A good game with some huge flaws.

The AI is pretty terrible. Because of the learning curve of the game this will take some time to notice but the AI makes many moves that are nonsense and will just throw games away so it's hard to have consistently enjoyable games. A couple of the factions are far worse for this. The UI for setting up single player games and multiplayer games is significantly different, in multiplayer you can get around this by banning factions but single player is missing this option so random setups will frequently give combinations that are awful. This is so bad that to pick factions for random games I have resorted to rolling dice at my desk instead. This is a weird oversight because the solution is already in the game for setting up multiplayer games.

The game is not balanced and that is more manageable if you're playing with only humans. This wouldn't be so bad if the multiplayer wasn't so buggy. Your multiplayer games will desync very often. Usually multiple times per game. You can reconnect quite fast but the game will replay the last several turns when you join so this gets really annoying. This doesn't stop you from finishing games but it makes them frustrating and much slower. Very basic quality of life features have been missing for years and seem to not be coming. To join games with friends you have to just scroll through the list of all of the games and try to spot their name, which is not necessarily the same as their steam username. There's an in game friends list but it doesn't seem to do anything.

If your intention is to play single player, I would consider not buying the riverfolk expansion at all. The AI for the otters is by far the worst and it often will ruin games if they are present. Without using jargon from the game mechanics, the otters can sell services to the other factions, the AI is terrible at using this. The other factions will often buy these services for prices that cripple them and make them unable to play. The whole game is warped if they are present and it's not fun because the AI can't interact with their rules properly. The other faction in this DLC has problematic matchups and they can be frustrating to play against. In multiplayer this can be mitigated by cooperating with other people but in single player they are very annoying. Because you can't choose to ban factions this DLC makes the option for randomly selecting factions unusable.

4 player board game where you choose an animal faction to play as. Each of which has its own theme and way to play it. First player to score 30 Victory Points (VP) wins.

Pros:
- Each faction has a tutorial that explains it pretty well
- Game runs smoothly
- Most players are pretty friendly and the community is still pretty active
- You technically don't have to buy the dlc factions because if the host has them, you can choose them

Cons:
- Some factions seem to be inherently better than others and it feels a bit one-sided at times
- The game can feel very overwhelming and luck-based in the late game
- You can only choose from whatever factions the host chose to put in. Meaning you're usually limited to choosing either 2 dlc factions and 2 base factions rather than being able to use all 4 base factions+ dlc factions

Feel free to correct me but this has been my experience so far

TL;DR- Game is fun but there's a huge learning curve and factions may take a while to master+ some factions are just better than others

fun