Whale Riders travel up and down the Ice Coast to trade, and with the coming winter, there’s time for one more trip before everything freezes over.

Whale Riders is a resource-management game for 2 to 6 players, ages 8 and up, and takes about 45 minutes to play. It’s currently seeking funding on Kickstarter, with a pledge level of $47 for a copy of the game along with the Whale Riders Card Game. It was originally published in 2021 by Grail Games, and APE Games has licensed it. Note that this campaign is for US backers only because it is intended to help pay for the tariffs incurred from importing it; more on that later.

Whale Riders was designed by Reiner Knizia and published by APE Games, with illustrations by Vincent Dutrait.

New to Kickstarter? Check out our crowdfunding primer.

Here’s what comes in the box:

The components are all fairly straightforward: small rectangular tiles and cardboard coins representing various goods, and contract cards that show combinations of goods along with the rewards for fulfilling them. The cloth bag for the tiles is a sturdy canvas material with a printed illustration that matches the backs of the contract cards; my only complaint about it is that it’s just barely big enough to hold all the tiles, which means it can be difficult to make sure they’re shuffled well. The Magic of the Whale tiles and Clan’s Decree tiles are for the variant rules.

Vincent Dutrait’s artwork is always eye-catching, and definitely helps to create the setting for the game, with a map of a snow-covered coastline serving as the background for what would otherwise be just a few rows of tiles. The standees depict people riding on the backs of different whales—orca, narwhal, beluga, dolphin—that have their own tattoo-like markings on them. There are small colored plastic bases for the standees, and for some reason the red character’s base is more of a dark orange (it looks less red in person), which can result in confusion with the orange character if players aren’t paying attention. I’m not so sure about the borrowing of what seems to be Inuit appearances (mixed with fantasy) in a game designed and illustrated by Europeans, although this is also not a game that has much narrative other than about a paragraph of intro text.

You can download a copy of the rulebook here.

The goal of the game is to acquire the most pearls.

Give each player a standee, placed at the Sun Port at the top of the board. Each player also gets 3 coins and 3 contract cards.

Set up the tiles on the board. First, place the starting pearl tiles (small tiles with purple backgrounds) at the Sun Port, with the single pearls at the lower prices and the 3 pearls at the highest price. Then, draw goods tiles from the bag and fill the spaces at the rest of the ports. For setup, the three ports closest to the Sun Port (Swordfish, Ray, and Urchin) may not include any tiles with 3 goods, 2 pearls, or 2 crystals.

After setting up the ports, add storm tiles to the bag based on the player count.

On your turn, you get 2 actions from the following choices (including the same action twice): Move, Buy, Take Gold, Discard Contracts, Fulfill Contracts.

Move: Move one space. At the beginning of the game, you move south. Once you have reached the Lobster Port at the bottom of the board, you will turn around and move back north again, but otherwise you cannot change direction or backtrack. Once you reach the Sun Port again, you do not move for the rest of the game.

Buy: Buy a tile from your current port by paying the coin cost shown on the board. (The tile closest to the port is free, the next one costs 1, and so on.) You may not buy starting pearls from the Sun Port at the start of the game, only when you have returned from your trip.

Take Gold: Take 1 coin from the supply.

Discard Contracts: Discard any number of contracts from your hand.

Fulfill Contracts: You may fulfill any number of contracts from your hand as a single action, but each contract must be fulfilled independently, so you can’t split goods from one tile across multiple contracts. Some contracts require a specific number of goods of certain types, and some require a particular number of goods or a number of tiles. You can overpay goods but you do not get any change for overpaying. Discard the goods tiles and immediately gain the number of coins shown on the contract card, and then place the contract card in a scoring pile for the end of the game. The rainbow-colored crystals are wild and can be used for any good, but if you use a double crystal tile they must both be the same good.

At the end of your turn, you draw back up to 3 contract cards and refill the board if you bought tiles. Slide tiles toward the “0” space of the port and refill from the bag. The snow storm tiles will take up spaces in the market, eventually sliding in so that goods at that port will be more expensive or unavailable altogether.

The game ends immediately when the last starting pearl tile is purchased from the Sun Port. (These spots are not refilled when purchased.) Everyone adds up their pearls from their completed contracts and purchased tiles, and the player with the most pearls wins. Ties go to the player with the most money remaining, and then the most goods tiles remaining.

To use the Clan’s Decree variant, randomly place 4 of the Clan’s Decree tile near the game board during setup. The first player to meet the requirements of each decree takes the tile and gains the bonus (either coins or pearls).

For the Magic of the Whales variant, players will draft an ability tile during setup, which gives them an ability to use for the game. For instance, you might be able to buy as many tiles as you want from the port for a single action, or use all 1-good tiles as wilds.

First, a bit of background about this Kickstarter campaign: as I mentioned above, Whale Riders was originally published in 2021, also through a Kickstarter campaign. APE Games worked with Grail Games to license and reprint it; the two variants were originally Kickstarter stretch goals, and are included in the APE Games version, and there are some minor graphic design changes, but overall the APE Games version is almost identical. This campaign is called a “Tariff Relief Kickstarter” because the games are actually already printed and sitting in China, but at the current US tariff rates, APE Games cannot afford to bring them into the US and put them all into regular distribution. The Kickstarter campaign lets them sell some copies of the game directly to the consumer and also raise the funds in advance, and may also allow them to ship over another title that is also waiting in China. (APE Games has the license for Whale Riders in the US, UK, and Canada, and are setting up separate distribution options for UK and Canada.)

Okay, with that out of the way, let’s talk about the game itself! Reiner Knizia is a wildly prolific designer (BoardGameGeek currently lists 783 titles under his name!) and I’ve found his games to be easy to learn, often with a mathy sort of puzzle feel, and with a light theme applied to them. You don’t usually get very deep into the story so it can feel a little pasted on, but they always have clever mechanics that make you think.

Whale Riders fits pretty well into that description. You get just enough flavor to give you an objective: get down the coast and back before everything freezes over, buying and trading goods. (Why do you want pearls? They won’t keep you warm and you can’t eat them, but I suppose they’re shiny!) With just two actions, your turns are tight and each decision feels like it will have an impact.

When the game begins, the first three ports won’t have any of the most valuable tiles. If you have contracts that require multiples of the same good, it feels most efficient to head south, where there might already be some 3-good tiles, rather than hoping they’ll turn up in the market after somebody buys something. On the other hand, any port could start filling up with storm tiles, and it feels like a missed opportunity to pass up a free tile when it’s sitting right there. To paraphrase The Clash: Should I stay or should I go now? If I stay there may be trouble (by missing out on better tiles further south); if I go the costs might double (on my return trip).

The contracts reward a mix of coins and pearls. Generally, contracts that require more different types of goods will give you more coins—but it also takes more turns (and probably money) to acquire them. Others might award you with a lot of pearls but not refill your gold supply, so then you may need to spend some of your precious actions just accumulating gold, especially later in the game when the free goods tiles have frozen over.

I think one of the key decisions in the game is when to head back home to the Sun Port. Do you stick around, try to pick up a few more goods tiles to fulfill contracts, or do you race back and start buying as many pearls as you can afford? If you’re the first one there, you could even take your time, buying a pearl and claiming a gold, and dropping the 3-pearl tile in cost until you can afford it. But if there are some other players closing in, maybe it’s worth paying the extra to get the higher valued pearls. It’s always a consideration that when you buy a cheaper tile, whether it’s a good or a pearl, you’ll be dropping the price of the later tiles for your opponents.

Overall, I’ve been enjoying Whale Riders. It’s a pretty quick game and the ending has a nice bit of tension when the board is filling up with all of the snow storm tiles. The variant rules give it some variety without adding too much complexity.

I haven’t gotten a chance to try the Whale Riders Card Game yet, but it’s a standalone game that shares the theme and artwork, but has its own gameplay—and Kickstarter backers will get it included in the pledge. You’re adding cards from your hand to a common pool (it represents a purchase order), and when a specific good reaches its threshold, those goods are purchased and will score for the players that played them, and all other cards are discarded and score nothing. The trick there is that cards that score more points have a higher threshold, so it’s easier to undercut them with low-scoring cards. There are also a few bonus cards and storm cards that can throw a wrench into the plans. I found that I could even fit the entire card game box inside the board game box, so now I’ve got all my Whale Riders in one place!

For more information or to make a pledge, visit the Whale Riders Kickstarter page!

Disclosure: GeekDad received a copy of this game for review purposes.

Source: geekdad.com