Designer Diary: Roaring River

by Joeri Hessels

Welcome on board, let’s get ready to raft down the river! Roaring River is a 2-6 player card game that plays in about 20 minutes. The game is designed by Wouter Moons and Joeri Hessels (me!) and published by Jolly Dutch Productions, with art from Lara Velitchko.

In this designer diary, we will take you along the story of Roaring River and what makes it tick. In the “Our journey here” paragraphs, we discuss our previous iterations, but feel free to skip these parts if you are interested in just the final version of the game.

The Inspiration

Some prototypes start with mechanical inspiration, others with thematic inspiration. Roaring River started with an experience.

I was at a party reminiscing with a friend about the good old days of our studies, and he mentioned the time we went on holiday to the French Alps near the city of Briançon. During our stay there, we decided to go rafting with the six of us. Some of us wanted to experience a wild ride down the river, while others thought rafting down a waterfall was a bit too exciting and mostly came along for the company.

During the rafting, we could control the intensity of the experience by navigating the raft to the milder or more extreme parts of the river. Even though we had wildly different preferences for the trip, all of us had a lot of fun.

Years later, I had a light bulb moment on my bike ride home and thought these varied preferences seemed like a perfect tension point for a game!

The Overview

The first prototype materialized quickly and almost designed itself. In short, you and 1-5 others are together on a raft, but all looking for a different experience — just like me and my friends on that raft in the Alps! You may crave the thrill and want to raft on the most exciting parts of the river, others may want a relaxed ride, and still others just want to enjoy the wildlife and scenery.

Some of the motivation cards; you want to collect as many victory points as you can, with :heart: representing how much fun you had.

Every round you proceed down the river, moving the raft to a new river card (see image below). If you reach the end of the river, all players score points according to their motivation card for the river cards over which they moved. The player who scored the most points enjoyed the trip the most and wins!

But wait — IF you reach the end of the river? Yes, we will get back to that…

So how do you get the raft in the right direction? By paddling, of course! All of you simultaneously select a paddle card to try to steer the raft. These paddle cards vary in strength and steer the raft to either the left or the right. If, collectively, you paddle harder to the left than to the right, the raft moves left, and vice versa. You might already wonder: what if the paddle values to the left and right are equal? You move straight ahead, skipping over the two cards in front of the raft. This often causes an upheaval around the table…but that might be just what you want.

If you have played Sail or Feed the Kraken (both great games!), this movement will feel familiar — :arrowNW:/:arrowN:/:arrowNE: — but where those games are all about the destination, Roaring River is all about the journey.

The raft moves left (3 + 2 > 4), after which you discard the two rightmost cards, then add three new cards in front. (I love the table presence of the meandering river over the course of the game.)

Our journey here: The core movement mechanism of the raft hasn’t changed since our first prototype! The motivation cards, on the other hand, changed a lot. Initially you were either on team wild river or on team calm river, but we quickly noticed that the team with more members nearly always won, creating little tension.

We spent a lot of time on balancing the motivation cards, while at the same time trying to make them all feel different, and while also ensuring players never got the same amount of :heart: for the same feature. To aid us here, a friend of mine (one of my fellow rafters from the trip to France!) helped me write a simple code to calculate the scores for all six motivation cards for 10,000 reasonable river combinations. Some iterations here, followed by a whole bunch of real life playtesting (still the most important!) led us to the finished product.

Getting Tired…

From all that paddling you grow tired, so in Roaring River the paddle cards represent your stamina, and once you play them, you do not get them back automatically. You have to rest and forgo contributing to the raft direction to gain back (some!) of your paddle cards. Even then, you cannot get your strongest cards back. This makes not only for interesting hand management — when to save strength, when to go all out, and when to rest — but also fits great thematically! We were inspired for this system by games like Concordia and Century Spice Road.

By using this rest card, you regain either a single paddle 4 card or two of the weaker cards, along with the rest card itself

Our journey here: The paddle cards changed little since the start! We initially used regular playing cards for these: spades and clubs to paddle left, diamonds and hearts to paddle right.

The paddle 2 card felt too weak, which we fixed by giving it an alternate way to score points. This had a great effect on the game as this not only introduced a new strategy, but also ensured all paddle cards have their own pros and cons. In a later stage we added the paddle straight ahead card, to give players a bit more influence on going straight ahead (and to counterplay a certain IF).

Mind games

Everyone’s motivation cards and previously played paddle cards are open information. This means that you know exactly what the other players want and what their (paddling) capabilities are. Thus, selecting your paddle card can lead to a lot of mind games, which is a big part of the game! To complicate your card selection even further, you and another player may want to paddle in the same direction, but you want THEM to do all the hard work, while you gently paddle along…

Roaring River‘s core mechanism for paddling ensures a ton of player interaction, emergent partnerships, and quite a few opportunities for table talk.

I want to go left, and I know that you want to go right, but how badly do you want to go that way? And what does player 3 want? Generally you have a pretty strong preference about where the raft should go, but what if you don’t care about any of the river cards in front of the river? Have a look at this BGG thread for some of our thoughts.

Our journey here: Initially, your played paddle cards were in a single pile, and it was up to you to remember what other players played. Now, you place played paddle cards slightly overlapping, so you can always stay informed on your opponents’ capabilities.

With both your motivation card and played paddle cards face up during the game, both mind games and strategy are significantly enhanced!

Circling Back to that IF…

As you might know, rafts are not the most stable form of transportation, so from a thematic perspective, we wanted to incorporate a compelling mechanism for the raft to flip.

From the first prototype this was possible, but we went through quite a few iterations. Now, you can try to flip the raft as an alternate win condition. Usually, you reach the end of the river and the player who enjoyed the trip the best (i.e., has the most :heart:) wins — but if the raft flips, the game ends immediately and the player who was enjoying the trip the least (fewest :heart:) wins. This worked wonders as even if the journey is not going your way, you still have an exciting way to win.

How do you flip the raft? We wanted the flipping of the raft to be a risk nearly every game, but it should happen neither too often nor too soon; most importantly, it needs to be highly player driven. In the end, we decided on a system in which paddling really hard to either the left or the right makes the raft less stable. When this happens three times (above a certain threshold), the raft flips and you all end up in the water. Since you know what the other players want and what they can do, you have a ton of influence here — but of course most players do not want this to happen, so they may — and probably should! — try to compensate for your shenanigans, possibly giving up a part of their VP lead in the process. This balancing act ensures the game remains exciting until the end!

!Danger mode! If the raft is at “danger level !!!”, it is all hands on deck as the game might be over if you rock the boat too enthusiastically. As you see on the right of the raft card, the flip is player count dependent. If you manage to stabilize the raft, you go back to “danger level !!” (see bottom left) and can breathe a sigh of relief…unless you wanted the raft to flip, of course, then it would be a sigh of disappointment.

Our journey here: Initially one of the motivation cards wanted you to flip the raft as your sole goal. We thought this was cool because the objective was so different, but it didn’t feel great to play.

In our early prototypes, the raft would flip if the river was really wild, but because of the random order of river cards, the raft would sometimes flip (or could not flip) no matter what players did. When we changed to the current system, players immediately had way more handles to influence the flip, and for many playtesters the tension around the flip was now their favorite part of the game.

Roaring River Duel, or the Two-Player Variant

During development, our publisher mentioned to us that they would love a two-player mode. Blind bidding does not lend itself to a two-player game, and we had already failed quite a few attempts at a compelling two-player mode, so we were dead in the water…

But this request set more brain machinations to work, and a few months later we were inspired. The problem was that playing a single paddle card versus one other player feels random and results in going straight ahead way too often. The trick was to let both players have two separate hands of paddle cards, and first select and reveal a paddle card from one of them, then select and reveal a paddle card from their second hand.

This reveal mid-turn has tons of implications for your next selection and leads to even more mind games than the core game. As such, the two-player game is a bit more complicated (since you have two separate hands to manage) and more confrontational. This makes the game feel quite a bit different — almost like the difference between 7 Wonders and 7 Wonders Duel — but two is now one of my favorite player counts! I am pleased with the result and happy that Jolly Dutch challenged us to develop a two-player variant!

I played the higher card, so if I also play my 5 from my other hand, I can guarantee we go in the right direction — but you know that and will probably play low or rest, so maybe I should play a low card, but you know I know, so…

Our journey here: As discussed above, we tried quite a few two-player variants, but none felt great. Using the same rules for all other player counts led to too many ties and little tension as it was too easy to anticipate their choice. A random reveal from a third set of paddle cards to simulate another player felt, well, too random. Both players having two sets of paddle cards and selecting one card from both (without the reveal in between) didn’t give you enough context to make an informed decision.

With the first test of the current system, we immediately knew we struck gold. Initially, we used the same motivation cards as for a game with 3-6 players (with restrictions to not have too much overlap), but Jolly Dutch suggested creating specific (double-sided) two-player motivation cards. This proved to be a great suggestion, and at the same time let us get creative with them since they needed to be balanced only against each other.

Our Journey Comes to an End…

If you are still here at this point, I would like to thank you for your interest and for taking your time to come along on this (design) journey with me.

We would like to thank our friends and families for a lot of playtesting, but also our playtesters at Amsterdice and at the playtesting events hosted by Amsterdam Board game Design (XXL) and Spellenmaakgilde. Again, thank you all, especially for enduring the lesser iterations of the game. Without you, this game wouldn’t be a reality!

We would also like to express a big thank you to our publisher, Jolly Dutch, for their help with developing the game, but also for encouraging us to submit another game after our first publication with them, Cloudy Kingdom. Roaring River is part of the publisher’s Jolly Club-series, a line of eco-friendly card games consisting of 110 cards. (Theoretically you could toss the game in a river if you don’t like it and it should fully degrade, but in that case we suggest you give it to another gamer in your life.)

Our prototype was functional at best, but the art by Lara Velitchko transformed it into a beauty. As they say, a picture says more than a a thousand words:

I hope you enjoyed our adventure and hope this design diary has made you enthusiastic about rafting, either by getting out there on a roaring river or by gathering around the table!

Cheers,

Wouter & Joeri

Joeri (l) and Wouter at Spellenspektakel 2024. (Photo by Henk Rolleman)



Source link