Pyramid Review
The Spirits of Niagara (for Niagara)
Published by Rio Grande Games
Designed by Thomas Liesching
Seven canoes (two for a sixth player, one each for extant positions), whirlpool and sixth-player stickers, 25 paddle-point cards, Hurried Elk foldout, Bathing Beaver pawn, rules; full-color, boxed; $24.95
Competition is getting fierce along the river. Everyone wants those gems, and you can't count on help from your human rivals. To whom do you appeal? The Spirits of Niagara, of course. In this supplement to Niagara, collecting one's fabulous jewel selection takes on new directions. In large part it boils down to changing the movement options offered.
For one thing, there's a whirlpool. The game provides a sticker that attaches to one of the clear plastic disks from the original set. You now have to actually keep track of which disks and how many you've sent through the pipeline, because the vortex goes down the river, over the falls, and back into the rotation at the upper end, costing you more paddle points to traverse all the way.
The spirits in question are animal spirits dwelling along the river, and they can be called upon to help the needful adventurer (the whirlpool seems nominally associated with the fish pictured thereon). The edge of the falls were notoriously difficult to reach without slipping over in Niagara, but now anyone that far out has an edge of their own: the Hurried Elk. He sits beside the last gem site on the . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: June 30, 2006
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