To start the game, there are special tiles you lay down to get things started. For the base game, there is a single tile with a road and part of a city that is set down to start the game. The River expansion is a set of tiles that make up a river that you lay down before you start play. This expansion is freely available and usually comes with your game. Here we have two of them, since we have 2 complete games.
Each river starts with a spring (near the middle in this picture) and grows outward, ending in a lake. Whoever plays the lake tile gets to start the game.
In this game, I'm the cool green meeples!
