RogerBW's Blog

Back to the boardgame café.

With nothing especially appealing among the new releases, we decided to give Rolling Heights another go—last played in September 2023.

Last time we found it dragged; this time, with a play speed optimisation of doing our rolls and rerolls before our turns began (because you never get a new meeple except within your own turn) if flowed rather better.

We did still take two and a half hours to play this "60 minute" game", but it felt almost the right length; two of us at least were left with the impression that if it had ended about one or two rounds earlier that would have been pretty much ideal.

Also, we were very cramped on the standard 30-inch Thirsty Meeples table (trays of resource cubes ended up living on unused sections of the map board); not only did our dexterity suffer, it was was quite tricky to read the tiny symbols on the tiles while craning over to the other side of the board and not knocking things over too much.

I lagged far behind for most of the game, though recouped quite a bit at the end.

I'm starting to find myself tempted to get this to play at home—where I have a rather larger table!