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Altiplano, a bag-building game along the lines of Orléans set in the South American highlands of the Andes — the Altiplano — is not a simple game, presenting players with new challenges time and again. There are various ways to reach the goal, so the game remains appealing to try out new options and strategies, but success or failure also depends on whether your opponents let you do as you like or thwart the strategy you are pursuing. The competition for the individual types of goods is considerable — as is the fun in snatching a coveted extension card from under another player’s nose!
Each player starts with a unique role tile, giving them access to different goods and methods of production. Players have limited access to production at the start, but they can acquire additional production sites throughout the game that give new options. The numerous goods — such as fish, alpaca, cacao, silver or corn — all have their own characteristics and places where they can be used. For example, while silver can be sold for a high price at the market, fish can be exchanged for other goods at the harbor and alpaca can produce wool that can then be made into cloth at the farm.
Aside from building up an effective production, players must fulfill their orders at the right time, develop the road in good time and store their goods cleverly enough to fill their warehouses in the most valuable way. Often, a good warehouse keeper is more relevant in the end than the best producer.
Ages | 12+ |
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Players | 2 Players, 3 Players, 4 Players, 5 Players |
Play Time | 60m – 120m |
Designer | Reiner Stockhausen |
Mechanics | Action Points, Contracts, Deck, Bag, and Pool Building, Variable Player Powers |
Theme | Economic |
Publisher | Angry Lion Games, Arrakis Games, Baldar, dlp games, GaGa Games, Giochix.it, Meeple BR Jogos, Pixie Games, Surfin' Meeple China, White Goblin Games, Arclight, Reflexshop, Renegade Game Studios |
Aaronw92
Initial thoughts: only one play in, but I enjoyed that one play. There seems to be a decent amount of strategies to pursue, from storing a bunch to orders to just collecting a lot of goods. I initially like the game more than Orleans, but my few plays of that didn't do much for me. Not much interaction, but an interesting puzzle. Girlfriend likes this one quite a bit.
agentpatman
I gotta say I like this more than orleans having played them both a number of times. It has the same level of thinkyness but with just a much better theme and much better game experience. In orleans there is monks, knights, pumping tracks, some down turns due to needing a lot of the right kind of tokens. However in orleans you get to make wool, build houses, boats, and make a ton of different goods and complete cards or store them in your warehouse. A bad turn might only mean doing 1 or 2 things but setting yourself up for next turn, while a good turn is a huge combo builder of running around the map making 4 different stops. The only thing really stopping you each turn is the movement due to carts and food and if you can manage that well you get to pull off big things. I also like how everything feels equally as important and the scores are always close on divergent strategies for us. You get to score for building houses or boats or filling the warehouse with goods. You will also score for how well you built your bag and huge points can come from fulfilling order cards. The warehouse also acts as a way to clear your bag which is so important late in the game to be able to maximize your turns and something I truly appreciate over orleans. There are entire tokens that you can't do anything with but store and can disrupt your turns. I also appreciate how food has this dual purpose of movement but use in almost all the actions. On one hand you need a good amount, but too much can be punishing because you can't utilize it all and waste turns drawing it without an easy way to get rid of it. The cards are some of the best features because they give you unique abilities to utilize your tokens and can build them into an excellent engine for almost every type of resource in the game. One con might be that it drags on a little bit long if you try to do everything since you wait for the cards to deplete which is 1 per round. However if you min-max a certain strategy or buy a lot of cards the game will end much sooner due to lack of resources and cards. On one hand I appreciate that you get to control the ending but on the other that means it can drag or be too fast rather than a consistent experience each game. I can't speak to the components yet since I played digitally but everything flowed very well and it really wasn't that fiddly since the end of round was moving a set of cards and resetting your carts. The bag reset happens at different times for different players. I am looking forward to trying different strategies of trying to build up some extra carts early on to move a lot as well as getting more tokens in play each round on the road track. From there you have multiple paths from boats, to houses, to market cards and I am curious if you focus solely on one how you score vs taking a more diversified approach. There is obviously some luck in bag builders with things coming out at the perfect time versus the exact wrong time, but obviously you control a lot of that based on what you put in and it really is just part of the game experience. There is not a lot of bag builders out there and I wish there were, because we have a great time every time. I would highly recommend this if you are interested in the theme at all over orleans. However orleans is still a very solid game and I plan to keep both because they are quite different but this will likely be played more with different audiences because it is approachable and more fun. I also appreciate the mini expansion in the box but I think it might be for more advanced play when you try to combo a specific strategy in conjunction with the cards or maybe newbies that gives them something to focus on. At the point in the game where we are they feel like they take something away because we want to try and experiment different strategies and a card would force us into a specific path but I appreciate that they are there for when the time is right.
AcemanBR
Certamente uma evolução do Orleans, com um tema muito simpático e jogabilidade fluida. Daqueles jogos que você não se importa se vai ganhar ou perder no final.