| 👨👩👧👦 | Players: 1-5 |
| ⏳ | Time: 20-30 mins |
| 🎂 | Ages: 8+ |
| ⚙️ | Mechanisms: Pick and Pass, Exploration, Writing |
Oh for the life of an explorer, sailing the vast seas in search of ancient treasures and long lost knowledge! While real life boats turn us both green, we’ve been able to experience a little of what it would be like while playing Rivages.
In Rivages you get to visit the forgotten islands of Myr. Your goal is to explore as many of them as you can, completing quests and gaining wisdom along the way. While it may look like a fairly standard “and write” game, there are a couple of fun little twists that we didn’t expect.
There’s no dice or card flipping here, instead you each get two cards with three rows of symbols on each. Choose a topmost row from the ones that haven’t been used, mark it off and then pass both cards to the next player.
You’re also encouraged to visit multiple islands, and once you feel you’ve earnt all the points you can on one map you can set sail for another. There are lots of different designs to explore and even a bonus for covering the most ground.
There’s a fun little knowledge track, which you go up on every time you mark off certain symbols. There are a lot of points on offer if you manage to get high up the track, but it can require sacrificing other goals to get them so you need to decide if it’s worth it.
Production is fantastic, with every map and card already laminated, and enough dry-erase pens and cloths for each player included. There’s been a lot of thought put into making sure this is a game you can just open up and play without any extra work.
We did find that having to write on the cards as well as your map each turn made it a bit fiddly. A few times we forgot a step, or missed collecting a bonus because we were too busy juggling everything. We think maybe one lot of symbols per card may have made it more manageable.
While we’re not big fans of “and write” games in general, it was interesting to see how Rivages has taken a concept that’s been done so many times and spiced it up a bit. We had fun seeing all the different maps, and racing to complete our bonuses before the game finished. Now if only the real sea was as smooth as our voyage here was!
You can see this post on Instagram here and if you are interested you can find out more about the game on the Pandasaurus website!
The copy of Rivages used for this review was provided to A Tale of Two Meeples by Pandasaurus Games
The Boardgame Detective 