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I haven’t been to the Swiss National Park. But having played Alpina by Helvetiq, I know I am missing out on seeing some beautiful wildlife! Happily I am not, however, missing out on a lovely, light but synapse sizzling placement optimisation game, because Alpina is all of those things!
Strike a Pose!
A game for 2 – 4 players and taking around 20 minutes, we are off exploring to photograph speckled nutcracker birds, grass frogs, and chamois (goat-antelopes)! But it is not all sweet mountain streams and birdsong. Like a twisty horn, Alpina has a sneakily sharp tip, and it is that which makes it special!
The rules are super easy to grok. Each turn, you lay a card from your hand into what will become a shared 5x5 grid. Each card has a specific animal, a particular landscape background, and a scoring objective. After placing one card, you can then choose to place one of your hikers (2P get 8 each) on that card, or on an orthogonally adjacent one. Once your hiker has been sited, it locks in that scoring objective just for you at end game, and then you draw back to refill your hand. The game ends when the 5 x 5 grid is completed, and then players score for their own hikers.
The scoring objectives are all spatial based and grouped depending on the species of animal on the card. The icons on the cards make clear that the speckled nutcracker scoring is based on the presence (or absence) of other animals in the vicinity. Grass frogs focus on the terrain type of the landscapes placed in near-by, and chamois score based on what nearby hikers are doing!
Final Thoughts!
We really enjoy ALPINA. It’s light, it’s colourful and it‘s easy to learn. It also takes up a small footprint and provides a fun spatial based challenge. It also works well at two player and uses the edge of the box and wooden pegs as a score tracker in a clever way that I haven’t seen before.
Although we play and enjoy quite a few games where we build our own tableaus, I like how we are developing out a shared space. Each card that gets added changes the decision space for everybody and forces players to stay on their tactical toes!
Placing cards in a “good” spot can and will further your own claimed scoring objectives. But that’s only one possible consequence. A nutcracker or a grass frog in the “wrong” place, could really mess up opponents’ chances of gaining points from their own hikers. Get placement just right and you might be able to achieve both at the same time!
Whilst having 6 cards in hand on your turn feels quite generous, the 5 x 5 grid starts to fill up. And when it does, it gets progressively harder to find the perfect spot. It’s also necessary to decide on timings – when is the best time to use a hiker? Drop it now to lock in this particular objective? Or save it later to try and shoot for a better one? Maybe you should just use one to stop an opponent scoring big instead.
The icons took a few turns to get familiar with, but they aren’t tricky to understand. The artwork is also really nice – it’s simple but striking, and the colours on the 56 cards pop. What’s also nice is that the rule book provides some interesting background to the setting of the game and why these specific animal species were chosen to be featured in ALPINA. Until playing Alpina, my only experience of chamois was the cloth I forget to use on the rare occasions when I wash my car!