River Valley Glassworks Review

River Valley Glassworks, published by Allplay and designed by Adam Hill, Ben Pinchback, Matt Riddle, combines a cozy aesthetic and easy to learn set collection and pattern building gameplay to deliver an attractive and engaging little puzzle.  With a relatively short playtime and a great table presence, River Valley Glassworks is definitely a candidate for both neighborhood game nights as well as the family gaming table, but how does it pan out?  Lets find out as we review River Valley Glassworks!

In River Valley Glassworks, you will earn points by gathering glass from the titular river.  These glass bits come in a variety of shapes and colors, and by cleverly timing your collection you’ll seek to fill the rows and columns of your glassworks.  You’ll score points for completed rows and your two tallest columns, with columns further down the rows being worth more points than those closer to the start of your glassworks board.  Balancing these two scoring features is important, because once a player has gathered at least 17 glass bits, the game draws to a conclusion and the points are tallied!

On each turn, you’ll choose between two available actions – you can either Place & Gather, or Draw.

When you Place & Gather, you’ll take a glass piece from your Pan and toss it into the river, adding it to one of the river tiles that has a matching shape icon.  You will then take all the glass on an adjacent river tile (regardless of shape or color), and add them one at a time to your glassworks.  Then, the now-empty river tile gets removed, the rest slide down, and the tile gets re-added and re-stocked.

When you Draw, you’ll choose 4 of the glass pieces that have gathered in the lake (the end of the river), and add them to your pan.  Your pan can only hold 5 glass pieces, and any that you draw beyond that will go into your Overflow, which will cost you points at the end of the game.

Glass added to your glassworks fills the rows from left to right and bottom to top.  The first time you add a color to your glassworks, it will go into the next available space in the bottom row, but after that, every time you add another piece of that color, it will get added to the same column.

Andrew

And that’s pretty much it for the rules! River Valley Glassworks is easy to teach and learn, and once people absorb the idea that shapes only matter for gathering and color only matters for scoring, they’ve got the only tough part of the game sorted.

Jess

Yeah! I loved that – the puzzle in River Valley Glassworks comes from trying to make sure you get the right glass bits, not from engaging rules that are the slightest bit hard to grasp.

The strategic wrinkle in River Valley Glassworks is how you can only collect glass by putting glass back in the river, and which glass you can claim depends on which tiles are adjacent to the one you’re depositing onto.  So while you definitely want to optimize what’s going into your glassworks and when, sometimes it might be worth taking some overflow (and the negative points that go with it) in order to grab the perfect glass from the lake, so that you can later claim exactly the river tile you want.  And while each river tile will get 1 or 2 glass bits on it each time it’s emptied and refilled, as players toss glass back into the river, it is possible to end up with a huge pile of glass on a turn, and quite possibly pieces that you didn’t necessarily want.

Jess

Since you only get credit for your two tallest columns, and you score the lesser for any tied columns, there’s actually quite a bit of strategy to how you’re adding glass to your collection! It’s not just ‘get all the glass you can’ if you want to score big!

The important thing to keep in mind in River Valley Glassworks is that the game will probably be over sooner than you think – that 17-piece limit can sneak up on you, especially if a player has a big turn where they grab a bunch of glass that has built up on a river tile.  You probably won’t get to complete that row you’ve been working on, and you’ll need to be strategic about not accidentally tying a high-scoring column with a low scoring one.  But that said, River Valley Glassworks is a relatively straightforward game.  There isn’t much room for hate-drafting glass you’d rather your opponent not have, nor is there any meaningful player interaction beyond the drafting of glass bits.  But that suited us perfectly fine – we did have a great time with it.  But we also definitely felt like there was room for more.

Which brings us to the River Glass & Other Sundries expansion.  This tuckbox has 6 modular expansions that can be swapped in and out of the base game in order to add some variety and strategy.  The expansion rules suggest using 1 or 2 at a time, and having tried all of them, we feel like you can’t go wrong with any of them:

• Orders from Afar gives each player an opportunity to score some bonus points by gathering specific colors as overflow, turning the negative points into positive ones!
• Assistants gives each player a unique once-per-game power that can come in handy, and if unused will give 2 points
• Equipment provides unique end-game scoring mechanics that can really change up a player’s strategy
• Flooded Market designates a color of glass that is undesirable for each player, providing bonus points for how well players have managed that color in their glassworks at the end of the game
• Lake Diving allows each player to collect a bonus piece of specifically-shaped glass when gathering from the river
• River Treasures has each player looking to collect specific shapes of glass to score bonus points at the end of the game

Andrew

The Other Sundries expansion is something you’ll definitely want to snag if you enjoy River Valley Glassworks. The modules add just enough to keep things interesting, providing either bonuses, challenges, or options that are a welcome addition and, in my opinion, should always be used.

As we mentioned, our copy of River Valley Glassworks is the deluxe version, and it is beautifully produced.  Everything, from the player boards to the acrylic tiles for the river to the wooden player markers, adds to the great table presence of the game.  But we’ve also seen the regular version and it is still attractive and entirely functional – whether you want to go for the deluxe version is entirely a matter of taste, as the enhanced components don’t alter the gameplay at all.

Andrew

The first time we played River Valley Glassworks, I thought that the game was going to be maybe too simple. The decision-space is so narrow and it’s over so fast that I didn’t think there’d be much to sink my teeth into. But I have to say, I don’t feel that way after a few plays, and especially after adding the Other Sundries modules.

Jess

Yeah, totally. I love set collection games and I thought the drafting mechanic was cool, but like you say, it’s far from complicated. But that’s just fine – River Valley Glassworks is good at what it does and doesn’t overstay its welcome.

Andrew

Absolutely. If anything, I kinda wish River Valley Glassworks stuck around just a little longer, but I totally understand the decision to have the game end when it does.

We definitely recommend checking out River Valley Glassworks – it’s a great Game Night game, easy to learn and engage for most players, with quick turns and enough strategy to stay fun without being overburdening in any way.  Its definitely heavier than a filler game but not significantly so, and it’s been a great game to warm up or cool down with.  And whether you’ve got the retail version of the game or went for the deluxe edition, River Valley Glassworks sits beautifully on the table.

Additional Recommendations

• From the designers: Ben Pinchback and Matt Riddle, two of the designers behind River Valley Glassworks, are among our favorite game designers of all time.  Check out our review of Subastral, another great set collection game from them
• Aesthetically & Thematically Similar: Everdell, also featuring illustrations by Adrew Bosley, is a big card drafting/tableau building game.  The gameplay is quite different, but the aesthetic experience is close to RIVER.  And for our preferences, we recommend My Lil’ Everdell even over the original
• Tranquil Set Collection: The Whatnot Cabinet from Pencil First Games is pretty and engaging.  Players will use an action-selection mechanic to gather tiles into their collection, working to make rows and columns of specific compositions to earn points.  Quick, pleasant, and of a similar vibe to some of the gameplay in River Valley Glassworks