Altiplano Review
The wind whips across the Andean plateau known as the Altiplano, blowing up dust and even setting the alpacas to shivering. You may have little more than a few scraps of food and a fish pond to your name, but that might just be enough to get you started.
Players: 2-5
Time: 60-120 mins
Ages: 12+
Designer: Reiner Stockhausen
Artist: Klemens Franz, Andrea Kattnig, Jeff Oglesby
Publisher: dlp games, Renegade Games
Altiplano is the newest game of small tiles being drawn from bags by Reiner Stockhausen, designer of Orléans. But whereas the (excellent) Orléans is a game of getting your medieval minions in order (and hoping to survive the plague), Altiplano is a game of goods and trading goods for other goods and also warehouse maintenance, which is surely a phrase to get the illicit thrills rushing up and down your spine. Most excitingly of all though is its cardboard centrepiece, the trojan alpaca.
This ridiculous construction is, tragically, only a first player marker. But it’ll grab your attention with that cheeky smile, draw you in so that you invite it into your yurt (/traditional altiplano dwelling) and then, when you’re exhausted from celebrating your new purchase with the traditional board game feast* it will sneak out and steal all the diagrams from your rulebook. I know! It’s an outrage.
*it has been brought to my attention that not everyone has a feast when obtaining a new board game? While I am surprised by this, I’m sure the sneaky alpaca will find a way of affecting your rulebook too.
Consider that Altiplano presents gamers with two fairly fiddly and relatively unique gameplay mechanics. One is the bag building that I’ll explain later. The other is an action selection mechanic called movement. This involves moving around the altiplano region and your ability to move, and how these moves are tied into the actions you perform, is explained on this page of the rulebook.
There’s nothing quite like a wall of text to make me excited to play a game. But it’s worse than that. The phrase a picture is worth a thousand words has never been more apt. A simple diagram would have made learning, teaching and referencing this game stratospherically easier. I learn a lot of board games and it took me two full plays of Altiplano to finally get all the rules right. This never happens.
I mention this now because this is how you will experience the game: wow so much cardboard! That alpaca is awesome! Jesus what is going on with this rulebook!? How the hell does movement work, again? It could have been so much easier, because once you finally figure it out, everything flows naturally, mechanics, transactions, decisions slotting together neatly into a delightfully satisfying puzzle. Let’s get trading.
Token Trading
Altiplano starts you off with a couple of plates of rice and a couple of the games’ numerous resource tokens. Then lets you run free amongst the towering stacks of resources that define the game. Everything is about trading up. Not that you actually trade anything away, more taking the right thing to the right place gains you a new token, but you still have the old one in your collection. This is particularly hilarious at the market space where you need only show off your wares to earn money. 3 coins to see this fabulous bracelet I made! I feel like I’ve been doing something wrong all my life!
This all makes more sense when you think of Altiplano as a deck builder. You have a big dark bag full of tokens: that’s your deck. You draw 4 at the start of each round: there’s a hand. As tokens get used, and when new tokens are acquired, they all go into your little box-shaped discard pile. When the bag eventually empties, in go all the tokens from your discard box. Framed this way everything seems very familiar. But of course, there are no special rules scrawled in microscopic text on the tokens. What they can be used for is determined by your player boards.
Welcome to your little slice of the Altiplano. This is what you will be spending much of your game staring at. The numbered spots in the bottom right are where you store your “hand”. As you can see, there is space for more than 4 if you invest in expanding your hand size. The rest of the many circular slots are spaces to assign your resource tokens, each associated with one or more actions, and each associated with a single location. For example, at the lake you can assign fish to get food (very talented creatures, fish). Likewise, you can instead use two fish to carve out a chunk of ore. They must be herrings.
OK I might be being facetious (not like me at all). It is thematic when you consider the use of tokens to be time and effort from your villagers, the depicted resources to not specifically be a single fish, say, but to represent you having access to the fish pond. Then fish to food is the more obvious catching fish to eat, fish based pick-axes being notoriously inefficient suggests the fish to ore space is one of trade with other peoples around the lake. The other spaces all have similarly thematic justifications. It might just be less amusing following them!
I gotta keep moving
Now there is a further subtlety that sets Altiplano apart from regular deck builders and that’s your little man and the elaborate set of storage tiles that make up the central area of the board. Each of these larger tiles corresponds to one of the spaces on your player board and you can only resolve that space when your little man is at that location.
This is where movement, and the central set of food specific spots of your player board, comes in. You always get a free move, of up to 3 spaces (which gets you anywhere, there’s no fixed direction on the chaotic Altiplano plains) but any further movement requires food (for a single space) or food and a cart (for a 3 space move). Thus the number of actions you can perform is limited but you can be more efficient by using the same locations multiple times (particularly the village and market spaces). It’s a neat little puzzle, getting around the area efficiently, not being stuck with resources you can’t use effectively because your board is clogged up, and not going too and fro to the same places each round.
And that is kind of how I would describe the whole game. A neat little puzzle. Never something that gets particularly taxing. Not something you would ever describe as mean and certainly not something you would describe as interactive. Your people don’t block each other and there’s more than enough resources to go around. There’s a bit of racing for boat and house cards, to big point scoring contracts too, and a market of extra action spaces that is very important to keep your eye on, especially as you simply can’t produce certain resources without buying board extensions there (or getting the right boat). But you’ll hardly be screaming with frustration.
Likewise it is pleasantly engaging. There’s just enough to keep you optimising, and it feels different to a deck builder despite being highly analogous. The opportunities and challenges presented by having to assign all your resources and not being able to discard them until used is different. The excitement of hoping for the ideal draw from your bag is much more palpable when you are looking for a specific resource to fill an action spot. The puzzle of how to get the most from your contracts or houses or the race to fill your warehouse is satisfying. I enjoy playing this game.
But my goodness does it take a long time to finish.
Your visit to Altiplano ends when one of the central locations has completely run out of stuff on it. That’s not a single resource being depleted, that’s two or three of the right resources, depending on the location. But the kind of behaviour that empties one resource pile will have next to no influence on the other, at any given location.
Altiplano encourages you to take a fairly broad approach to collecting resources, and it let’s you explore the game space. You still have different strategies to pursue and different starting points to consider, but a game will rarely go by without you doing lots of things. I feel like it should end sooner, keeping things tighter. I’m always left at the end of this game feeling like I simply don’t need to play any more, but the game insists oh, no, one more round! One more round!
Ultimately, Altiplano drags on too long, and it doesn’t exactly introduce itself well either, with that damn rulebook. These two negatives bookend a really enjoyable core. It’s a solidly pleasant puzzle in the sit back and enjoy with good company and a bottle of wine category of euro. But solidly pleasant struggles to cut it in the current market. It needed to challenge players that little bit more, make the movement more restrictive, make the game end as you are scrambling to complete some big scoring moment. Instead it remains stuck in the shadow of its predecessor.
Rating: High and Dry
Our copy of Altiplano was provided for review by Asmodee UK. You can get hold of it for £49.99 RRP from your local hobby store.
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