River of Gold Board Game Review

River of Gold, based in the Legend of the Five Rings universe, is one of the most beautiful games released in 2024. Beauty, however, can only get you so far, but thankfully River of Gold has a ton of great and easy to understand mechanics that makes this a really good game for veteran board game players, and casual players as well. We looked at the games components in a previous post, so we won’t go into depth on all of that here again, but rest assured this is one of the most impressive productions this year, and I’m not sure it’s that close!

In River of Gold, players will be constructing buildings along the river to earn themselves points, resources, and more. Alternative actions will allow players to fulfill contracts – spending resources they have accumulated – and allow players to sail their ships to collect various things. And that seems to be the overarching theme of River of Gold – you are always collecting things, moving on things, etc. You are always doing something, and that feels really good.

When teaching the game, it does feel like there is a lot. You can sail your ship the number of spaces you roll OR you can build a building in the location that matches your die roll OR you can fulfill a contract if the contract card matches the location you rolled. It’s a lot, but it is engaging.

What I love about this adventure is that you are always part of the game. While technically you could say there is downtime in this game, you always need to be present and aware of what other players are doing. See, the reason why you want to build so many buildings along the river is because you get a building bonus each time another player lands on a space with your building. The more you build, the more resources, experience track points, victory points, etc. you can earn. It’s also why you need to always be paying attention.

As we noted earlier, you are always getting stuff in River of Gold, and this is the main way that stuff will be accumulated. But you also get stuff by moving up various tracks based on each region in the game. Do certain things in a certain region, and get to move your marker up the track. As you advance along one of the six available tracks, you will get resources, money, victory points and more. Points are also awarded at the end of the game for the person furthest down a specific track, and these points can be doubled if you happen to get a tile placed on the track as well from one of your completed contract cards.

What I really like about this experience, however, is how interconnected everything is. Resources are gathered by moving your ships, and those resources will help you fulfill contracts. The contracts will give you various bonuses in the game, like upgrading one of your ships, adding a merchant to the end of the river to give you more benefits, or adding an elder to one of the games six influence tracks. Buildings will impact all of these things. Honestly, I think that is what makes this a good game for brand new players. It’s a bit more complex than something like Ticket to Ride or Settlers of Catan, but because everything is woven together so nicely, it’s easy to understand how doing “A” can be beneficial to “B” and to “C”.

River of Gold is a game that will be sticking around in my collection. With dozens of games passing through our offices each week, some stay but even more go, either to friends, local charities, etc. River of Gold is a game I want to play again and again, one I’m readily happy to teach, and one that I think almost anyone can pick up easily and play!