Once the players get to the river, they needed to move to the other cultures to trade. This would add difficulty to the game. The tokens to represent the categories caused some problems. Looking at game stores, fabric stores, and hobby stores, nothing was found. Beans were chosen for the food token since several cultures used this as a food source.
Buttons represent the clothing since most student understand that buttons are used on clothes.
Cubes were used for housing since blocks are used for some houses. The cards were created with situations that would affect one, several, or all the cultures. The situations would affect your culture by adding to your stockpile or taking away from your stockpile. There was the chance that you would have to add 2, add 1, minus 1, or minus 2 tokens. The first run through resulted in a status quo.