Mountaineers

EvEvanstar10,0

This game has a cool 3d mountain, which makes it really difficult to plan your future turns since players are always rotating it so they can see their pieces, obscuring yours. The mountain component itself is really fragile, it kept accidentally coming apart in our play. The art on the mountain is pretty, but the in game icons are extremely easy to miss. For example, they have dark blue dotted lines over black background. Points in the game largely come from completing your hand of goal cards. They ask you to walk to these places and drop markers next to specific things to get points. You have limited turns to get it done and other players can attack you pulling your markers out. It's expensive and inefficient for them to do it, so the game has some goal cards that push you to do it specifically. On your turn you also draw a card from a pile of random events that pick away at your resources if you are within 3 spaces of this or that in a totally unpredictable and uncontrollable way. Worse yet, some of the events make it two or three times more expensive to walk on certain terrain types. In our game I needed to walk on a lot of forest spaces, but for half the game forest spaces were double expensive to walk on because we never got an event that changed it to something else. ☆ Art, Iconography and components functional ☆ Clever or interesting mechanisms ★ Reasonably low downtime between turns with mildly AP players ☆ Multiple plays stay interesting ☆ Low or mitigatable luck elements ☆☆☆☆☆ Raw enjoyment