Rising Cultures

• Designers: Aske Christiansen, Francesco Testini 
• Publisher: Huch! 
• Players: 2
• Age: 12+
• Time: 45 minutes
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4oDfObO 

In Rising Cultures, you take control of one of four different civilizations — Egypt, Persia, Rome, or the Abbasid Caliphate — each with its own unique deck and abilities. Your goal is to lead your culture to fame and glory through conquered provinces or building cards. Each of the multi-use cards presents you with an important decision: Do you use them for resources, for your military, to build important buildings, or to play unique leaders? The decision is yours!

To start the game, pick one of the 4 civilizations, taking the board, overview card and card deck that correspond. Draw 4 cards from the deck, choosing 2 of them to line up under the resource stream area at the bottom of your board.  Gain coins if they are seen on your cards or board in addition to the 2 coins that each player always gets in setup.  

Shuffle the province cards and make a line of 7 of them in ascending order between the players.

The game is played over 7 rounds, three phases in each

Income: Check your cards and civilization board, take the amount of coins that you have unlocked

Play cards:  Both players draw the top 4 cards from their deck. You may pay up to 2 coins to draw additional cards from your deck, then returning a card to the bottom of your deck after the extra draw.   Once the players are set on their 4 cards for the round, they take turns playing a card a resolving it.  There are four options on how to use a card

• Increase your military strength – rotate the card so the red military symbol lines up with the highest free red band on your civilization board, possibly unlocking a bonus there.  There are three different military icons and they are used to win province cards at the end of each round
• Increase your resources – rotate the card to add its resources to your resource stream at the bottom of your board
• Construct a card – put a card in play (either a building or a leader) above your civilization board. You must have adequate resources available to you to pay the construction cost shown on the card (or pay 2 coins for each additional resource required that you do not produce). Once in play, you have access to the effects shown on the bottom half of the card.  You can have as many buildings in play as you like but only one leader.  After you construct a card, you then have a one-time choice whether to convert your most recently played resource card to increase your progress level (on the left of your board).  As with the military track, this might unlock abilities as shown on your civ board.
• Discard the card and gain 2 coins

After three cards have been played by each player, the last card in the hand is placed back on top of the player’s deck.

At any point in the game, players can also advance their civilization into the golden age.  For a cost of 7 coins, minus a discount of one coin for each matching level of military and progress – you can flip your board over.  You will get 3VP for the flip at the end of the game, and your board will now have better rewards for achieving levels in progress and military.

End of round: award the left most province card to the player who has the most military symbols of the type shown. Ties broken in favor of the first player marker.  If there is an effect on the province card, it is immediately effective.  The player who won the province must discard their most recently played military card. Interestingly, players can choose not to compete for the province card if they do not want to be forced to discard a military card.  If both players refuse to compete or neither has the required symbols, the province card is simply discarded.  The progress marker (first player token) goes to the player with the most progress levels achieved; if there is a tie, it simply switches hands. Finally, return any coins in excess of 7 to the supply. 

The game ends after 7 rounds – and players count up their points – scoring for constructed buildings and leaders, points on the civilization board, points from province cards collected and 3VP for having the progress marker at the end of the game.  The most points wins, and ties broken in favor of the owner of the progress marker at the end.

My thoughts on the game

This past year has been a sort of Renaissance for my 2-player game career.  For many years, I had shied away from the 2p only games because I really didn’t have a regular partner to play them.  But, as things always do, change has brought a few regular 2p opponents into my circle, and now I’m getting a much better chance to play these.

I didn’t take a look at this game back at Spiel 2025, well, because of my lack of 2p playing time, but I was happy to try the game when asked.  I was invited to do a webcast with the great folks at Capstone Games – and I’ve been waiting for a chance to play the game again since that stream.

In Rising Cultures, I like the fact that there are four different cultures to play, and the obvious variety generated by the six different possible matchups – well really 12 for each player as they could play both sides of a matchup.  Each of the four cultures plays a little different – based on the unique abilities afforded on their board as well as the general makeup of their decks.  From what I’ve seen so far, you’re definitely not sworn to a particular strategy based on your culture, but a lot of the cards in your deck work together in that way.  (For instance, I did once win with Rome while specifically not pursuing a military only strategy…)

The designers have definitely come up with a great system with the multiple ways to use the cards. At the start of each round, you’ll definitely want to plot out your main strategy; what cards do I want to build, and then what sort of resources will I need to build them?  While you’re doing that, you’ll also want to keep an eye out on what your opponent is doing and be prepared to quickly shift gears if you need to reply to their action.

For me, I usually try to decide if I’m fighting for the Province card or not, and then figure out where the current battle stands.  If I’m leading, I might not play to the red column immediately, but keep a card in reserve so that I can raise my military to the next level if required.  On the other hand, sometimes the pre-emptive strike is the best play – if I can get a 2 step lead on the first turn, that might be enough to convince my opponent that it’s not worth investing the effort as I could still play more later in the round. 

As you are building your engine, the game also continually tries to tear it back down.  First, there is the catchup mechanism on the military side – where you lose your most recently played military card when you win the province.  Second, you’ll likely want to increase your Progress, but to do so, you’ll have to discard production cards after building things.  There is a tough push/pull here as you have to give up some valuable cards in order to make these other steps forward.

You’ll go through your entire deck once during the course of the game, so timing will play a decent role in things; and I think this is a good thing as you’ll have to adapt to the order that the cards come out of your deck.  I suppose if you got a great end-game scoring card in your first hand, you could keep putting it back on top of your deck each round until you had the capacity to build it – but this of course would limit your flexibility otherwise as you would be forced to always use the other three cards drawn.

Rising Cultures is a quick playing 2p game that has quite a lot of depth.  Our first games were 40ish minutes, but we’re definitely coming in under 30 minutes now.  With the variety from both the matchups as well as the order in which cards come out of your deck, each game has felt fresh – with new challenges each time.  This is quickly becoming one of my preferred 2p games as a result.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. Dale Y
• Neutral.
• Not for me…

Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4oDfObO