Niagara (board game)

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Niagara

Designer	Thomas Liesching
Publisher	Zoch zum Spielen Rio Grande Games
Players	3–5
Age range	8 and up
Setup time	< 5 minutes
Playing time	30-45 minutes
Random chance	Medium
Skills required

BoardGameGeek entry

Niagara is a German-style board game designed by Thomas Liesching and published in 2004 by Zoch zum Spielen and Rio Grande Games.

The game is played on a hinged board designed to sit atop the game box and represent Niagara Falls as a flap hanging over the box edge. The river is represented using clear plastic discs in a grooved surface, allowing board spaces to move downstream toward the waterfall. Although these components are not geometrically tiling shapes, the mutable board layout of Niagara otherwise functions in the manner of a tile-based game.

Players collect gems along a river. Players move canoes to transport the gems, and can steal gems from other players' canoes. They may also influence the speed with which the board spaces move downstream. The first player to acquire four gems of one colour, or one of each of the five colours, or seven gems of any colour, is the winner. Although the game box states that gems closer to the waterfall are of higher value, the game treats all colours equally.

[edit] Awards

In 2005 the game won the Spiel des Jahres [1] and was one of the winners of the Mensa Mind Games competition.[2] It received 2nd place in the Deutscher Spiele Preis and 3rd in the Schweizer Spielepreis for Family Games.