The River, the most recent release from the imprint Days of Wonder, tries to be Stone Age Lite, but only succeeds about halfway, as it strips down game time and makes building things a bit easier, while also recomplicating things with a strange and not very successful new scoring mechanism that adds little to nothing to game play.
Stone Age is both one of my favorite games ever, and one of the best examples of a straight worker-placement game: You get a finite number of meeples and you put one or more of them on the board in each turn to either gather resources (wood, brick, stone, gold, or food) or spend them to get stuff (build buildings for big points or buying cards for points and/or more goodies). Stone Age starts each player with five meeples, and you can run that up to ten by sending two meeples to what is colloquially known as “the love shack” on a specific turn to, um, make another meeple. Games can run 90 minutes or more, but you’re constantly in motion, and there are a lot of constraints that force players to compete for the same spaces and rewards on the board.
The River’s intent is clear: Streamline (pun intended) the Stone Age concept for a half-hour game. There are three main resources, wood, brick, and stone, plus a wild-card resource of food (little turkey meeples, a nice touch). You gather resources to build building cards worth two to nine points, and early buildings gain bonus tokens starting at six points and gradually decreasing to zero. The number of resources you get when you visit a resource space is equal to number of symbols showing that resource on the twelve spaces on your personal river board, and you also have a number of warehouse symbols that limits what you can store.
Within each round, you can also take up to two new tiles to place on your river, in order. Tiles show resource and/or warehouse symbols, or they confer one-time or game-end bonuses. So you can expand your storage and set yourself up for bigger resource hauls with the right tiles, making your meeple usage more efficient. You start with four meeples, and placing your fourth tile (out of twelve) unlocks your fifth meeple. After that, however, you can lose meeples, staring with your fifth tile, as your workers choose to settle down on the new terrain you’ve developed, so rounds can get shorter as players keep placing tiles.
The game ends when a player has placed twelve tiles, filling their river board, or built five buildings, filling all five bonus token spaces (even if one or more tokens are worth zero points). The game-end scoring adds an additional wrinkle: Tiles come in five different terrain types, and if you’ve managed to get the same terrain in two or all three of the tile spaces in one column, you get additional points – six if you got all three to match, two if you got two of the three. There are a few ways to switch tiles around once you’ve already placed them … but my God, this feels like a totally extraneous, tacked-on scoring method. It has no tie to game play, and it has no tie to the theme. With winning scores in the 30s for us, a player could mostly skip the building cards, get a little luck with river tiles, and rack up enough points to win just by color-matching.
The two-player game uses a smaller main board that restricts meeple placement further, and the game ends if either player builds four buildings (reduced from five). That latter threshold might be too low; my daughter, who didn’t care for this game, decided she was going to try to end it as quickly as she could, and raced through to build four building cards, two of which were worth two points each, the lowest value. It turned out to be a smart plan, because she ended the game before I could build my third building, since I was trying to get some higher point cards. It’s also possible that my daughter is just smarter than I am.
I don’t think The River makes the cut in my house to stay in our rotation; it’s too familiar – really, yet another game where we’re gathering wood, brick, and stone? really? – and offers nothing new in the mechanics or theme. It is, however, a simplified version of Stone Age and similar games, and probably far more friendly to play with younger kids – especially if you just dispense with the game-end tile-matching bonus. That eliminates one spot on the board, and you’d take out some tiles that give you a free tile swap power, but then the game would be like a starter version of Stone Age … except that such a game already exists, My First Stone Age, with a listed playing time of 15 minutes. I haven’t played the latter, but I keep coming back to how The River just feels like a blurry copy of Stone Age, and that feels very unsatisfying to me as a critic or just a player.