Base price: $50.
2 – 4 players.
Play time: ~60 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon! (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 10
Full disclosure: A review copy of River of Gold was provided by Office Dog Games.
The problem with being fresh off Gen Con is that you have, as a “Professional” Board Game Reviewer, so many more games to check out but the same amount of time in a day and a week. It’s genuinely unfair, and I’ve half a mind to complain to whoever supervises this whole Existence thing. I’m getting ahead and falling behind and getting back ahead and the rigamarole of the entire thing is humorous, to say the least. But expect a bunch of cool new reviews coming down the pipeline as we get through Gen Con and PAX West season and finally enter, blessedly, PAX Unplugged season and the holidays. I think I have some more vacation I can burn. We will see. In the meantime, let’s check out River of Gold!
In River of Gold, you play as the scions of different clans looking to make their fortunes amid the world of Legend of the Five Rings. I don’t really know anything about that world, so, I’m not going to speak to that, but it doesn’t seem to require that knowledge, so that’s nice. Instead, you’ll be, throughout the game, collecting resources and money to develop land along the major river of the land, collecting benefits as you stop by buildings owned by you and your rivals. Sometimes, even the Emperor will swing by! Focus on public goals to earn points and don’t forget your influence across the various regions if you want to win big. Do you have what it takes to become the grandest provider along this golden river?
Contents
Player Count Differences
Surprisingly, not a ton for a decently complex game. With more players, the major change is just that the starting layouts for buildings along the river shifts somewhat, but not a ton; there are just fewer starting buildings because more players will build more buildings over the course of the game. For the various Influence Regions, you have slightly expanded scoring tiles at higher player counts. Again, this allows you to have a bit more interesting flexibility with more players, though I like the limitations of a two-player game. There, some of the tiles only give second place points if they’re within a certain number of Influence of the first player, which I haven’t seen a lot and like a lot. I think there’s a lot of smart design around how player interaction works, but it’s largely positive. Other players reward you with some points or resources or Influence (from the supply) if they use your buildings, and the only real points of conflict are on the public goals and the Building Tiles, as other players can beat you to either of those. It’s a surprisingly positive set of interactions for a somewhat complex game, and it leads me to have no strong player preference. Everything moves pretty quickly and doesn’t feel particularly congested with more players.
Strategy
- Try to have a consistent source of money. If you run out of money, you’re not building anything, and a lot of the public goals need things that mostly buildings can provide, like influence or … just buildings, sometimes. If you need more money, try to eyeball spaces that will give you at least four coins. Otherwise, you’d just be better off going to a completely empty spot. Plus, if you can go to your own buildings, you’ll get Owner Rewards.
- It’s worth saving up for some of the more expensive building spots if the buildings you buy have sufficiently good Owner Rewards; you can get a lot of points from other players using them. The more expensive building spots connect to multiple spaces, so you can get players to potentially activate them more than once and get a ton of stuff, especially with the Age II building that give you more points.
- Plus, buildings give you all of their standard Owner Rewards during the Emperor’s Visit. That’s great! Get more buildings you control on the board for a ton of free benefits. That said, it only happens once.
- Try to be first to score the various public challenges. It’s worth more points that way. Yes, this is pretty straightforward and upfront, but it’s still worth mentioning! You can kind of see who’s going after what, so try to use that to plan.
- Different customer abilities come in handy for different things; try to use them to construct a strategy to your liking. They have similar outcomes but they’re not the exact same thing, so you can use that to take other players’ rewards (they still get them too) or double your own or lower building costs or something. You can effectively carve out a playstyle that benefits you or helps you score public goals faster.
- Remember that moving around the bottom of the river back to the top spends a Building Tile, which can accelerate the end of the game. It’s a useful trick if you want to speed up the end of the game, or a nice thing to avoid if you don’t!
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- They knew what they were doing: the gold inlays on the box and board make the game look extremely classy. I really like how they used it to make the river look incredible! It’s very very nice and it makes the whole game seem like an art piece. The rest of the art is great, too, but man, the gold inlays are nice.
- As I mentioned, I really like that most player interaction is positive with the only real opportunities for “conflict” being the racing elements about who can achieve certain goals or buy certain tiles first. You exclusively benefit other players when you use their buildings, and there aren’t any take-that elements beyond scoring a public goal before another player or managing to take a Building that another player was going to build. it makes the game feel positive but not inherently collaborative, like participating in a society with the other players. You may still get more influence or score more, but you do that by building each other up, not by tearing anyone down.
- The game, more generally, feels very flexible. It’s rare to have turns where you can’t do something you want, and even then, a boring turn is very short so it’s not agonizing or anything. Occasionally I run out of money or tokens and I just need to go down the river and get more. It’s fast. But when I want to do things like deliver to customers or buy a tile, I usually have a decent amount of things I can do on my turn or a clear throughline between my plans and my strategy. I think that makes me, as a player, feel more rewarded and it’s less annoying when it’s not my turn.
- This is a nice bridge between strategy games and more complex games. It’s not, say, an extremely heavy game (90ish minutes per game, tops), but it’s definitely going to be more intricate and intense for players if they’re used to lighter fare. I think short turns and lots of options with clear outcomes make that very easy; it feels like a smartly designed game.
- The game comes with a mini-expansion that adds player powers, and those are fun. I pretty much always love player powers, to be fair, but they all break a rule in some fun way, usually, and that gives players a lot of flexibility. I particularly like the powers that let you ignore your die roll for some aspect of the game (so you can deliver to any customer or place a purchased Building anywhere, for instance).
- Pretty fun to replay! I try different things each time. There are player powers, as I said, but also different buildings come out in different orders, and it means the resource economy is going to shift along with your priorities. The thing that surprised me is also that the Influence Tiles for the different regions change every time, so certain regions are more or less valuable, which should definitely influence your game-to-game strategy.
- Actually plays pretty quickly. Turns are short, at least. Like I said, you have options, but none of those options are particularly lengthy to execute on. You can move pretty quickly and there’s little to no downtime.
Mehs
- It’s a surprisingly long board. I’d recommend not playing the way I did most recently and playing with the board’s long side facing players, not the short side. I had to stand up to place my boats at the top and it was a little annoying from time to time.
Cons
- The board can be fairly busy, so I wish there were more clear demarcations between different River spaces and different Influence spaces; it can be challenging sometimes to immediately determine where you’re going on the River and what your rewards will be. I just miss things sometimes, and it can be hard to determine where your tiny token is on the Influence spaces from time to time. I think this is the challenge with having the Influence Track tokens be the tiny circle clan markers, but I’m not really going to hold it against the game when the rest of the game looks so good. Just try to make sure you’re placing things in the center of the various spaces and you’ll be doing okay.
Overall: 8.5 / 10
Overall, I think River of Gold is great! I’ve been playing it a lot on Board Game Arena, so I’m glad to have been able to play more in-person games. The game feels very smartly designed, as it’s a great example of something on the more medium-weight side of games that doesn’t have particularly long turns or intense decision-making; you just do a little thing every turn and try to plan strategically along that curve that you’re making. It’s smart design, but it lets the player feel smart too for consistently executing. I’m a big fan. It helps, of course, that the game is lovely; the gold accents on various parts of the board make it look regal and artistic, and the rest of the art is pretty great, too. I don’t know a lot about Legend of the Five Rings (L5R?) so I can’t speak to narrative integration beyond that, unfortunately, but I was relieved as mentioned earlier that you don’t actually have to know anything about L5R to make that work. River of Gold is just a solid standalone game that speaks for itself. I’ve been having a blast with it, and if you’re looking for a game that gives you a lot of choice over its course, you want a game that rewards positive player interaction, or you just like sailing boats, I’d recommend checking River of Gold out!
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