Base price: $25.
1 – 5 players.
Play time: 20 – 30 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 2
Full disclosure: A review copy of Rivages was provided by Pandasaurus Games.
There’s always this near-legendary flow state I can get into where sometimes I actually get a little ahead on reviews, and it looks like we’re nearing that once again, boys. Whenever I go to a con, I think the pre-con hype helps me get back on board the review train much more easily and thoroughly because, not going to lie, this has been a rough year and I haven’t been as proactive as I would have liked to be. Sometimes it’s just lacking the energy to actually get the games played, but there’s that four step process: pick a game, play the game, photograph the game, and write the review. Any problem at any stage can mess up this whole process for weeks. It’s ongoing. But I’ve been pretty excited about this recent set of games, so I’d love to tell you more about them. Let’s dive into them starting with Rivages!
In Rivages, players are seekers of lost wisdom searching the many legendary islands that compose the land of Myr. There’s lots to see and lots to do, but you also only have so much time. That exploration will drive you to seek your fortunes on each island, yes, but you’ll also need to be wise and decide when it’s time to move on. Don’t want to overstay your welcome. There’s all sorts of history and technology and even a bit of magic in these lost lands; what are you going to find?
Contents
Setup
Not too bad. Remove cards for player counts less than your player count from the Exploration Card deck (they all have player count printed on the back):
Shuffle up the boards and deal each player one:
Shuffle the five Endgame Cards and place them on the bottom of the Exploration Card deck:
Give each player a Tree of Wisdom Board. The B sides are all different, but for your first game, they recommend using the A side.
Place the Loot Tokens in the Loot Bag:
Place the Scroll Tokens nearby:
The Great Explorer Tile should have the current player count facing up.
Give each player two Exploration Cards and a pen. Have them mark one of the ship spaces on their map as their starting space. You should be ready to start!
Gameplay
This one’s pretty simple. Your goal? Explore islands to earn Scrolls, using treasure and Spyglasses you find along the way to explore more effectively. Statues will help you advance your wisdom, as well!
Each turn, choose one of the two cards in your hand and mark off the topmost unmarked row on that card. Mark that many matching spaces off on your island. Each space must be adjacent to a previously-marked space, but they don’t have to all be adjacent to each other. A white space can be marked off by any tile icon. If you mark a Statue, advance one space on your Tree of Wisdom track. Spyglass icons can be used to mark off any space.
If you complete one of the three goals on the bottom of your board, mark it off and collect it. Some require you complete the previous goal before the next one (usually via arrows or being physically below a different goal); plan accordingly.
It’s kind of wild, but that’s most of the game. If you mark off the other ship on your island, after everyone’s turn is over you set aside your board, draw a new one, and pick a new ship to mark off. If you get passed a card that’s completely marked off, discard it and draw a new one.
The game ends when an Endgame (purple-backed) card is revealed; everyone gets one more turn and then the game ends! The player who explored the most islands gets the Great Explorer bonus (at higher player counts, the player who explored the second-most islands also gets a bonus) and the player with the most Scrolls wins!
Player Count Differences
The major one is just in planning. At two players, you can quickly get a sense of how the cards work since you’re just passing the same cards back and forth the whole time. This means you might be able to plan ahead a bit, if you want (and it meant that we largely didn’t see the point of keeping the cards in our hands secret). With more players, you obviously don’t want to let them see what’s in your hand and start to plan accordingly, and you’ll potentially never see a card again once it leaves your sight. Beyond that, though, there aren’t a ton of differences. Rivages has the flip-and-write core element of “largely not super interactive between players”, so the only thing you’re waiting on is players to make a decision about the cards they want to use and how. The only reason that there are more cards for more players is just so that the game takes approximately the same amount of time regardless of player count, which I appreciate. No big preferences, otherwise, though I enjoy playing at two with cards face-up.
Strategy
- You don’t always have to 100% every island. Sometimes leaving instead of exploring an area for an extra Scroll can set you up well. Don’t forget that the player who explores the most islands gets a bonus at the end of the game, and that can occasionally be the big differentiator.
- Consider how to use Spyglasses to set up big combos. Well, not gigantic combos, but still, you can play a random tile into a Spyglass to let you move somewhere else. If you can chain that up with rewards from Quests or Loot Tokens, you can get a bunch of movement all at once if you’re lucky.
- Your Tree of Wisdom Board can give you some big rewards if you know how to set it up. You really want those late-game Scrolls that will help you get ahead of your opponents. Don’t necessarily neglect those spaces on the board that can help you advance. On the B-sides, you can also get Spyglasses and such, so sometimes it’s worth steering towards a statue for a later bonus.
- You can look at your opponents’ board and hate-draft a bit if you want. If they really need to explore water and there’s only one good water space on your cards, you can always just … take it for yourself. Just remember that hate-drafting doesn’t win games; you should focus on building up your own score.
- I’d generally try to do the Quest on each board; the Exploration Missions are more up to you. The Quest usually has the most lucrative rewards. The Exploration Missions are more nice things that happen as you advance across the island.
- Don’t just spend your Loot Tokens immediately; they can really work in your favor on certain maps. There are Loot Tokens that let you cross off an entire area of a certain color. You can use that on certain maps to sink Quest or Exploration Mission requirements near-instantly. Sometimes, you’ll need to burn them just to get out of a bind, but try not to use them willy-nilly.
- Exploring is fun and all, but don’t forget: you’re here to collect Scrolls. I’ve actually almost forgotten that a few times because I was so caught up in just exploring the islands for fun. That’s a point of high praise, but eyes on the prize, friends. You need to collect Scrolls to win, so don’t just get into the exploration elements.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- My friend pointed this out, but I agree: it’s nice to have the visual stimulation of changing boards every now and then. I don’t think I totally realized how nice it is to just have a new board to explore every now and then rather than looking at the same board for an entire game. It’s a little thing, but it goes a long way.
- The color scheme is super fun. It really captures the joy of exploration rather than some of the worse vibes that can come through with more colonize-y type themes. Rivages’s bold colors do a lot for its appeal.
- I love the variety of the B-side Tree of Wisdom Boards. I love variable player powers or similarly equivalent things, and giving players their own unique advancement tracks can really give players an opportunity to craft and scope their gameplay experience to their tastes. Plus, it’s fun! I vastly prefer it to the A-sides, though I do actually agree that it’s better to start with the A-side boards. Usually I just murmur that I’ve played a ton of games and start with the B-side, but I’m glad I didn’t. Gives you a chance to appreciate all the mechanics of the game first.
- The exploration elements of this game are awesome. It feels like a mini Guild of Merchant Explorers, but in a great way. To be clear: I love Guild of Merchant Explorers. No idea why AEG dropped the ball so aggressively on that game (probably because the name of the game was so vague that it probably hurt itself in marketing, among other reasons), but that was one of my favorites of the last few years. To play another game that highlights how fun exploration can be and gives you a lot of opportunities to explore is fantastic. I really like how you can move in different directions on your turn and how many options you get from just the cards you get passed. I think the smartest stroke was the white spaces being able to be filled out by any color, though. It engenders a lot of player freedom.
- I generally was impressed at how infrequently I felt stuck. The white spaces, as I said, help a lot on this front. I was worried that with only two cards I wouldn’t be able to explore as much as I would have liked, but that literally only came up once across two games. Even in that case, you can just take a single free space. It’s not ideal, but I was surprised at how infrequently I needed that.
Mehs
- It can be a bit annoying to use square cards in circumstances where the side that’s on top matters for gameplay reasons. It’s usually pretty clear which side is up because there’s a line and a Spyglass, but it would have been fine if the cards had been normal card-shaped instead of square, and that’s mostly just because I hate shuffling square cards.
- It’s weird that we never change up the direction cards are passed. Just, if you have one player who’s aggressively hate-drafting, that can get a bit exhausting. Most games have some element of switching it up every round, though I’m not sure how you’d do that here without it occasionally switching back and forth in a silly way. Oh well!
- Maybe I’m just bad at this but the box doesn’t quite close all the way? I think the maps are a bit taller than the insert allows for, unfortunately, so there’s a tiny bit of a gap. It vexes me, but it’s not the biggest deal. Not like I have the mental bandwidth to put games back on the shelf lately anyways.
Cons
- Hope you like erasing! There’s just a pile of work to do after every game since you have to erase all the spent boards and all the spent cards. Reminds me a bit of Silver & Gold, in that regard, though I appreciate that they have little cloths for erasing rather than the truly-awful dry-erase marker erasers that have one or two good erasings before they get junked up.
Overall: 8.5 / 10
Overall, I really like Rivages! It’s got a bit of that traditional exploration feel in the same vein as The Guild of Merchant Explorers or The Quest for El Dorado, but with a more compact overall feel. It leans more towards the roll-and-write genre, though the drafting part of gameplay adds a nice bit of player interaction that can feel sorely needed in a genre that’s kind of known for players just doing their own things on their own boards. Also, it’s nice to get that feeling of progression that comes with exploring more and more islands in a given game; you aren’t just staring at the same board the entire time, and I didn’t realize until I played Rivages how nice that is. There’s something classic-feeling about the game, and I think Rivages plays to its own strengths really well, in that regard. There’s bright colors, engaging gameplay, and a persistent sense of hustle among the players as you compete and interact while still keeping mostly to your own boards. It forces everyone to play towards optimizing, rather than just lazily explore, though the temptation is there. I think it speaks to how fun the game is that you can get distracted by just wanting to 100% your islands, and I do wish there were some mode or challenge that encouraged that. That said, I do keep wanting to come back to Rivages, so I’m also hoping to see it on Board Game Arena or somewhere where I don’t have to do nearly as much cleanup. It’s not terrible; it’s just a lot of erasing. If you love exploration games, you enjoy drafting, or you just want to discover the secrets of a bunch of little islands, though, I’d definitely recommend Rivages! It’s super fun.
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