River Dragons

Note: This is a short really early legacy review before I started posting longer form review in our Facebook Group.

Game 7 of the “Bailey School Holiday Boardgame Marathon (Christmas Edition)” played by Jack(6), Toby(3) and myself as it is one of the biggest disappointments I have had in a long time and that is playing the game “River Dragons”.

The first issue is the rule sheet is terrible as we will discuss.

The idea is you pick a colour (which if there are 3 of you is forced to red, pink and blue which is insane as the default pink and red are so close colour wise… why no purple!?). You have to get your person from your starting island to your destination island. Nowhere in the rules can i see any mention of what your destination island is so we went with the opposite one (which seemed to make some vague sense).

You have your deck and draw 5 cards. you then “program” your actions and choose the order of your 5 cards. each player then turns over their numbered cards at the same time and does the action. There are also ways to block an opponents action but they also make you lose a useful action so seem negative to use.

Theoretically, you disrupt each other but if the cards to remove planks don’t come out it’s pretty smooth sailing.

you lay stones, build bridges and move. you can use other’s bridges but you don’t really need to and you end up essentially crossing in the middle and it being luck who gets home first. We played 3 times each game took 10 minutes and 3 or 4 turns.

on the face of it, there should be some dexterity element but this is not clear in the rules. What happens if you knock over a plank? what happens if a person falls in the water? Who knows!

there is a different board on the back that I’m guessing is more freeform and doesn’t have the guides to place rocks but this side is never mentioned anywhere and still, you would just go in a pretty much straight line.

Component quality is high. the wooden people are lovely, it has a good insert and everything looks great,

Maybe I’m missing something or miss guessing a rule but this is not a great game and one that will likely go in the post xmas sale pile.

Sad Times.