Meadowvale: The River
Development Log: The Meadowvale River
The River Leam near my home winds through the countryside to the east. It rarely grows wider than a few metres, glimpsed running under bridges or alongside a wood when out walking. It flows through Leamington Spa, flooding only at the weir in Jephson Gardens, before joining the Avon at Warwick. From there, it flows to the Severn and finally the estuary. This is how most rivers in the Cotswolds behave: narrow, branching, connecting streams. If you go out cycling a lot as I do, then you start to trace them, where they start and where they join other streams. It really is a beautiful and gentle part of the world!
So in the game, it made sense to start with rivers. My first attempt was to design abstract river tiles with specific mechanics, but this did not feel realistic. It looked more like a large-scale map with patches of water. I wanted connected rivers that wound through the countryside. Scale was an important factor, and once I had decided that the board represented around four square miles, it made sense to have only one river. I experimented with branches and tributaries, but a single river feature worked better, especially since river tiles connect to one another and cannot be blocked by other terrain. In that way the river grows naturally as tiles are drawn.
Kingfishers were always going to score based on rivers. The first iteration of the rule allowed several rivers and a kingfisher to claim points equal to the length of an entire river system, with no other kingfishers placed on that stretch. This reflected their solitary and territorial nature, but it created problems. Once a river was claimed, other players could block or disrupt the system entirely. It was a good mechanic, but it belonged in a different game. With a single river winding through the board, the river became a platform for kingfisher interaction. Retaining the idea of solitary placement, scoring is now based on how many clear hexes of river there are until the next kingfisher. As the design developed, I added an environmental rule: farmland and village tiles reduce a kingfisher’s score if placed adjacent to the river. Kingfishers now have an optimal score of +4, reduced by other factors. The placement of tiles on the banks to protect or disrupt a kingfisher’s line is now a strategic concern.
The result is a separate web of interaction involving the river and kingfishers.
For many playtests, the river cut the board in half. And for a while I quite liked the idea of two sides evolving differently. Sometimes though it was too separate with only Barn Owls being able to influence both sides. More recently, the rules have been updated to allow some animals to cross following ecological behaviour, but that is a subject for another log. So there is a story in every river, a kingfisher hunting, and protecting it's space, and the landscape around it.
