Base price: $39.
1 – 5 players.
Play time: 25 – 45 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy directly!
Logged plays: 10
Full disclosure: A review copy of River Valley Glassworks was provided by Allplay.
Oh, another week where I’ve accidentally come up with a theme across the two games I’m reviewing. It’s not really that hard to do this, given that any two points can define a line, but these games both end up being light-to-casual strategy games with fun animals. Granted, that’s a pretty common part of town for board gaming, more generally, so this isn’t a particularly big lift on my end, either. But I got to play both of these recently in my digging through BGA, so I was excited to write about them a bit more. This is also an interesting time for me: I’m writing these while on a trip (it’s a fun trip, don’t worry; I may not take breaks but I do have vacations) and I’m interested to see how that fits into the time I have. Everyone else is asleep, so that seems to be working well so far. But before I conk out, myself, let’s talk a bit about River Valley Glassworks!
In River Valley Glassworks, players are local woodland creatures creating their own glass-working businesses after finding a river that produces wonderful glass, Pull what you can out of the river and throw what you don’t want back, but make sure you don’t take too much! Nobody likes someone wasteful. There’s only one river, so you might not always get what you want, but a true entrepreneur knows how to make that work. Will you be able to get the most business, or are your plans too fragile?
Contents
Setup
Not a ton! Each player gets a player board:
You should also give them the non-solo side of the player trackers, unless you’re playing solo (then one goes on your rival):
Each player gets an animal token matching their board, placing it on “0”:
Prepare the board by rolling out the playmat and shuffling the tiles, placing them on the spaces on the board:
Fill them up with glass tokens by dumping all the non-black ones into the bag (black glass is only for solo mode) and then placing tokens on each space equal to the number of icons on that space.
Each player also gets three of their own, placing them on their own supply board:
Add five more glass tokens to the lake, and you should be ready to start!
Gameplay
This one’s pretty easy. Each turn, you’re going to either place a piece of glass in the river and take glass from the river, or you’ll refill from the lake. Simple? Great.
Your goal is to get a bunch of glass for scoring, so placing in the river and taking from the river is going to be your most common move. When you choose to do that, choose a piece of glass on your little supply board, and place it on the tile matching its shape. You can then take all of the glass from one tile on either side of the tile you placed on and add it to your player board. When you add glass to your board, glass of the same color goes in one column, and glass of different colors are placed in the same row (starting with the bottommost row and going until that row is filled). Careful, though: there are only so many rows and so many columns, so if you ever take a piece of glass you can’t place on your board, it’s placed in your overflow area. Also, if you have two pieces of glass that are the same shape (even if they’re different colors), you may place them both on any tile instead of only placing one. That lets you pull from any tile in the river.
Once you’ve taken from a tile, remove it from the river and place it in the back of the river. Refill it with glass based on the number of tokens on the tile in front of it. Then, the next player can take their turn.
If, instead, you’re low on supplies, you can take four glass tokens from the Lake and add them to your supply board. Again, be careful: you must take four, and you can only hold five on your supply board. If you ever have more than five, they must be added to your overflow. Refill the lake after doing this.
Play until any player has seventeen or more glass tokens on their board. That starts the final round! Finish the current round, and every player with fewer than three glass tokens on their supply board refills to three. Each player gets one more turn.
For scoring, first, score each row up to the first gap in that row based on the values on the bottom of your player board. Then, score your two tallest columns based on the number on the topmost-filled space for each column. If there’s a tie for tallest columns, choose the leftmost tied columns. Finally, lose 3 points for each token in your overflow. Rough stuff. The player with the most points wins!
Player Count Differences
Not a ton, here! It’s the usual thing you’ll see with drafting games. Here, your major decisions are choosing where to draft and how to place what you draft. With more players, there’s a lot more entropy happening on the board itself. Each player drafts on their turn, so you’ll see more spaces shifting around over the course of the game. Granted, that still happens at lower player counts, but you can’t rely on things like tiles with a ton of glass on them making their way back around to you; someone’s going to grab it first. Here, however, a medium amount of entropy actually works in the game’s favor. There’s not always a good way to keep the tiles moving around at low player counts, so you’ll likely have a board that’s pretty similar to the one you just played on last turn on your next turn. That might not necessarily be what you want; more movement can sometimes shake up a board in a good way and make your options a little less stale. I think the sweet spot for this one is probably three or four players, but I will say I’ve had fun playing it with two.
Strategy
- I generally recommend trying to draft rarest to most common, but there are some obvious issues with that. The most obvious issue is that you might not actually be able to complete any rows if you do that and don’t get access to rarer glass later in the game, and rows can be pretty big moneymakers for you, points-wise. It’s important to be a bit flexible.
- Whatever you do, focus on making those last two columns your tallest ones. Those have the highest score yield of the columns, so it’s almost always best for them to be the tallest. Having your leftmost columns be tallest means you’re missing out on a lot of points (but you’ll potentially get them back from having so many small rows).
- Filling in rows is also great, strategically. They’re worth a lot of points, after all. It gives you something nice to prioritize if you prefer going wide to going deep. The best outcome is doing a bit of both, but do what you can.
- You can hate-draft a bit, if you look at your opponents’ boards and see what they need. I wouldn’t recommend pissing off your opponents, but you can do what you want, I suppose. What players need is both public information and pretty obvious to glean just from looking at their boards, so if you want to be like that you can certainly just take glass they’re interested in.
- You also have a sense of what’s available between player pools and the Lake. It’s not like the glass really comes from anywhere else, short of being taken out of the bag and placed in the Lake, so you can use that to see what you’re likely to draft over the next few rounds and begin to plan accordingly.
- Generally, taking more glass is good, but make sure you don’t overflow. It’s a pretty steep penalty (-3 points per overflow), so be mindful of what you have available, spot-wise. Sometimes it’s worth it (if it would fill out a couple rows or extend a column on the right), but make sure you’re doing the trade-off math there.
- There’s pretty much no reason to take glass from the Lake if doing so would cause you to overflow. It’s unusual, especially in the early game, for players to take glass and then never add it to the river, so even if you want a particular color, you don’t have to worry. Plus, taking a particular color because you want it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be able to both place and take it back. Someone else might beat you to it.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- The art style is quite charming. As you’d expect from Andrew Bosley; one of the better cute animal artists in the business. His style generally lends itself to charming, as seen in plenty of his other games. Big fan.
- I have a very soft spot for the animal token that’s just the sad turtle in a top hat. Animals in top hats are hilarious; I don’t make the rules.
- Light strategy hits a nice spot for me. This is the kind of game I could just play over and over and over without really thinking too much about it, and I like that a lot. There are some nice strategic choices you can make and sometimes blocking is a little useful (hate-drafting, more accurately), but you’ll find that those aren’t really going to burn you out too much. Great game for the start or end of game night.
- I think allowing players to go anywhere in exchange for two glass of the same type is a great simple upgrade. It means you’re rarely completely hosed, and if you’re worried about it, you can remember to draft matching shapes from the Lake when possible. The one point of confusion here is that players may get “two of the same shape” confused with “two of the same color”, and only one of those is valid for this rule (the former).
- Allplay continually has great component quality in their games, and it’s nice to see that, here. Particularly of note are the “glass” tokens, which are really striking. They’re a pleasant acrylic in a variety of fun colors, and some have other fun things in them (a bit of glitter, I guess?). Looks nice.
- The deluxe neoprene board is a very nice upgrade over having a cardboard “board”, rather than tiles. Even if the board were double-layered, you run the risk of the board getting scratched up by the tiles as you move them again and again and again, which isn’t ideal. Neoprene is great for this because you can easily lift things off of it and sliding the tiles has a bit of resistance but not enough to make movement anything but easy. I think it was a wise product choice.
Mehs
- Since the glass shapes are so distinct, there’s some risk that unscrupulous players might opt to grab only what they want when they’re refilling the lake. Simple solution: don’t play with cheaters. It’s a mild problem but not a particular failing of the game; just something to watch out for.
- That box is stuffed. I am impressed by the sheer volume of things in the box, genuinely, but it takes some doing to put everything away.
Cons
- I know I just said the shapes are distinct, but a few of them are relatively similar at a quick glance, which can pose an occasional issue for players. They feel distinct to the touch, but a couple of them just kind of look similar, which isn’t necessarily great. I wish they were as visually distinct as they feel.
Overall: 8 / 10
Overall, I think River Valley Glassworks is great! It’s one of those perfect games where you can play it while you kind of aimlessly chat. There’s plenty of strategy and planning and execution, granted, but the explicit core gameplay loop isn’t so complicated that you can’t do that while still just kind of relaxing. I wondered, a bit, if that was just my impression from BGA, so I wanted to make sure I got a few plays in of the physical game before I wrote up my review. I’m pleased to say that the performance is pretty much identical across platforms, so there’s good odds that this and Loco Momo (also reviewed this week) are going to end up in my regular BGA rotation. It’s nice when that happens. I enjoy some good strategy and some games that are just fun, but having some games that are light and pleasant but I still have to plan and execute are always nice additions to the repertoire. Art-wise, I still can’t get over the sad turtle in the top hat, but there are enough animals here that you’ll likely be able to find something for everyone that’ll keep them mostly satisfied. This is an interesting product for Allplay, just because a lot of the games in this box size tend to skew more complex. No complaint about it; just interesting. I don’t think you could have made it into a smaller overall footprint and still gotten the component quality and the presentation where they would want it to be, though; Allplay generally keeps a pretty high standard about these sorts of things. But other than Roll to the Top, this is probably the lightest game I’ve played from this footprint. Still enjoy it a lot, though! Very pleasant casual game. And if you’re looking for a nice opener or closer for game night, you enjoy cute critters, or you just like games with nice components, you’ll probably enjoy River Valley Glassworks as well!
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