Rocking Raft

• Designer: Carlo Emanuele Lanzavecchia
• Publisher: Horrible Guild
• Players: 2-4
• Age: 6+
• Time: 15 minutes
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3TgM4pz
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Adrift on the open sea, a creaking raft carries a glittering pile of stolen treasure. Gems slide and tumble across the deck as pirates rock the raft to grab the richest prizes… Gather the sparkling loot and load it into your Lifeboats, and make sure to grab as much loot as possible before the Pirate Flag signals the end. When the chaos settles, the pirate who rescued the most valuable treasure wins! 

The game is played on a tilting raft (pre-assembled cardboard tray), and this is placed on the center of the table on top of the plastic stand.  The gem inventory for the game is assembled based on the player count. One random gem is placed in each of the eight outer sections of the 3×3 raft, and the rest are dropped into the center space.

The deck of Lifeboat cards is shuffled and each player gets 2 cards dealt face up in front of them.  The pirate flag card is buried in the deck, at a depth of (players x 5) cards deep.

On a turn, the active player may rotate the raft – so that they can tilt it in the desired direction.  Once ready, the player puts their finger on one of the designated areas and pushes down until the raft touches the table.  You then release the raft quickly as you actually want to cause a bit of a bouncy rebound.  Any gems that escape the raft are kept by the player and placed on matching colored areas on their cards.  Note that Black gems are wild and can be placed on any color space.  If you have any gems that you cannot place, they are passed to the player on the left who then tries to place them.  Unplaced gems continue to be passed to the left; and if no one can place the, they are out back in the center space of the raft.

If a lifeboat card has every space filled, it is complete.  The gems are removed and placed back in the center space of the raft.  The completed card is flipped over and it will be scored at the end of the game.  At the end of your turn, draw cards from the deck so that you always have 2 cards in front of you.

The game continues until the Pirate Flag card is drawn from the deck.  This card is discarded and a new Lifeboat card is taken from the deck.  Continue play until the end of the current round so that all players have had the same number of turns.

To score, players add up the points on all of their completed lifeboats.  Ties broken in favor of the player with the most completed cards.

If you are playing the advanced version, place a Water token on each of your Lifeboats at the start of your turn.  At the end of your turn, any incomplete Lifeboat card that has 2 Water Tokens on it sinks to the bottom of the ocean.  Gems on it are discarded to the center of the board and the sunk boat is placed on the bottom of the deck.

My thoughts on the game

Rocking Raft has a really well designed board/rocker system to use in the game. Once the gems are dumped on the board, they really do move around – first, in the direction that the player pushes down on the board, and then they scatter about when the raft is released.  The irregular shape of the gems makes them go every which way, so it is truly unpredictable how the board resets itself.

There really isn’t too much to the strategy here.  At the top level, simply look to see which gems you need, and then figure out which of the four sides of the raft to push on to get those colors out.  I suppose at the next level, you’re trying to pick a side where your colors come out first and then you can let go quickly so that you don’t have to pass on any gems to your opponent.  

But, honestly, that’s about it.  And frankly, a game like this doesn’t need much else.  It’s a game to set up, enjoy for ten to fifteen minutes, and then put away until the next time you have an occasion for this filler or when you want to show off the super cool board / tilting mechanism to someone else. 

There is an advanced variant where each of your boats only lasts for two turns and then it sinks on its own – but this just adds a bunch of fiddliness and rules to a game that is more about the fun experience.  If you really want a game with more strategy, just pick a different title to play.  

Rocking Raft provides you exactly what you’d expect based on the description on the box, and you probably can already tell if this is something that you and your group would like.

Until your next appointment

The Gaming Doctor

Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3TgM4pz