Niagara arrives!

Our latest family addition, Niagara, arrived today after our surprise win on Ebay! I doubted very much we would find a copy for sale, let alone one for auction, but one was going in Mint condition and we won with one bid! We also had our doubts it would be Mint condition, so we had taken a gamble because parts could be missing, but the owners said it was 100%. We got it today and had a good look through - not only was it 100% complete, but there was also 2 extra gems (instead of one) of each colour!

I've had a scoot through of the rules and it seems very good - although the rules do cover many pages, a fair amount is for Examples and diagrams. The dynamic of how the river flows is brilliant - the board is placed upon the upturned lid and base, so a waterfall hangs over the edge of one box edge. The board has a channel cut into it with plastic discs representing the river water. The canoes used for going up and down the river to get the gems to win the game, float on the discs. At the end of each turn, more discs are pushed into the start of the river, causing the other discs to move along the channel, penny-pusher style, eventually causing one or more to fall off the waterfall edge, taking any hapless canoes with it!! Players use Paddle cards with numbers on them to navigate the rapids, between 1 and 6 and a cloud card to manipulate the weather (for better or worse), thereby increasing or decreasing the speed of the river each turn. It does sound a little complex, but the rules compress into one side of paper in a Summary, so hopefully it'll be pretty cool to play.

We will try it out on Sunday.