River Horse: Noli The Board Game

Noli is a relatively short game (45-60 minutes) for 2-4 players that involves a well-designed combination of mechanisms (Auction / Bidding, Real-Time Dice Rolling, Events, Income / Resource Management). It's fairly simple to learn and a lot of frantic fun, as you rush to build up your fishing tower to six levels high. It's a race after all and the first one to finish their tower wins!In terms of value for one's money spent on Noli, it's got charm and replayability going for it at a very reasonable price point. The only real downside is that once a player gets a lot of choice things going for him/her and starts to steamroll ahead of other players, it tends to stay that way and can be very frustrating having to wait two or three rounds before a glimmer of hope might arise to compete again. That being said, if a game goes south (so to speak) said player wins and another game quickly begins thereafter just because it really is rather addictive to best the player who just won the last game. The challenge aspect simply wins out over the steamrolling.

I heard about this game from a board game group. I was surprised at the quality for the price. My friends and I can't stop playing. I know it's a great game when someone is cheering their win, someone is cursing their loss and everyone is laughing! Great strategy in the bidding phase! Do you want to advance on the track? Have the rolling advantage during the regatta race? Add a boat to your fleet? Build your tower? Each action might bring you closer to the win until you lose a boat, all your gold. Be the first to build your tower to win. Sounds easy but your competitors will be waiting to sabotage you! It's a squealer!!! It takes 1 or 2 games to get familiar.

Exciting game with a good bit of take that. The game can run long if players do not focus on the different ways to win. "MAN OVERBOARD!"

This game was surprisingly well made, especially considering the low price point. The pieces are wood and thick cardboard. The game plays well without any confusing glitches. We've only played with 2 players so far, but looking forward to playing with four. It's got a bit of everything: bidding, dice-rolling, action cards, building. We thought it was really fun.

The game has 2 major problems which we found out fairly quickly. It is unbalanced in terms of coins in that a short ways into the game one player is getting 15-20 coins and another is getting 3-5. And that brings up the second problem. There is no way to recover. Once you are down to one boat you get no coins and have a limited chance of recovering or bringing the leader down to your level. The walls and the Courtier track have vey little effect on game play. I bought this game because of it's low price. Normally we can make adjustments to make the game playable but the card stacks are just too unbalanced in terms of coins and the various calamities that can be visited upon the other players. We all like playing the game, messing around with the bits and the design and backstory are lovely but the game play needs some work. Sorry.

Based on the general visual feel of this game, I took it to be a fairly light strategy euro-style game. The art and colors are great, the components are really nice, and I love that it's in a thinner box. However, there are a few elements here which I think are a pretty big turn-off for most strategy gamers, myself included.First, blind bidding is great, but completely throwing away your losing bid feels rough. Bid amounts tend to be low since you ideally want to win without overpaying, and hopefully pay double for the extra action, so ties are common and the tie-breaker being placement on the track gives a huge advantage to players earlier in starting order. The game has a few pieces in place to replenish your money each round so maybe this feels worse than it is, but barely losing a bid and just tossing your money to the bank does not make for a fun experience.Second, the speed dice rolling round just feels out of place. Everyone gets cool stuff so earlier decks aren't always better, but they can mess up later players so going early is an advantage and the cards tend to be best. Regardless, any game that involves quickly and competitively rolling dice puts certain people I know at a huge disadvantage just for general dexterity reasons, and I don't like needing to house-rule a game just to make it playable.Third, the random card draws can be pretty swingy, like just wiping out everyone else's money. And some of the cards may not really help me directly much at all. You do get a little boost if you completely miss on money, but going into a round broke is still painful.Overall, I'm just not sure who this is meant for. It's presented like a strategy game but you make very few meaningful decisions and you can't really even be proud of big cool plays since so much of it is just luck. Looks great, but the gameplay is certainly not for me.

The product came in time and as expected.

Game was pretty good. Price was great. We like it.