Moon River

• Designers: Bruno Cathala, Yohan Servais
• Publisher: blue orange
• Players: 2-4
• Age: 8+
• Time: 45 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by publisher
• Affiliate link: https://amzn.to/48YC5rF

The subtitle on the box is: “Piece together the next level of Kingdomino”.  The publisher’s blurb: Moon River uses the Kingdomino game system — but without dominoes. In the game, you will build a personal landscape of tiles to score points, but instead of tiling dominoes in your landscape, the game uses half-dominoes in which one edge has a jigsaw puzzle-style connection. You combine two of these half puzzle pieces to craft your own dominoes. This mechanism is meant to provide more variability and randomization in each play. Instead of building your landscape around a central castle, you start from the river and expand away from it. Also, the crowns (i.e., the victory point multiplier) from Kingdomino are replaced by cow meeples, with players being able to use cowboys to move them.

To set up the game, each player takes a Reservation board.  The tiles are shuffled and placed in the box, and then 4 tiles are drawn and placed in a column in ascending order – the lowest numbered tile being closest to the box.  The meeples for each player are drawn out at random, and when a meeple is chosen, the owner places it on a tile in the column that he wishes to claim.  Once the starting tiles are claimed, make a second column of 4 tiles, again placing them in ascending order.  The Saloon board is set up with 5 Partner tokens placed on it, with the specialist side face up.

The game is now played in a number of rounds until the box is empty of tiles.  In each round, the turn order is decided by the location of the meeples – the meeple closest to the box is the one who plays next.  On a turn, there are three actions: Collect your plot tile, optionally expand your ranch, then select a new plot tile.

When you take your tile, you place it onto an empty storage space on your Reservation board.  There are 3 spaces here for storage.

Then, if you have at least 2 plots in storage, you can choose to expand your ranch.  If you ever have 4 plots, you are obligated to expand!  You must choose two of your plots and connect them together to form a domino.  The domino must be placed so that it either physically connects to one of the three bridges printed on your reservation board or the domino touches a previously placed domino.  The dominoes must fit in an imaginary 5×5 grid above the reservation board.  

There are 3 possible action icons on the tiles, if you play any of these, they must be resolved in the following order.

• Cow – place a cow meeple on the plot for each cow icon
• Skull – remove a cow meeple from the territory where the icon is found (same color background)
• Circle – choose a partner token from the saloon and place it on the tile, you can choose which side (cowboy or specialist) to use and then immediately apply the effect

Every Partner token acts as a Herder – that is they prevent the theft of cows from whatever territory they are found in.  Each also has a specific action:

• Cowboy – move any cow one space orthogonally, though not over corn tiles. Do this three times
• Desperado – swap a plot from your Reservation board with an opponent’s
• Cattle Thief – steal an unprotected cow from an opponent
• Gold Digger – 1VP at game end per gold nugget on your tiles
• Trapper – 1VP at game end per beaver on your tiles
• Farmer – 1V at game end for each corn symbol on your tiles

When the turn is over, the active player now places their meeple on any unclaimed plot tile in the other column.  This will determine both which tile they get next round as well as their spot in turn order.  In a 3 player game, the unchosen plot is simply discarded from the game.

Once the turn is done, the meeple which is now nearest the box takes a turn, and the process continues until all players have taken a turn.  A new column of tiles is drawn and the pattern is repeated.  Additionally, the Saloon is replenished to be full with 5 circular tiles.

Continue this until there are no more tiles to be drawn from the box. At this point, there is one final turn where players draw their final tile and then perform the expand action as many times as needed to empty their Reservation board.  If you can place a domino, you are obligated to do so.  If you cannot legally place a domino, discard the unusable plot tiles.

At the end of the game, before scoring, you must remove any excess cows from your board – you can only have one cow per plot tile.  Then it’s time to score:

• Territories – each territory scores the product of the number of tiles multiplied by the number of cows in it
• Resources – 1 VP per each nugget, beaver and corn symbol
• Partners – if you have the appropriate Specialist, 1 more VP per nugget, beaver or corn symbol

The player with the most points wins. Ties broken in favor of the player with the most cows

There is also a more advanced version of the game – in this version, each player has an asymmetric starting area on their board.  There are four different scenarios in this version, and one is randomly chosen to be in effect each game.  Most of the rules are the same, but each scenario has a special bonus score:

• Gold Rush – 10 VP per gold vein (area of 3 orthogonally plots with gold nuggets) plus 10VP per extra nugget in that area
• Moon River City – 10 VP per farm (area of 3 orthogonally adjacent farm plots) plus 10VP per extra farm in that area
• Outlaws – 10 VP per outlaw gang (area of 3 orthogonally adjacent partners, at least one of which is a desperado or cattle thief) plus 10VP per extra partner
• Timber Rafting – 10 VP per woodcutting area (area of 3 orthogonally adjacent forests that touches the river) plus 10VP per extra forest in that area

My thoughts on the game

Well, Kingdomino is one of my favorite gateway games because it’s so elegant; quick to play, easy to teach.  Moon River looks to expand a bit on the idea, adding a bit more complexity to the game.  Now, not only do you have to construct your own dominoes, you also have special actions to use to your advantage.

Game play is similar to Kingdomino, though the fact that you get to construct your own dominos makes things a bit more complex.  The fact that the scoring icons (cows) are able to be moved or stolen also gives you a lot more to think about.  For me, it’s more interactive than I want.  I really liked having my own area to plan and grow – here, people can steal my tiles and cows!  The snappy turns that I’m used to in Kingdomino are not found here as players often have to consider all their options and actions each turn (as well as which domino to construct in the first place).

So, one big difference (for me at least) is that Moon River has antagonistic actions; that is, you have the opportunity to steal cows from other players or exchange tiles with their Reservation area.   Is this a bad thing?  Not necessarily!  It definitely puts a bit of time pressure on players to put dominoes together as quickly as possible; because once you place them on the board, they can’t be stolen.  Or, put a circle tile out in play in order to swoop in and steal a tile that you really need from someone else!  

The setting where I don’t like this sort of play is when I’m introducing games to newbies.  I don’t like take-that or targeted attacks for those games as it could make the experience negative for someone who gets picked on or who loses an important tile at a critical moment.  Maybe I’m a softie, but I really do want everyone to have the best experience possible when they are new to games.

So, for me, Kingdomino remains the gateway game in this domino series, and Moon River comes out more with the gamers as it does offer a bit more to the strategy and tactics – though definitely still keeping everything in a nice short time frame.  It’s not my favorite in the family, but many of the gamers that I have played this with prefer this version as there is more to think about during the game itself. Heck, there are even more advanced rules (Legends of the West variant) – which give even more objectives and ways to score…  As I find the base game of Moon River already less elegant and less preferred, I’m definitely not going to add even more rules/overhead to the game.  I’ll stick to the base Kingdomino which remains my favorite in this family.

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Mark Jackson (2 plays): Conceptually, it sounds like a great idea. In practice, it buries what is clever about Kingdomino in too much extra stuff. (BTW, felt the same way about Queendomino.)

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it.
• Neutral. Dale, Mark Jackson
• Not for me… Steph H, Jonathan F.

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