Riverfolk Company

Sell your services, collect your funds, and convert otter commerce into victory points.

Moderate

Background

The Riverfolk Company is a band of merchant otters who treat the waterways of the Woodland as their private highway network. While other factions fight over clearings, the Riverfolk set up shop along the rivers and sell valuable services to whoever can afford them — riverboat passage, warriors for hire, and cards from their hand.

Your entire economy runs on funds: warriors that other factions pay you when they buy your services. Those funds cycle through your faction board — from the Payments box into the Funds box at the start of each of your turns — and you spend or commit them during Daylight to take actions, build trade posts, and eventually convert them into victory points.

This is a faction that wins through economic patience and clever pricing. You are not here to conquer the map. You are here to make yourself indispensable, then cash out.

How you win

You score VP two ways: by placing trade posts in clearings (each placement awards points immediately, and the more posts you build the more each one contributes) and by taking the Dividends action during Daylight, which converts the warriors sitting in your Funds box into VP at a rate of one point per two funds.

The key insight is that you need other factions to actually buy your services. No purchases means no funds, and no funds means no actions and no dividends. Your pricing strategy — set each Evening — is a constant balancing act between making services attractive enough that players buy in and expensive enough that each purchase actually moves your score.

Trade posts also matter beyond their immediate VP: they expand how many services a buyer can purchase in a single turn (one per trade post in a clearing where the buyer has pieces), which means a well-placed post can multiply your incoming funds over many rounds.

How they play

Your turn does not begin with actions — it begins with accounting. During Birdsong, if your Payments box is empty you place two warriors there as a floor guarantee, then you score dividends (one VP for every two warriors in your Funds box, but only if you have trade posts on the map), and finally you move everything on your faction board into the Funds box.

In Daylight you spend or commit those funds to act. Most actions cost one fund committed to your Commitments box:

Move — travel between clearings connected by river or path
Battle — fight in any clearing where you have warriors
Draw — take a card from the shared deck
Recruit — spend (not commit) one fund to place a warrior in a river clearing
Establish Trade Post — spend two funds belonging to the faction that rules the target clearing; place a trade post and a warrior there and score immediately
Craft — commit funds to your trade post tracks by suit to craft a card

Each Evening you discard down to five cards and set your service prices by repositioning your service markers on the three tracks — Hand Card, Riverboats, and Mercenaries. This is your only chance to adjust costs, so read the table before you lock in.

Strengths

✓
Every time another player buys one of your services, warriors flow into your Payments box without you doing anything. A busy table with active players generates funds even on turns when you hold back, letting your engine run almost automatically.
✓
You treat rivers as paths by default, which gives you a movement network that ignores most of the map's chokepoints. You can reach clearings that other factions need multiple turns to cross, letting you build trade posts efficiently and respond to threats quickly.
✓
Because you profit from other players' turns rather than territorial control, you rarely need to pick fights. You can stay out of the major wars and let the combative factions exhaust each other while your Funds box quietly fills up.

Weaknesses

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If other factions ignore your services — whether because your prices are too high or they simply don't need what you're offering — your funds dry up and your whole engine stalls. You have almost no way to force purchases.
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Removing one of your trade posts costs you half your remaining funds, rounded up. An opponent who identifies this vulnerability and targets your posts can collapse your economy in one or two attacks, especially mid-game when your fund stack is largest.
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You rule very few clearings and have a modest warrior pool dedicated to action. You cannot bully other factions off the map, which means you rely entirely on diplomacy and pricing to protect your interests.

Tips & tricks

Tip
Setting prices too high is the most common Riverfolk mistake. A service that nobody buys earns you nothing. Start your costs low in the early game to get funds flowing, then raise prices once players depend on what you offer.
Tip
Dividends score at the start of your turn during Birdsong — but only when you have trade posts on the map. Get at least one trade post placed before your Funds box grows large, so you're not sitting on a pile of warriors that score you nothing.
Tip
Place trade posts in clearings where your warriors won't be easily outnumbered. Losing a post mid-game when your funds are high is catastrophic — the fund drain alone can cost you more than the VP you gained from placing it.
Tip
The Mercenaries service lets a buyer use your warriors in battle as their own. This is powerful for them, but it puts your warriors at risk. Price it accordingly and think twice before selling it to a faction that might use your troops to attack your own trade posts.

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