Far to the north, in a remote winter land, the rivers are frozen most of the year. When the villages along the riverside eventually are accessible, a small river cruise company offers exotic tours like polar bear safaris, ice fishing, reindeer trips, and more. Lucky tourists might even get a chance to see the northern lights.

You work as a tour guide attempting to attract tourists to your guide boats for spectacular excursions.

Riverside is a different type of roll-and-write game: The game includes a modular game board, which composes the route for the game. On a river cruise boat, everyone will follow the same route, but you can take your tourists on different tours. You can plan ahead, but beware, the dice may force you to change your plans.

You begin each round by rolling dice into a common pool. Simultaneously, each player picks one die of one specific color (without physically taking it) and fill seats on the matching guiding boat on their own player sheet. Whenever they have filled a row of seats, they have sold a group ticket of the corresponding color (excursion). The longer the row, the more points they will get. Additionally, this ticket is valid for the rest of the game: Each time they go on an excursion in a village of this color, they take this group with them to earn even more points. The player with the most points wins.

Each dice color represents tourists with a preference for a specific type of excursion. The transparent green die is "wild" and represents the northern lights, something everyone wants to watch.

Riverside provides tough decision-making within a short playing time: Some rows are short with low points and bonuses, while other rows are long with more points and bonuses. Which one do you begin to fill? Within each guide boat, you will need to score higher and higher, so taking too many tourists on your first excursions could be fateful. Players will be rewarded if they manage to please all five kinds of tourists, so maybe you need to score a new color instead of scoring really high in another color? Higher dice represent tourists who are cold and cost fire symbols to get. Note that the "wild" green die will always costs fire symbols to get! You'll have a limited number of fire symbols to use, so when will be the right time to use them?