Gamehelpriverbankers

Overview: River Bankers is a 2–4 player worker-bidding auction game (30–60 min, ages 10+) in which rival semi-aquatic mammals — beaver, otter, muskrat, and mink — collect timber, stone, reed, mud, vine, and clay drifting downriver and spend them to build structures along the bank. The goal is to score the most victory points (★), earned mainly from the structure cards you build. Every action costs fish (🐟) — your workers eat them to swim against the current — paid by advancing your pawn on a shared 60-space fish track. There are no rounds: the player whose pawn sits farthest back on the fish track always acts next, and keeps acting until someone else falls behind them. This makes fish both your currency and your clock — a big, expensive turn buries you deep on the track, which hands turns to everyone else but also buys you a run of upcoming turns.

Your turn: Take exactly one action, which slides your pawn forward by its fish cost. The core action is running an auction: choose a material card in the Headwaters (pay 2/3/4🐟 by slot — this is Pull) or an existing card already in the River (Swim, 1🐟 flat). Every player then secretly bids workers, all reveal at once, and — critically — everyone pays fish for their full bid, win or lose (per-item cost is 1🐟 in the Headwaters, and 2/3/4/5🐟 for River spaces 1–4). If total bids fit on the card, everyone places what they bid; if bids overflow the card's icons, the river "jams" and each player takes their bid minus the overbid, so paying up front keeps big bids honest. Other actions let you refresh the market (Flush the Headwaters, 5🐟), draw/cycle structure cards (Invent, draw N and discard N), or Build.

Materials, movement, and building: Winning workers sit on the icons of a material card, claiming those materials. After any auction, if the card still has uncovered icons it slides one space downstream (where per-item cost rises); if fully claimed it goes straight to the shoreline. To Build, pay the structure's printed fish cost and return the required workers from your material cards to your supply; place the structure in front of you for its ★ and any ongoing power. Structure effects come in a few flavors — When built (fires once immediately), When you build / passive perks, As an action, Once per game, and End of game scorers — but a card never affects the build that created it. An optional (recommended) species starter draft at setup gives each player one asymmetric structure already built from turn 1, each species biased toward cheaper handling of its signature material.

Endgame and scoring: The fish track has a single finish line at 90 fish (on the second lap — flip your pawn to its "+60" side when you pass 0). The moment an action carries your pawn to or past the line, you finish that action and retire: you take no more turns and bid 0 in remaining auctions. Once the first pawn crosses, anyone may retire early by advancing to the lowest open space at/past the line (retiring to a lower space helps the tiebreaker). After everyone has retired, go around once more for one final build each. Then total up: ★ on your built structures, plus 1★ per pair of same-type leftover workers you still have on the board (count each material's workers across your cards and score floor(workers/2); wildcards assign each worker to maximize pairs), plus any variable (?-VP) structures resolved from the end-state. Most victory points wins.