When it comes to his work with Button Shy, purveyor of 18-card wallet games, Steven Aramini has a mode. Between Circle the Wagons and Sprawlopolis — not to mention spinoffs Agropolis and Naturopolis — his output has been a fixture of microgames for years. His latest diminutive title is River Wild, about selectively channeling a river through a fantasy kingdom to preserve its wildlife. It is exceptionally pink and purple. That might be the one kind thing I can say for it.

Running a cotton candy river.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a workmanlike confidence behind River Wild. Aramini knows how to leverage a handful of cards and some mismatched scoring bubbles into a solitaire score-chaser. Here that dichotomy is manifested on each and every card. On one side of the river rests a fantasy animal, whether dragon, unicorn, jackalope, or, um, frog. On the other is a goal. Save three frogs, for instance, or save one of each animal, or unite a dragon and a unicorn. If you save more, all the better, letting scoring criteria double or triple for further sets.

It’s relatively straightforward, although there are a couple of wrinkles to consider. Mountains can serve as land or water, which matters because you don’t want your islands to become too large. In addition to scoring points for every completed island, you also score half points for everything on your largest stretch of land, making it imperative to split up your animals as often as possible. There are also totems that jut from the river and act like wildcards, adding animals to every adjacent island.

And, well, that’s that. Unlike the changeable conditions of Sprawlopolis and its offspring, River Wild doesn’t vary much from session to session. As placement games go, it doesn’t deviate from its straightforward challenge. That could be considered a strength; in some of these games, pulling the right victory conditions is tantamount to success or failure. If only River Wild managed to replicate the successes of its predecessors as well as it stripped away their shortcomings. The formula is familiar enough. You place one card at a time, drawing replacements from the deck so as to keep your hand at a steady three options. It’s a tight design space, allowing for both suboptimal necessities and little ah-ha moments.

But the moment-to-moment gameplay is frustrating, withholding the spills and windfalls that made Sprawlopolis such a delight to interface with. A big part of the problem is the blandness of the victory conditions. Set collection feels like a step backward, even if the game keeps demanding different sets. It doesn’t help that where Aramini’s previous efforts were always visually clear, placing River Wild’s diagonal outcroppings is awkward and hard to visualize. It lacks the crispness of those titles, not to mention the satisfaction of wringing every possible point out of your placements.

Not every river is a looker.

I’ve always had a soft spot for microgames not because they perfectly replicate what makes their more expansive kin compelling, but because they’re exercises in distillation and compression, even revelation. In the best of cases, they focus a microscope on a single concept and highlight why it’s worth exploring in its own right. In the past, Aramini has excelled in his examinations of variable victory conditions. Titles like Sprawlopolis showed that variable criteria, while not to be confused with replayability, could mix up a puzzle with new considerations, giving even an 18-card microgame surprising legs.

Unlike those games, which got me chasing ever-higher scores, one five-minute session with River Wild is enough. It’s too prickly and difficult to decipher, too prone to a bad draw, too skint with its points. If even five minutes feels too long, that’s a sign. There are better microgames to explore.

Including, as it turns out, another solitaire offering from Aramini and Button Shy that we’ll be looking at tomorrow.

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi.)

A complimentary copy was provided.