River Bankers is a 2–4 player tabletop game where rival semi-aquatic mammals — beavers, river otters, muskrats, and minks — bid workers on materials drifting downriver and spend them to build structures along the bank.
The headline mechanic is a novel multi-unit auction: players blind-bid workers on a material card, and when total demand exceeds the icons on the card, leftovers are allocated fairly and the card slides one step downriver into a costlier slot. The river itself escalates prices when contention is high, with no math or change-making for the players to track.
“Money” is a shared 60-space fish track. Every action costs fish — workers eat them swimming against the current — and your bid size is physically capped by the worker meeples you have in front of you. You can never overspend. Turn order is driven entirely by the fish track: whoever’s pawn is furthest back acts next, so a cheap action keeps you in the chair and an expensive one buys you a long pause.
Score the most victory points from structures you build along the bank.