Sometimes you want a hardcore, cutthroat game. Other times you want a cozy, feel-good game. When you want those happy vibes, Kid’s Table Board Gaming has you covered with Roberta Taylor’s award-winning Creature Comfort series. River Market is the third journey into the Maple Valley, and it’s a ton of fun.
It’s Summertime in Maple Valley, and the River Market is open for business! The narrow streets and waterways are bustling with vendors hawking their wares and customers in search of a good bargain. The market is growing, with new businesses opening all the time.
What do you think of when someone says “market game”? Do you think of unbridled capitalism and making the most money possible? Well, think again. River Market isn’t like that. It’s much more wholesome than that. Money is a resource in the game, but it’s not the main one, nor is it how you win. In River Market, you’re wandering through the farmer’s market-like stalls and collecting or trading resources from them. From there, players will invest those resources into opening new booths and hiring helpers, being the entrepreneurial critters you are. As the market grows, opportunity grows.
On your turn, you can either spend resources to play a booth or helper, or discard a card to move around the market (to collect resources). There are also movement cards that only let you move when you play them, but that have bonus actions attached to them as well. When you move, you collect the resources on the card you end on. When you build a booth, you place a house marker on it to denote that you built it. Whenever one of your opponents collects resources at that booth, you also get a resource.
The end game begins when one player has placed all of their markers onto the tableau. Once this happens, every player gets a Zoom token to move anywhere once and two more turns to complete their plans. At the end of the game, you are awarded victory points based on what you built during the game. You also may get victory points from the helpers you’ve hired, and sometimes for additional resources you have left (but only sometimes, depending on the cards in play). That’s it. That’s the game. It’s straightforward and plays in 20-30 minutes easily.
Like the other games in the Creature Comfort series, River Market is adorable. The original artist of Creature Comforts and Maple Valley, Shawna Tenney, has seen great illustrative success and wasn’t available to do River Market. The new artists, Daisy Ingrosso and Cindy Monroy, did a great job complementing that original art style, while making River Market their own. I love the design of the cards, with the river at the bottom of each booth card. When you play a card into the market tableau, you play it into one of two rows of cards, with the bottoms of the cards against each other, creating the titular river in the River Market.
Whenever you play a card into the market, you are impacting every player’s experience and strategy. Similarly, when a player moves, they may affect another player (giving them resources). While there is impact, there’s very little direct interaction with other players. In some games, that lack of interaction can be a major detriment. But River Market moves at a fast enough pace that you don’t really notice it. You’re still engaged on other players’ turns, and there isn’t really a ton of time between turns to plan your own strategy.
I love this game. The unique market building concept is just so feel-good. There’s good competition happening, but it’s never cutthroat or mean spirited. If you like family weight games that move at a good pace, River Market is another homerun from Kids Table Board Gaming.
If you want to see River Market played, we streamed a playthrough HERE.
You can find Kids Table Board Gaming online at kidstablebg.com or on Facebook at facebook.com/kidstablebg
