Step into the 1920s with Rolling Heights, a city-building game set during the rise of North America's first skyscrapers. You play as a construction company trying to gain influence in a growing city.
Rolling Heights is built around a meeple-tossing mechanic that starts every turn. Your meeples' final position determines what actions are available to you, from grabbing new building blueprints to upgrading your construction abilities. Each completed building earns you rewards that help you build faster and bigger.
Everyone is competing for the best blueprints and the most valuable spots in the city. As the game progresses, the board fills up with buildings and grows more complex.
Points are earned through buildings and objectives. Once the end game conditions are met, the player with the most points wins.
Rolling Heights plays 1 to 4 players in a few hours. Expect a mix of strategy, planning, and tough decisions.
This article doesn't cover gameplay mechanics or general game feel, except where they're relevant to the argument. Our focus is on identifying barriers to an inclusive and accessible experience, with concrete recommendations where possible. Some familiarity with Rolling Heights is assumed. If you're new to it, we suggest watching an overview first.
Inclusivity Analysis
The Rolling Heights box art immediately reveals a difference in how genders are represented. On one side, men are working hard in physical tasks, strong and commited. On the other, a svelte and well dressed young woman appears to be shopping while looking after a child.
This same dynamic carries over to the score board, where each meeple type is paired with an illustration. Of the 9 people represented, only 2 are women, both svelte. One is an architect, the other appears to be an opera singer cast in the role of public figure. Men hold the construction roles, but also the prestigious ones: city planner, politician, and director (also mayor in solo mode).
This is a familiar narrative. It reflects the position of women in the 1920s, where important roles were reserved for men while women were confined to home related duties such as shopping, caring for children, or entertaining men after a long workday. But is that really the story we want to pass on to future generations? And was it important enough to reproduce in a board game a century later?
The game also lacks ethnic diversity. If the designers wanted to reflect the historical reality of the era, they could have included characters from the various communities that actually built those skyscrapers — including ethnic minorities ironworkers who played a key role in New York's skyline.
The illustrations from the box and the score board are then reused throughout the game. Each new illustration was an opportunity to bring more diversity in gender, ethnicity, and body type. Most of those opportunities were missed.
Accessibility analysis
Physical Accessibility
Setup is not too demanding for a game of this size. The only time-consuming part is counting out the right number of cubes per color based on the player count.
Cardboard containers help keep them contained, so everyone can do their tossing phase at the same time without disturbing the board.
Then come the action phase, and that's where things get harder. Grabbing blueprint tiles is manageable if you're on the right side of the board. But the most important action in the game, building construction plans, requires stacking small cubes on designated spots. It takes a steady hand and good dexterity. It gets even harder when your building is on the far side of the board. The slightest shake can bring everything down. Rebuilding from memory and deduction is the only way to recover from an accident. On BoardGameGeek, some players have even suggested replacing the components with Lego bricks for better stability.
Cleaning up at the end of your turn quicky become a chore. The tile market becomes tedious quickly. You need to align 9 tiles individually along two different tracks, each in their own spot separated by a small gap, making it impossible to slide them all at once.
Watching the city grow as the game progresses is one of Rolling Heights' most satisfying elements. But building is also the game's biggest physical accessibility barrier. The game requires handling a lot of small pieces, and making them bigger is not a practical solution. It would only make the board larger and increase the distances between components. The only real workaround is asking another player to handle the pieces for you when needed. Overall, Rolling Heights is a difficult game for people with physical limitations.
Visual Accessibility
Rolling Heights is a fully open information game, which means a lot of information lives on the board, the tiles, and the score board all at once. That can make things feel busy and easy to lose track of what's yours. The size of the board makes things worse, as information can end up far from where you're sitting. The score board and character reference sheet are well designed, but individual player aids would have been more effective. Having that information within arm's reach would make it easier to read, without having to lean over a growing city or ask someone on the other side of the table to read it out loud.
Finding information specifically on the tiles is even harder. Tiles get buried among buildings as the game progresses, forcing players to lean over or move around the table to see them. The small reminder icons on the sides of the tiles help, but they are too small to be practical. Some icons are easy to mix up, especially building types that can look similar from a distance.
Color plays a key role in Rolling Heights. It distinguishes building materials, action types, and tile ownership. One of the game's graphic designers shared on BoardGameGeek that a full color-blind testing process was carried out. That said, the large number of meeple types makes it hard to avoid colors that are close to one another. Pink and fuchsia, for example, are easy to confuse. Black player tokens can also be difficult to see on the board due to a lack of contrast with the other pieces. Manufacturing variance adds another layer of inconsistency. The final production colors don't always match what was designed on screen, which may explain why some players feel the meeple colors don't quite match the illustrations in the rulebook and on the board.
This can have several consequences:
- Unless you pay close attention, it's easy to assign the wrong color to the wrong role and take the wrong actions
- Colors can appear differently depending on the lighting in the room
- Everyone has their own way of naming colors, which creates confusion when asking someone to grab a specific meeple for example. The color names are listed in the rulebook, but it's unlikely players will use the actual worker type names instead. That would require a significant memory effort.