River Rafters

River Rafters is a board game aimed for a younger audience where the players have to sail down a river and be the first to cross the finish line without their ship sinking. This was a design focused project made with 3 other Designers. Our main priority with this was iterating with many different iterations of the game being present throughout its development cycle.

I was responsible for the production of the physical board and many of the pieces. I was also heavily involved in the playtesting both suggesting and making balance and optimisations to the game as we developed.

Our unique mechanic was our Action Cards allowing the players to balance the randomness of the dice by affecting other players movement or giving themselves a boost.

Players also had health, being able to take damage from the rocks on the path or other player's action cards.

Board

Photoshop

Documentation

Project Overview

Features

Board Building

At the beginning of the game, the players build the board with the board tiles, creating a different river to raft down every time.

Wind

Once all players have taken their turn, they spin for wind and move in that direction based on a dice roll.

Cards

The players have cards that they can use to trap the area, move themselves or others and directly damage them.

Player Movement

Movement is limited to a single direction, forward. players can repositions themselves sideways but have to go along the map. They roll a d6 to determine how far they move.

Health

Players then have health, this can be reduced by player cards or by hitting the rocks or walls on the map. Once they die they move back to the previous checkpoint (or start).

Project Details

Board

Corners

There are 4 corners provided with the game.

These pieces incentivize taking the corner as tight as possible, with less spaces on the tighter side.

These boards went through a redesign to make ranges more readable on them but keep the (1,2,3,4) lane splits.

Rocks are randomly places along each piece.

Straights

The straights are most simple, with 4 lanes each piece being 3 along.

There are rocks randomly placed on the tiles, these block the player from progressing.

Each side is the river edge, which can also damage the player because of the wind.

Spinner

The Spinner is the decider for the wind.

This spinner is weighted to push the players into the river edges or backwards, with a chance to go forward.

This is also then used for a card to affect another player.

Pieces

The player pieces are coloured hexes that can be chosen.

This is then placed on the board and represents the player.

Each player then is given a health board to keep track of their health during play.