The River Review

We go down to The River

And into The River we’ll dive

Just as soon as I’ve finished playing that song a dozen more times. Man, the memories

The River

Players: 2-4
Time: 30-45 mins
Ages: 8+
Designer Sébastien PauchonIsmaël Perrin
Artist Andrew Bosley
Publisher Days of Wonder


Days of Wonder only releases one new game a year so it is always a special event! This year that prestigious honour goes to The River. A game whose title manages to be both enigmatically vague and alluring weighty with symbolic meaning at the same time. Which is surprisingly appropriate for this game. Sadly not a Bruce Springsteen in sight though…

The River player board

This is your river. It winds through mysterious, untamed lands. That someone has perhaps built barns on. God’s barns they are. For God’s people. Or meeples, in this case.

The River boat

God’s meeples are currently living on your boat though, and that makes them yours. It’s a lovely boat. But it’s much too large to fit on your actual river, so it just sits beside your player board like the cardboard elephant in the room. This makes me sad. I wanted to push a boat down a river.

The River Turkey

The turkey meeples though, they make me happy. Just look at those guys! Living their best life. Just don’t tell them it’s nearly Christmas. And what’s even better than turkey meeples? The fact that these turkeys… are wild! (resources)

My first worker placement game

Yes, with the enthusiasm of a turkey on its way to Thanksgiving celebrations we must drag ourselves away from whimsical musings and into the hard light of mechanical reality. The River is a worker placement game and a rather simple one at that. Place out one of your pioneers to the spaces of the central board, get your reward, and on you go.

The River worker placement

The main spaces gather you resources, the wood, stone and brick you’ll be using to build buildings in exchange for that most important of metrics, victory points. That’s as simple a core as can be. There’s an element of a race to proceedings, building early earns you bonus VPs, getting out a second building earns you an extra worker to do more stuff on a round. Each player is building from the same market too forcing you to keep an eye on who is close to building what and, of course, the resource grabbing spaces soon get blocked up with other people. It’s hardly an inspiring or novel approach but it works.

The river adding terrain

What makes things interesting is the river and the lands around it. You see, the other action spaces gain you terrain tiles that fit beside your river, and are placed out in order. They are the landscapes you discover as you journey down the river. And these contain a mix of barns and resource spots that are hugely important for your game.

Whenever you gather wood, say, you count up the number of wood producing spots on your river and gain that many wood, storing each in one of your barns. Fill up all your barns and that’s it. Since most things you’ll want to build require a mixture of resources you’ll find yourself always wanting a little bit more of something. A situation exasperated by the fact that new terrain tiles will cover up the basic symbols printed on your board, forcing you to plan ahead to ensure you don’t run out of stuff you need.

This is again a simple system, but is very enjoyable to puzzle out. It ties in tightly to the resource gathering and building, and forces you into tough decisions on the worker placement board as you race for the best picks of the terrain tiles and the resources you need.

The River loss

There are two additional wrinkles to your terrain placing journey. One is the spaces like those pictured above, where your meeples will leave your boat and settle in the little town, permanently. I can’t think of another worker placement game where you will lose workers permanently! It adds a very nice twist to proceedings – don’t add terrain to keep your workers available, but lose out on the extra production and storage symbols you could have gained.

You will also lose out on potential end game points to be earned from laying out your terrain in columns of matching type. Apparently pioneers liked their landscapes neatly ordered! To aid this, there is a swap two tiles action which will definitely fill up very quickly at the end of the game! The pioneers were also, apparently, not beyond uprooting and moving entire.forests and mountain ranges to fulfil their desires. This is definitely the least thematic action in the game… or is it actually the most?

The River stuff

Thematic Musings

The River in literature has always been symbolic, of journeys, of time passing. Your little tale of meeples travelling downriver is both one of (admittedly faceless) individuals discovering the land around them and choosing somewhere to call home as much as it is a story of the development of civilisation and its exploitation of resources and construction out on the frontiers. There is something ethereal to the quality of terrain swapping in this context. It might be a mechanical convenience but it also brings to mind that sense of the land not really being something… known, yet. As though the people of your boat can’t remember the order of the terrain that they’ve passed. That only as time goes on and the region is fully settled, and the journey comes to an end, are the boundaries fully mapped and the days of the pioneer left behind.

It is rare for a board game to do something with its theme that is anything other than set dressing. In this case I find it slightly hard to believe the people behind this game actually intended their game to be viewed in this way, but sometimes art, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. The Days of Wonder team may have stumbled into something with a greater depth of meaning than they intended. Good for them! Or perhaps they were seeing things as I do. That title speaks of abstraction. But in abstraction there is the freedom to examine broader concepts.

The river main board

Whether or not you read in the interpretation that I do, The River is a game that completely surprised me. In part because of middling comments from others before I played. Suggesting it was too light to be interesting. But I completely disagree with those views. It is simple. But the push and pull of competing interests makes it thoroughly engaging. And it is FAST! Easily playable in half an hour, but as fulfilling as a larger game once you get used to the pace. That makes it highly competitive when compared to the hour and a half to 2 hour play times of the classic entry-level worker placement games Lords of Waterdeep and Stone Age. In that context, the pure tightness of The River makes it more appealing to me!

 

Rating: Go with the Flow

 


Our copy of The River was provided for review by Asmodee UK. You can pick up a copy for £36.99 RRP from your local hobby store.

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