River Valley Glassworks

River Valley Glassworks

Quick Summary

Fast paced and cozy, Glassworks is a one to five player drafting game centered around collecting glass pieces from an “eh hem” moving river. Using the glass pieces from your satchel  as a resource, you select a section of the river to pan glass from. You use that glass to raise your score higher than your opponents through quantity and diversity. With games usually lasting less than ten turns, this is a very fast game that won’t bore kids, and will entertain adults.


How to Play

River Valley Glassworks, or just Glassworks as we call it, players are competing to get the highest score by placing a collection of glass pieces on their Glassworks board in the order they feel will get them the most points. The glass pieces are categorized in two ways, the color and the shape. There are eight base colors and a ninth if you play with five people as well as six unique shapes. The shape of the glass pieces is used for drafting, while the colors are used for scoring.

Tips and Tricks

Remember what you pick out of the lake will eventually be back in the river, so be selective and pick pieces that you want for your glassworks board.

Not all colors are created equally.  Look at the chart to see the most common colors. You want to place colors to the left that can make at least 2~3 in the column, but not the most common one so that you end up with getting it as your tallest column. 


How to Set Up

  • 1. Give each player a satchel board, a glassworks board, and have them place their inventory tracker at zero.

  • 2. Connect the six river tiles in a random order to form a river, and then connect the base of the river to the lake tile within reach of everyone.

  • 3. Randomly pull glass pieces from the bag, to fill all the places needed: you will place (5) glass pieces into the lake, one or two glass pieces on each river tile corresponding to the number of stones on that tile, and (3) glass pieces on each play

  • 4.The player who most recently saw a river gets the first player marker and is ready to start their turn.