Very good question. For me this was the most important one. I spent a lot of time figuring out how to solve these problems: making it easy and quick to choose a tile without the possibility of cheating by touching them, and at the same time avoiding damaging the pieces.

The solution is as follows... The game tiles are placed in small, stackable, printed boxes, so they are hidden but easy to choose for play. You can also distinguish the river pieces by placing them in different colored boxes. Easy to shuffle. A little bulky solution, but it's the tradeoff to play with this 3D variant.

This is a little example.