Base price: $25.
3 players.
Play time: ~20 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy directly!
Logged plays: 3
Unfortunately, it’s been a pretty busy month, so reviewing has taken a bit of a back seat to all of the work- and non-work-related stuff that’s come up. It … happens, I suppose, but I’m hoping that I can tackle some interesting games over MLK Weekend and try to get back to being somewhat ahead on reviews, ahead of a bunch of travel and such over the next few months. We will certainly see. In times of strife I come back to my old stalwarts, Oink Games, and I’m always excited to see what they have next in the pipeline. I already covered DroPolter, one of my new favorites, but let’s see how Rafter Five measures up!
In Rafter Five, players are after one thing: treasure! The best way to get treasure, as everyone knows, is to build as big of a raft as possible. The trick is making sure that getting on the raft is as tricky as possible, so that other players fall off into the water with their goods (and sometimes yours). If they drop your stuff off, you can blame them for it and potentially kick them out of the treasure hunting group. Ideal, really. So build the raft, make it complex, and see who you can trick. Will you be able to stay afloat?
Contents
Setup
This one’s pretty straightforward. Give each player a Penalty Board:
Then, give each player a set of Treasure Chests in the same color. If there are fewer players, distribute more Penalty Boards and Treasure Chests:
- 2 players: Everyone gets three Penalty Boards and seven Treasure Chests in the matching colors.
- 3 players: Everyone gets two Penalty Boards and seven Treasure Chests in the matching colors.
- 4+ players: Everyone gets one Penalty Board and seven Treasure Chests in the matching color.
Regardless, empty out the box and place the box bottom on the box top (face-down) and place the base card on top of that. This will be your raft!
Mix the lumber cards around upside down to create the ocean, and spread them out around the raft in a circle (ish).
Finally, place the rafters on top of the raft, however you like.
Once you pick a starting player, you should be ready to go!
Gameplay
The game isn’t too complicated, either, which is nice. To start your turn, if any rafters are in the water, you have to take one of them. If not, lift any rafter from any spot on the raft. Then, select a lumber card from the water by taking a Sea Card and flipping it over. Place the lumber card and the rafter on the raft so that the lumber card is covering at least one other lumber card (no sliding it below things!) and place the rafter on top of the new lumber card. Finish up by placing one of your Treasure Chests on the lumber card as well. Everything must be placed flat; you cannot tilt the lumber cards or something weird.
If you placed everything successfully, your turn ends! If at any point anything falls down, stop what you’re doing and resolve that. To resolve, if any of your Treasure Chests fell, they’re returned to your supply. If any of your opponents’ Treasure Chests fell, they’re placed on your Penalty Board. Bummer. Either way, your turn immediately ends. If you still have something in your hand, gently place it into the sea.
There are a few extra rules, such as having to stick with the rafter that you touched and not intentionally moving rafters or chests while placing, but generally, just play the way you think you should play.
Continue playing until one player has taken at least five penalty Treasure Chests. The game ends, and everyone else wins! If you’d like there to be an explicit winner, the player with the fewest penalty Treasure Chests wins!
There are also advanced rules, if you’d like! One set disallows playing lumber cards on top of nails (the circles in the corners of many lumber cards). The other disallows playing a lumber card on top of another lumber card’s joint (usually towards the middle; a dark spot). Good luck!
Player Count Differences
Rafter Five tends to be most exciting with more players, in my opinion. At lower player counts, you’re essentially just doing the same thing but you’re playing multi-handed; you control multiple “players” and so does your opponent. The only difference is that both sets of chests are considered yours, so you don’t take on as much risk as one individual player might at higher player counts. Even then, though, I think part of the fun of the game is seeing how different players react to the tragedy unfolding in front of them from a stacking game perspective. There’s a lot to love, frankly. With more players you just get more interaction around the table and frustration and table talk; you won’t see that with fewer players. I still enjoy Rafter Five at low player counts, but I think it definitely shines with more.
Strategy
- So, each turn there’s usually a non-load-bearing rafter. Look for them first. Remember that whoever you touch you’re stuck moving, so look with your eyes, not with your hands. There’s usually someone who has their lumber card partially covered by another lumber card, so you might be able to wriggle them away or place another lumber card without the entire game collapsing underneath of you. It’s good to know who’s safe and who will make you sorry.
- The smallest rafter doesn’t weigh anything, so don’t use them to counterbalance a Treasure Chest. Truly, they’re just a little rafter. They do not weigh more than (or even the same as) a Treasure Chest, so if you try to place them incorrectly your chest will end up in the sea 100% of the time. Not ideal.
- On the plus side, the smallest rafter doesn’t weigh anything, so they’re often going to be your non-load-bearing friend. You should usually be able to move them off of where they are unless they’re the lynchpin of a multi-rafter, multi-chest weight-balancing conspiracy. Again, it pays to do a quick survey of the game state before you touch anything. But more often than not they’re the rafter placed in a way that they can be maneuvered somewhere else pretty easily.
- The rafter with the big arms can be pretty useful in a sneaky way. What I do is place my lumber card below them such that the edge is right under their arm, and then I place my rafter and my Treasure Chest. Subsequent turns, if the rafter with the big arms is still there, I can move my initial rafter and the lumber card will tilt up, being caught under their huge arms. Now they super cannot be moved and I got a free low-risk play. It usually works.
- I usually try to do aggressive balancing moves so that my rafter can’t immediately be moved. My favorite is always getting the chest completely suspended in the air off of the side of the raft; it looks great, it plays well, and it’s a very clear threat to anyone who would move the rafter I just placed.
- The biggest rafter can often support multiple Treasure Chests themself. They’re large and in charge, and you can create so many interesting balancing situations with them if you’re lucky. They don’t move a lot, as a result, since they’re usually balancing a chest that’s well off the raft entirely.
- Generally speaking, you don’t explicitly care who dumps your Treasure Chests, as long as it’s someone. Under the explicit rules of the game, all other players win when someone loses, so you can ignore targeting people or playing to make certain Treasure Chests harder to knock off or keep if you’re playing with those rules. Sometimes it’s nice for everyone else to win!
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- The different rafter shapes are very fun. They come in all shapes and sizes! Big ones and little ones and wide ones and narrow ones. I kind of wish they sold like, randomized gacha packs of rafters so that every game could be unique, but I imagine there’s some “game design” reasons why that wouldn’t work. Good convention promo, though; just put a coin in and get a random new rafter, hint hint.
- I also like the verticality of the game, using the box and everything. It’s fun to see games that actually use the box as part of the game. It’s a relative rarity, so every time it happens, I’m a little delighted.
- Stacking and balancing are some of my favorite things to do in a game. It’s been a favorite genre of mine for several years now, both from the Catch the Moon era of gaming and also from more recent favorites in the genre. It’s a real perennial, and I’m excited to see an Oink Games take on it. My particular favorite thing about it is that you can come in with no experience and, after watching a more experienced player start to play, you can learn some new tricks and techniques. It’s one of the genres that you can see a lot of player skill growth rapidly, and while that’s terrifying, it’s also excellent.
- I also like how flimsy all the cards feel. They’re very small and thin, but with the right weight they will stay firmly in place. I particularly like how much they bow without bending; it adds a good amount of stress to the game since you’re not sure if the chest will slide off or not.
- Plays pretty quickly. It’s an easy 20 minutes; I’d be surprised if players could go that long without a catastrophic error.
- As with most Oinks, portable, too. I love throwing like, ten or twelve of these in a backpack for a game day. They’re so easy to take everywhere.
- Fairly easy to learn. You just kind of play how you expect. Rafter and chest go on a card. There’s some specific edge case rules about placement order for balancing reasons, but beyond that, everything kind of follows from there.
- You can create some nightmarish balance systems in this, and I love that. You really can make some things that defy God and gravity as you build out the raft, and I think that’s hilarious. We usually celebrate the first player to place a rafter or a Treasure Chest completely off of the raft. Mild applause far from the table.
Mehs
- Repacking the game is mildly annoying, since you have to shake it a bit to get all the pieces to settle into the right spot. It fits, but it barely fits, as is the Oink guarantee, sometimes. It also means that the base card gets a bit bumped by all of the wooden bits jostling around, which isn’t ideal from a photography standpoint. I wish the base were cardboard or something a bit thicker.
- I do wish they had explicitly named the rafters. It’s an immersion thing. Who are these rafters? What compelled them to get on this (also unnamed) raft? I just want to know.
Cons
- The game can end fairly anticlimactically, as one person may just knock over the entire thing and then, obviously, they lose. It’s a tiny bit of a bummer when the game just ends, but there’s really no way around it. I tend to prefer minor catastrophes here than a major one where someone just knocks off everything; I think it’s more fun for there to be a bit of growing tension between players with penalties.
Overall: 8.25 / 10
Overall, I think Rafter Five is a blast! Of the two new Oink dexterity games, I will have to say I slightly prefer DroPolter, both because it has a sillier theme and it’s a fundamentally sillier game overall, but despite that, I still think Rafter Five is a lot of fun, too! I think there could have been some better theme work done to get me invested in the plight of these rafters I’m about to dunk, granted, but that’s just life, sometimes. It’s a bit unsatisfying in a Tokyo Highway kind of way when the entire thing falls over and the game just kind of ends, but that’s also a lot of stacking games; there’s not much you can do to recreate what you had previously, and not much point continuing and ignoring it because of how many negative points the player just took. It just never feels the right level of satisfying to me. I’ll think more about that. Nonetheless, for a small-box stacking game, you can do some pretty wild things in here as players place rafters and counterbalance cards with rafters and chests and vice-versa. I’d love to see a build that gets every rafter off of the main box itself, but that sounds near-impossible to pull off. As I mentioned earlier, one of my favorite things about stacking games as a genre is that you can watch players rapidly improve over the course of the game as they see what other players are playing and how they’re doing it and they start to emulate similar techniques, so the game can really get heated quickly, and that’s half the fun. The other half is the wild, nightmarish things you can build with just a few wooden pieces. Love a stacking game. Anyways, if you’re looking for a fun and quick game that will test your estimation and dexterity, you love raft-themed games, or you’re just an Oink lifer, you’ll probably enjoy Rafter Five! I certainly have.
If you enjoyed this review and would like to support What’s Eric Playing? in the future, please check out my Patreon. Thanks for reading!