normal editors, so please excuse any typos. Or make a game out of finding them!)

Preview tile 3 and 4 (and more?...)
about 2 years ago – Thu, Feb 17, 2022 at 09:00:54 AM

     As a backer, you'll be getting 5 extra buildings and the bonus micro-game*. We decided to have some fun with the extra buildings and named each one after another great John D Clair/AEG game. First up today Pillar of the Vale.

Named after the first card crafting game AEG published, Mystic Vale**, the Pillars of the Vale Park is another great late-game Level 2 building. When completed, you will gain a Wild Cube/1vp token for each Industrial Building already built on the same neighbourhood board - yours AND your opponents'! Wild Cube tokens are super helpful when you are trying to complete large skyscrapers in particular, so getting a big handful of these late in the game can really help you come from behind if your opponent played an early factory strategy. 
             Next up is the Space Opera House (hehe), named after my family’s current favorite John D Clair game Space Base! 

            This building scores VPs for each pair of Residential and Commercial building in the neighborhood - a perfect building for a mixed-use downtown.
            Both of these buildings take 3 different resources to complete, which is pretty rare and does make them a little harder to finish, but they are definitely worth the effort. As promo tiles they are a little more rules-ee than most buildings as well - we would suggest not including these buildings in your first game while you get the hang of things. 
            More info on the other promo tile and other news coming soon. Thanks again for supporting Rolling Heights and we'd really appreciate if you shared this campaign on social media. 
             Team AEG

             * Might there be more free stuff coming for Kickstarter backers? Stay tuned...
             ** If you've never tried Mystic Vale or just want a copy for yourself, be on the lookout for the Mystic Vale Essential Edition, coming to a store near you in a little more than a month! 

Bonus Tile #5 Preview - The Edge Observatory
about 2 years ago – Thu, Feb 17, 2022 at 08:01:43 AM

As we approach 2000 backers I wanted to do a quick update to thank you and to preview bonus tile #5 - Edge Observatory. Named after John D Clair’s hit game, Edge of Darkness, Edge Observatory is unique in that it scores more points when it’s far away from other buildings.

We are working on some fun updates for later in the campaign, so stay tuned! Until then, thanks again for making this campaign a success and for sharing the campaign with your friends - we really appreciate it. 

Luke

Bonus Tile Preview #2
about 2 years ago – Sun, Feb 13, 2022 at 04:39:43 AM

I hope you are having a great weekend! Just a quick update to show you bonus tile number 2 - The House of Reckoning. Named after John D Clair's game Dead Reckoning, the House of Reckoning is a haunted house with a super unique effect that allows you to sacrifice a meeple to allow you to play your cubes as wilds for a turn! 

Early in the game, you probably don't want to use this ability, because you would have to send a hard earned meeple back into the supply. Late in the game however, when you have more meeples than you can use in a turn (you can only roll 10 meeples in any given turn no matter how many you have), this can be a massive game changer and allow you to build some very tall steel and glass skyscrapers. 

A quick reminder, these promo tiles have been designed to be on the more complex side and we recommend you don't add them to your game until you get  the hang of the basic gameplay. I'll keep previewing bonus buildings during the campaign and thanks again for supporting Rolling Heights!

Luke

 

Solo rule posted and BoardGameCo Review
about 2 years ago – Sun, Feb 13, 2022 at 01:20:13 AM

Late yesterday we posted the rules for the solo version of Rolling Heights. I've reached out to the developer Josh Wood for a look at what his goals were with the solo rules and how these rules came to be. Take it away Josh! 

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I wanted solo Rolling Heights to feel like you were playing against an opponent, while keeping the AI’s actions short and straight forward.

I could have done a ‘Score X points in Y turns to win” kind of game, but I wanted players to have something to interact with, so early on I decided the AI would build buildings. This was also important because so much of Rolling Heights is about the table presence and I wanted the game to look like a big city at the end.

Figuring out how the AI would get buildings was easy, figuring out actually where those buildings would be placed was tough. Since there are 6 neighborhood boards in the game and 6 sides to a die, I wanted to make the entire AI system work on just one die. After a few stops and starts, I had a system where the AI rolled the die and placed a building on that neighborhood board. But where to place it on that neighborhood board? I talked it over with John D Clair and he suggested the center-most location.  This worked really well since most of the neighborhood centers are on or near water, which helped the AI score additional points. 

The final thing I needed to figure out was how many cubes the AI will place each round. My initial thought was 4. At this point I figured the game would be playable, but knew it would be far from perfect. 

Around this time, I signed a lease to a new place but hadn’t moved into it yet. I went to the new place and lay on the floor with the solo mode for the first time (This was also so my cat wouldn’t jump up on the table and take on the role of a Kaiju). The first test went OK. I won by a good margin but at least I knew about how many points the AI needed to get better by. 

I shared my ruleset with a few people including John Clair. John and the others would play and give me feedback and I would change the game accordingly. Eventually we got to a place where the solo mode was challenging, but beatable. Most importantly though, it felt like you are playing against an actual opponent and the game looks great when you are done! 

I’m excited where the solo rules ended up and I hope you enjoy playing Rolling Heights solo. I want to thank everyone who helped me on the solo mode, especially John D Clair who trusted me to make it and Kirk Buckendorf who did a bunch of testing as well. 

- Josh Wood

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Lastly I wanted to share this unpaid review of Rolling Heights by the folks at BoardGameCo and Quackalope. Don't want to spoil it, but Shira gave it a 9 out of 10!!!