River of Gold review — Rollin’ on a golden river

You know how sometimes you sit down to a new game not expecting too much, only to be blown away by every little thing put in front of you? That was my experience with Keith Piggott’s River of Gold, a surprise masterpiece of delivering resources, sailing down, and building next to a major trade river loosely set in the Legend of the Five Rings universe.

The first thing you’ll notice is the absurdly gorgeous production, with the gold embossed river, beautiful art, and linen finished everything. Ok, the middle of the coins is just printed black instead of being another thing to punch out, but having done that before for other games, that’s a chore I’m entirely willing to forego. Yeah, we’ve got nitpicks with some graphic design decisions, like having the influence tracks snake makes their information less parsable at a glance, but on the whole Office Dog knocked it out of the park on this one. But all the art in the world is functionally meaningless in a board game if it doesn’t serve its purposes; drawing your attention to important mechanics, indicating what function something performs, or intrusively reminding players of the rules. For the most part, this is accomplished with subtlety and elegance, but I can see the argument against the elegance of a big ol’ chonky die.

 

 

Speaking of that chonky die, it’s the primary reason why this game is so damn good. The three actions of move, build, or deliver are basic to the point that if they weren’t tied to a die this game would be barely complex enough for older elementary school kids. Instead, you’ve got a game that’s simultaneously straightforward and complex, centered around the buzzword of our favorite games of 2024: adaptability. Once you’ve played a couple times, you’ll have reached a level of familiarity with the systems that just about anything you do will lead to points, it’s just a matter of properly navigating your resources and ship placement so that you can stick to a path forward that scores you huge bundles of points, no matter your rolls or customer draws. That’s the real genius of River of Gold; while in other games like War of the Ring where your actions are determined by your rolls, you are entirely limited by said dice, here you only ever have yourself to blame if you really needed to do something and couldn’t. Either you got greedy on another delivery/build and don’t have the resources you need now, put your ships in bad places, or wouldn’t take a suboptimal action off an earlier roll and spent too much favor to fix your rolls and now you’re stuck with a bad roll.

The box also comes complete with a mini-expansion of two asymmetric characters players can play as per faction, which I personally didn’t care for because it adds even the tiniest bit of extra rules overhead that betrays how simple learning the game is otherwise. My fellow editor James, on the other hand, appreciated how they added some flavor to an otherwise dry euro. Whatever side of the fence you wind up on, it’s only an extra handful of cards, so I’m happy they’re there. I could expound on the minutiae of gameplay and strategic balance, but the real draw here is how straightforward River is given how much depth it provides once you sink your teeth into it, so going any further would be doing its simple complexity a disservice.

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