“In a land being explored by frontiersmen and soon to be settled by pioneers, as valuable a resource as nature ever provided man is a steady stream of fresh water from the flow of mighty rivers and their vast tributaries; in The Great Divide, it is up to players to see that nature favors their side in the flow of that water to the oceans.”

That’s the primer directly from the publisher’s mouth.
Now, with that said, what this game really is, is a brilliant area control game in which players draw tiles and attempt to fence in a larger area than the other.

Here’s the rundown:

Contents
Game Components:
• One 4-page, illustrated, full-color instructions booklet with Variants and a Scoring Example
• 72 1” die-cut hexagon-shaped River tiles
• 20 Selection and Events cards
• 1 8.5” x 11” game board of the Rocky Mountain region of North America

I can’t really comment on the quality of the components as published. I only have a hand-made copy I produced for playtesting. What I can tell you is that the art is perfectly adequate for game play. The tiles are the exact size they need to be in order to convey the information needed, without being fiddly or overly large. And the board really looks great!


Setup
What setup!?
Really, this is one of the lightest setups in gaming. Place the board between players. Players get their own hand of selection cards. Shuffle the event cards (if used.) Place all tiles in an opaque container.

That’s it. Setup complete… now for the fun part!


Game Play

The board is split into 7 regions: East, West, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Mexico. Players are placing “River Tiles” on the board, attempting to influence the flow of water towards their edge of the board (East or West.)

On a players turn, they draw a tile from the lot and place it on the board. Each tile has an arrow on it that shows the direction of flow for that tile. Players are trying to connect these arrows in a “chain” that connects to their edge of the map. Players are not allowed to place a tile so that the flow runs off the North or South edges of the board nor may they place a tile so that the arrow points directly at an arrow of another tile.


That is, essentially the entire game… except for the clever bit that is:

Selection Cards – players, prior to drawing are allowed to “tune” the tile that they wish to draw. At the beginning of the game, each player is given a selection card for each section of the board. Also, there are special “geography tiles” and a selection card for them as well. Before a player draws they may select any number of these selection cards and turn them to the “Passive” side. What this means, is that if you draw a tile in which you have selected as “Passive” you do not have to place it… but you do have to give it to your opponent for them to place. Once you have placed a tile, your turn ends.

The special geography tiles are as follows:
“5” – a tile that is simply worth 5 points at the end of the game. It is not placed on the board. The player drawing the tile has the option of keeping it, or passing it.
“Great Basin” – this tile is a lake. No water may flow into the lake and water never flows out of the lake. So, in essence, it blocks a hex from scoring.
“Two Ocean Pass” – this tile must be placed so that it is joined or can be joined to both the East and West. It MUST connect to both the East and West at the end of the game, and all tiles placed must adhere to this new rule.
“Earthquake” – the player drawing the earthquake must chose to pass, or remove one tile from the board and place it back in the lot. If they pass, their turn ends. If they remove a tile, then their opponent has the choice to pass or remove a tile. This proceeds until one player passes at which time the current players turn ends.

“Event” – when an Event tile is drawn, the player turns over the top card of the event deck and takes the appropriate action. Now, as an outside playtester, we did not test this aspect of the game, so I cannot comment on it… though I can’t wait to play with this! Reading the rules for the events, they sound very powerful and would add a wonderful bit of spice to the game.


Game End
The game ends when the board is full. That’s easy enough, right?
Now the hard part… scoring.
Players score 1 point for each tile that is connected to their edge of the board. This can be a bit tricky at first, but once you learn the basic method, it’s rather easy to calculate. The rules provide a very detailed example of scoring, which is VERY helpful to new players.


Conclusion
What a unique experience!
This really is a great 2-player game. Once both players have a few games to chew on the strategies, it becomes a tense struggle. I would recommend this to anyone who enjoys a tense two-player struggle that plays rather quickly. This is a very good abstract with a theme that fits it quite nicely…. so, a thematic-abstract, thabstract.

7.5/10

Thanks for the review, Chevee.

One Note: It's not a chain, it's a river.

Sorry about that. It's hard to convey what's going on in the game without occasionally slipping into abstract terminology... once out of that whole review? I dun gewd theyen!

Chevee

Just wanted to reiterate this. That's possibly the most useful example of play in a game I've read. Without it we'd have been lost!

Nice game. We have to have another go now we've figured out some basic tactics.

One problem I have is that I keep thinking you shouldn't be allowed to have a river start on the East sector and travel all the way to drain off the West side (or vice versa)... It just sounds geographically wrong!

However, in the real world, part of the Northernmost West hex (the Montana-Idaho border) does flow to the East.