Rules to North River
North River is a tile laying game where you lay down tiles to represent terrain, make food products from animals and plants and try to enclose those tiles in road to capture and lock those terrains for points. Once a tile is roaded in you'll get 2 points for that tile. The roads and the animals within that can move from tile to tile and are both worth 1 point per enclosed tile.
Once roaded in, you can make your products: cheese, bread, sausage and alcohol by combining items in a prescribed way.
Each player starts with 5 gold coins, but the game has 100 coins total to use.
The object is to enclose as many tiles as you can while garnering the most points you can from those enclosures.
Each tile is worth 2 points.
Each road around a tile is worth 1 point.
Each livestock within is worth 1 point.
Cheese is 2 different milks on a tile. 3 points.
Bread is 2 different herbs. 3 points.
Sausage is 1 herb and 2 different meats. 4 points.
2 different eggs are pickled eggs. 3 points.
Alcohol is 3 different herbs. 5 points.
Items on their own are counted and counted again if they can be combined to form a product. Products must use items independent of one another and not repurposed. For instance, your herbs, if you only have 2 in the enclosure for your bread cannot be used in your alcohol if already being used. Roads can be counted multiple times because they are counted each time they, the roads, enclose a tile.
Once a parcel (tile) is enclosed by road, points are tallied and rewarded to the player who enclosed the parcel. All players can work any one tile per turn. Each turn consists of flipping over a face down tile face up from the stack onto the table and one move: laying 1 road around 1 perimeter or moving an animal from tile to tile for 1 coin per tile traversed or making 1 product by grouping the items together or grouping the items differently until the area is enclosed.
The meats all match to different terrains:
Milk animals (Mammals)
Goats from hills. Purple.
Cattle from fields. Yellow.
Pigs from forest. Green.
Egg animals (Birds)
Chickens from oases. Red.
Ducks from rivers. Blue.
Geese from marshes. Orange.
Eggs are white. Herbs are black.
Every color is a cube representative of the 6 animals, eggs and herbs. There are 8 colors of cubes.
Herbs come from every tile and are simply named for their terrain; hill herbs, field herbs, etc. Each tile automatically gets one herb and 1 animal once the tile is played on the table. An additional animal of the same type may be placed as well for them to mate for 1 coin to the bank and a new animal comes along through birthing on the next turn if noticed without a calf. Each tile can have 3 animals of a kind.
Enclosing an area also wins you 5 coins, which are useful because moving an item costs 1 coin per tile of crossing. Coins are worth 1 point each at the end of the game. Tiles can only be placed beside other tiles where they can combine to form a secondary color or divided into a primary color. In other words, every color, but the color opposite can lie adjacent to your placed tile:
Red and green cannot touch.
Yellow and purple cannot touch.
Blue and orange cannot touch.
You can draw a tile or use a tile you already have. Each tile you still have counts as -1 at the end of the game.
Points are tallied on a score track.
Components:
72 tiles
200 roads
400 cubes in 8 colors
1 score track
6 scoring meeples, 1 per possible player
1 box
