River Valley Glassworks

River Valley Glassworks is designed by Matt Riddle, Ben Pinchback, and Adam Hill and published by Allplay. In this family-friendly drafting game, cute animals collect and sort river glass by color. Plan around the flowing river and place your glass strategically to win.

Project Overview:

Development on River Valley Glassworks focused on four key areas:

We dramatically increased the differentiation between rarities to deepen their impact on decisionmaking, and reworked setup and endgame conditions so players only needed to adjust the tiles in the bag when playing with 5 players.

The added solo mode features five unique rivals, each with a distinct personality and playstyle. Not only are the varying rivals in a range of complexity, but they present new challenges for solo players to come back to again and again.


Services Provided:

Case Study: Tuning a Draft Mechanism

As delivered from the original designers, River Valley Glasssworks was played on a circular arrangement of mats, with each mat refilling with a single piece of glass unless there were too few total pieces.

From our calls with the design team, we knew that the absolute most important thing to them was the game's scoring system, which they originally developer for their game Subastral. We prioritized keeping the scoring throughout the development process and focused on making sure the way pieces flowed into the game and players selected them supported that scoring as best as possible.

We paid careful attention to the incentives that differentiated player choices between sets of tiles to take. Each time you make a move, you set up or block your opponents. While playing in the original circular format, each piece shape had a limited zone of interaction, but we wanted to create more ways to interact with the draft.

At the same time, we wanted to connect the draft more deeply to the theme of the gameplay. We brainstormed several possible ways to use "flowing" a river as a metaphor for shifting the pieces around, finally settling on the final conveyor belt approach that is in the published version of River Valley Glassworks. This central river really reinforces the key thematics of play in a mostly abstract game, and provides a great tactile centerpiece.

Additionally, we noticed as we began public playtesting that there was stronger tension in decisionmaking when there were multiple places to collect multiple pieces of glass. Weighing which two or three pieces fit best into your strategy was more interesting than picking one or two pieces. In the late game, we wanted more situations where players could pick up a "mixed bag" of pieces: some that were good for their strategy and some that were bad.

To that end, we adjusted the refill system to place out more pieces in a variable schedule, sometimes placing 1 and sometimes 2 depending on where tiles were placed. This helped tune the flow of pieces into the river and provide a subtle increase in stategic decisionmaking.

This kind of tuning is often subtle, but provides important support for key gameplay concepts. We're immensely proud of the gameplay development on River Valley Glassworks and want to thank the designers and project manager Joe Wiggins for their continued and active feedback across the development process.

See more on the River Valley Glassworks Kickstarter page.

Brieger Creative Team