So River Dragons wasn’t a game I’d heard of, but I discovered it browsing some sales, did a bit of reading and decided that it sounded like there might be more than meets the eye, enough for me to pick it up and give it a go!
Colourful And Chunky
So opening up the box and digging through you might start to consider this a kids game, there’s a punchboard full of colourful tiles to represent planks of wood, a small deck of cards and several chunky characters to represent the players. The rules are just one sheet that folds out, but after you start digging in you can find more than first meets the eye!
Brief Rules
To set up River Dragons place the board in the middle of the table, each player chooses a village close to them, but they are spaced out determined by player count. Then they all get resources, cards and a player piece to match their village colour, all of them are the same regardless of colour.
The game works through programming, each round players will have access to all their cards, they choose 5 of the cards to play that round and lay them out in the order they want to play them. The cards do various actions, placing or removing stones/planks, moving across the bridges you build with these, or summoning the various dragons of the delta to sabotage the other players. At the end of each round take back all played cards for the next round, so all possible actions are available, and move the first player for the round around the table. Keep going until the first player manages to move their villager onto their opposite village to win.
Competition
So River Dragons sounds simple enough to pick up, but there is some hidden depth and strategy in there, regardless of how random and chaotic it may seem. You need to play your action cards to play stones before you can lay down planks, you need to lay down planks before you can start moving, and you need to make sure you path is clear to move or you may find yourself moving in the wrong direction or falling in the river and heading back to the start. So there are other helpful cards, you can use one of the cards to pick up stones or planks, so you can pick up your bridge behind you as you travel to make sure you don’t run out of planks, but also dismantling it removes possible paths for your opponents to use. Not just that, but you can pick up some unoccupied planks from anywhere on the board, there are some conditions I won’t go into now, but if you’re able to you can scupper your opponents well placed plans by removing one of their planks right from the middle of their path! And with the final cards, the dragons, you may only get to use one per round but whatever colour dragon you play causes that player to lose the matching action that round, so a powerful tool if played at the right time, but also a terrible waste if you play it at the same time as other player’s dragons!.
If you can tell, there is some unexpected randomness out there. Similar to other classic games like Colt Express or Robo Rally, you must perform your programmed action if able, and so one wrong card could throw your whole turn out the window, and some people may not be a fan of that. But the amount of available action cards means you can often plan around mistakes and put fall back plans into place if you think carefully, although this costs you some speed and may let other players get ahead of you. But the game both always has catch up mechanics available for anyone to win, although you may end up in situations where it is almost impossible to stop one player from winning, but just delay it long enough to hopefully sneak ahead of them. But the turn order aspect combined with this does mean there is a slight possibility of king-making, if multiple players have played a winning action in the same space late in the round, then you might find an earlier player may be in a place where they can only block one, in which case they’re left to decide who their favourite is.
Final Thoughts
River Dragons is able to be enjoyed by anyone, even players not sure of exactly what they’re doing can just choose a selection of cards and be helped by others with potential actions. But those who hate to watch plans fall apart may not have the best time. The game has a double sided board, one side has set points where stones for bridges can be played which can help to give a structure, but the other side is open and free allowing play anywhere which let’s players get much more creative. The game is not dexterity based, but sometimes can feel it when you’re trying to remove some planks from the middle of the path, it may just need a careful hand not to knock other things out of place as initial stone placement is important regarding the planks that can be played, each player only gets one of each length. Overall I would recommend this for anyone who enjoys programming games and has enjoyment when watching chaos reign, and with all the bright colourful pieces it can be a fun one for family gaming too, just be careful about feeling like you can get picked on, or decide to all gang up on the lead player, the choices are yours!!
About the blogger
Hi I’m Sean, chocolate factory operator by day, Zatu blogger by night. I’m a fan of all games but a bigger fan of anything with dinosaurs. Come check out my gaming pics and videos on my socials:
