Floßer am Katarakt is a nicely-produced two player strategy game. The "board" is an elevated river with a waterfall at one end. Logs in the colors of two players, plus white and green logs, are placed in a four-by-eight grid on the river, and each player starts with five raftsman on their side of the river. The first player to get three raftsmen to the other side wins, or alternatively the first player to knock off three of the opponent's raftsmen wins.

On a turn, a player must advance the river by pushing one of two logs into the grid along one of its eight columns, forcing a log down the waterfall at the other end. This log is then placed behind the river and will be one of the two available for the next player. After advancing the river, a raftsman can be moved along the logs. Raftsmen can move on logs of their color and on neutral white logs, and can go as far as they can on connected logs but must stop as soon as the color changes. Raftsmen can never move onto the other player's logs and neither player can move onto the green logs.

Thus, by proper advancement of the river logs one can craft a path across the river. The raftsmen can move up and down along the logs, but can never move backwards towards their own shore. Once on the fourth column, for example, a raftsman could move along any of the four spaces in that column, or to any forward column, but not back to the third column. If a raftsman gets dumped over the waterfall, he swims back to his shore to try again. But if you take advantage of the white logs to advance your move, you are vulnerable to attack. If one player can make a legal move to a white log holding the other player's raftsman, that original raftsman is removed from the game.

The result is a clever and enjoyable strategy game that looks terrific. Floßer am Katarakt was displayed quietly at Essen and was marketed with mostly child games, but it is nothing of the sort. It is not original its design but works well and the production is top-notch.

This review originally appeared in Counter Magazine.

Very neat to see a review of this game.

I love owning this for a variety of reasons, but it's very rarely played. I need to correct this.

I'm a little surprised that it's so overlooked. Then again, I have no idea how many of these were made.