Roberto Fraga's game River Dragons challenges the players to participate in a dangerous race in the Mekong delta, running over planks bridging the river and hoping not to be hampered by the mighty River Dragons. The gameboard features a total of 6 small islands which are distributed equally around its outer edge, and on each of these islands the figure of one of the up to six players will begin the game. It will be the aim of each player to reach the opposite island, and for this purpose first stones must be placed on sandbanks within the river, and afterwards planks can be placed on the stones to allow the passage of the player figures.

Each player possesses a set of six planks of different lengths which can be placed, but actions may not be taken at random but instead each player has to "program" the five actions his character will take during the upcoming round of play. The programming-mechanism is similar to Roborally, with each of the players possessing a deck of action cards from which five cards must be chosen and placed face down in front of the player in an order in which the player desires to perform the actions. However, when everybody is ready, the players will take turns performing one action each, so that first all players will perform their first action before everybody performs their second action etc.

The action cards rank from the placement of one or two stones to the placement of one or two planks from the players' stockpiles, but when placing a plank the players need to make a good estimation which length may be needed, because a plank which is too short to bridge the desired gap between one stone and another will drop into the water and is removed from the game. Of course, the players also may use movement action cards to move their character for one or two planks, but here the tricky part begins. Each player wants to move out quickly, but with the planks criss-crossing each other in the middle of the river it will be unavoidable to run over planks placed by opposing players. However, only one figure may stand on each plank, and so the player figures will be blocking each other. Even the placement of additional planks to circumvent this may not be possible because no more than three planks may end on one stone, and so it may happen that a player must use his programmed movement action to move his character backwards, or - even worse - if the character cannot move at all the character falls off the plank and must restart his race on his own home island. A jumping action may be used to get over a blocking character, but using this card may be dangerous because the card only will work if there still is a blocking character which can be jumped. If the character has moved out of the way before the jumping action comes to bear, the character who wanted to make the jump once again lands in the water and must be returned to his island of origin.

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Copyright © 2012 Frank Schulte-Kulkmann, Essen, Germany