River of Gold

• Designer: Keith Piggott
• Publisher: Office Dog
• Players: 2-4
• Age: 14+
• Time: 60-90 minutes
• Played with copy provided by publisher

From the Spine of the World Mountains to the bustling fishing villages of Earthquake Fish Bay flows a river where fortunes can be made and lowly traders can brush shoulders with Rokugan’s elite. Will your clan become the dominant force along this River of Gold?

In River of Gold, players take on the role of river merchants allied with legendary samurai clans, each vying to exploit the river to earn wealth, glory, and wisdom. Will you invest in developing ports, markets, shrines, and more along the banks of the busy river? Or will you rely upon sailing the river of gold, growing your wealth and influence through delivery contracts, visiting the nobility, and garnering a bit of divine favor during tough times?

To set up the game, place the board on the table, and then put a scoring tile in each of the six region boxes.  Randomly select 3 of the Mastery cards to play in this game.  Put the designated starting buildings and Imperial Market tiles on their respective spaces along the river.  Finally, shuffle the Era 1 and Era 2 building tiles separately, and stack them onto the small Building board.  Then make the initial supply of buildings by placing the top 4 tiles of the Era 1 stack onto the building track on the main board.  (The counts of these tiles are determined by player count, and there is a chart in the rules to refer to.)

Each player takes a clan board and then all the bits in their clan color. Each player puts a scoring marker on the main scoring track as well as the influence track for each of the six regions.  Players place one ship at the start of the river and one at the midpoint of the river; for each ship, players roll their die and move each ship downstream based on the die roll.  Players also start with 2 customer cards, one of each trade good, starting money based on initial turn order and also start with 2 divine favor with a max of 3 (denoted by the moon marker).  Finally, each player rolls their die to set up for their first turn..

Each player’s turn goes through the same four steps:

1] Spend Divine Favor – spend 1 Divine favor to modify your die roll by +/- 1.  The die wraps around so a 6 can be increased to a 1, and vice versa.  You can always spend 5 koku to generate a Divine Favor.

2] Take an Action: build a building, sail a ship, or deliver to a customer

To build a building, choose an empty space in the region that matches your die number, pay the cost printed on the space and then choose any building tile from the market track and place it on the space.  Put your clan marker on the central space and gain the covered influence amount on the track for that region.  Slide the buildings to the end of the track and then refill from the building tile stack.  If you pass bonuses on the track, gain them as you pass them.  If you exhaust the Era 1 building tile stack, you will trigger the Emperor’s Visit.  At this time, the game pauses, and all players take the owner’s bonus for all of their constructed buildings.  The game then uses Era 2 Building tiles for the rest of the game. 

To sail your ship, choose one of your ships and move it downstream a number of river spaces equal to your die number. Take a bonus from each of the 4 shore spaces adjacent to that river space (either the 1 koku printed on empty spaces or other bonuses found on the end of the building tiles.  The owners of each building in that region also gets a bonus shown on the non-pointed end of the tile.   If your boat reaches the end of the river, you get a small bonus and cycle the buildings.  Then you place the boat back at the top of the river and continue your movement.

To deliver to a customer, choose a customer card from your hand that has a region number on it that matches your die number. Discard the trade goods that the customer wants and place the card face up on the table.  If needed, you can trade a pair of matching goods for any other good. Customer cards have a reward for fulfillment, many have an ongoing action, and most have an endgame bonus scoring rule.  Then draw two new customer cards from that deck, and then discard any one card from your new hand.  

3] Claim Mastery – Look at the three Mastery cards in play for this game.  If you have met the conditions for any of the cards, place your clan marker on the highest available scoring space on that card.

4] Roll your die – your turn ends when you roll your die

Play continues around the board until the last Era 2 tile is moved to the main board.  The active player at that time scores 5 points and then each other player gets one more turn.  At that point, the game moves into final scoring.

• Regional Influence – score each of the six regions for the first three places on the track
• Customer cards – score points 2/5/9/14/20/27 for 1/2/3/4/5/6+ costumes completed
• Customer card bonuses – look at each customer card with an endgame scoring criteria on it and tabulate points accordingly

The player with the most points wins.  Ties broken in favor of the player with most divine favor left over.

My thoughts on the game

This game is set in the universe of the Legend of the Five Rings.  While I have played other games set in this universe, I honestly don’t know/remember the first thing about it.  And, luckily, you don’t need to know anything about Lo5R to play and enjoy this game.  I’m sure that if you’re a fan of Lo5R, the theme is a big plus and a selling point; but it’s not required knowledge.

You’re challenged in River of Gold to both pickup and deliver goods to fulfill contracts while also finding time to build town tiles which will produce income for you.  The way that the die determines your actions is well done – you can spend favor to modify the die – but sometimes, the number shown will dictate what is the best choice for you on that turn.  Sure there are ways that you can gain more favor (aka divine butter), and ways to increase your max favor (the holy croissant) – but it feels like it is always in short supply, so you have to use your favor wisely.

Luckily, you can usually find something worth doing with any number.  If you can’t build or fulfill a contract, you always have two boats that you can sail down the river so you will have options on what you might collect from the ports.  If you can time it right, you might even be able to double dip – visiting ports that you own, so that you get to collect things from both sides of your tile.  Depending on what is available to you, moving on influence tracks can also provide you with money or goods, and that often gives you another viable option to get things done.

The tempo of the game is interesting – well maybe not the actual tempo but the subjective feeling of how fast the game is moving.  The timer for the game is the two stacks of building tiles.  You’ll likely blow through the first stack.  At the start of the game, there are plenty of cheap building spaces, so it’s easier to afford to build a building.  Additionally, when there aren’t many buildings on the river, much of your sailing will only yield coins – which in turn feed the building frenzy.  As the game progresses, right around the midway point, the building slows down.  The remaining spaces are more expensive, players are able to gain more goods which means they deliver more contracts rather than building things, etc.  I would guesstimate that about 30% of the turns occur in the first half of building tiles and 70% happen after halftime.  Once you realize this (after playing a few times), it will slow down that sense of panic that the game is going to end before you get to do the things you want to do.

Mechanically, the game is quite simple.  You have three options on a turn and each is really straightforward.  As you roll your die at the end of your previous turn, you have a full round to try to plot out your possibilities, and this helps with downtime.  Sure, you’ll never be certain of your options until it is your turn, but you can at least start to calculate what to do next from the end of your previous turn.  Be sure to keep an eye on the Mastery cards as those bonuses have a good payoff, and it is probably worth it to deviate from your overall plan if you can score a nice bonus from one of the three cards.

Ergonomically, the icons are easy to parse and easy to understand.  I did have a small issue with the region influence tracks; as you often need to look underneath other players’ clan markers on the track as you gain any bonuses that you pass on the track, but the icons can be covered by the other clan markers.  I would have preferred that each bonus space have a colored outline to the space to make it more clear that there is a bonus printed on that space.  On the other hand, I really liked the art direction and the board – the shiny gold printing is really sharp, and it looks great on the table!

The scoring is a bit of a point salad situation – there are lots of ways to score points, and it’s really not clear if any method is dominant.  In River of Gold, you can consider focusing on contracts or the influence tracks, or you can go for a broader strategy trying to do a little bit in everything.  I’ve seen both methods work well, and I look forward to playing the game some more to further explore it.  There is a surprisingly deep game here for the 60 minute time frame it fits into.

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Mark Jackson (1 play): Dale’s comment about the perception of timing is spot on… knowing that going in would have reduced some of my panic in the early game. The board art felt really busy when we were learning the game – but once the game was underway, the clear iconography on the tiles rendered that a non-issue. I look forward to playing it again.

Patrick Brennan: Nice mid-weight Euro. There are only 3 action types – build (your collection ability), collect (money, resources et al) and satisfy contracts. Your die roll each turn dictates where/how you do the action (so one of the things you need to collect is dice wibbles) but you get the whole round to plan your best move so the game ticks along nicely. There are global contracts to compete for. Gain the most influence in regions to score them. Fulfil contracts. It all happens in fewer turns than you expect so you need to prioritise within your dice constraints, which nicely makes the game. I enjoyed it and would happily play again. May the die be ever in your favour.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. Dale, Mark Jackson, Steph, Patrick Brennan
• Neutral.
• Not for me…