Peaks Review: Peaky Climbers

[music] [music] >> I have happily never worried about having a tragic mountain climbing accident. Because if you don't climb mountains, you can't have a mountain climbing accident. It's the same reason I'm not really afraid of sharks. Um but Peaks, I know a lot of people do love climbing mountains. At least the concept of the In Peaks, you're going to climb mountains.

You'll start with some low mountains, but eventually you climb some of the most biggest and treacherous mountains in the world. But the game isn't really about mountain danger. It's about increasing your climber, making your climber better, a camaraderie with other climbers, or at least uh you're you're you're waving at them as you pass them around.

This is a game where you're going to take different actions. This is from Tangerine Games, designer Sam Gray. Let's take a look. Players are going to be traveling all over the world here to climb various mountains. You'll start with deck A where the mountains are not necessarily as high or as famous, but eventually you'll get into deck B where you might recognize the names of some of these mountains more as you climb them.

They're much higher mountains, including well, the highest. Each player has a player board which you're going to keep track of their energy, their stamina, and their three main actions, rest, prepare, and climb, as well as the different gear that you will have. All the player components come in this little container here, and you have these flags.

The goal of the game is to get these flags on the board. You'll be moving your climber around. They'll start in the continent, and you move them around. And in fact, you will have a couple of these cards here, these boost cards at the beginning of game. You'll pick one that shows where stuff starts.

So, this shows that I have 20 energy, my stamina is at six, and I start with a companion card. And companion cards can be used multiple times to help you out as the game goes by. So, let's take a look at these three actions. Whenever you take an action, you're going to put a cube in that action to take that action.

And this matters for a couple reasons. When there's three cubes there, then you get to reward. In this case, you are going to move up one in stamina when I have three rests. When I have three prepares, I'm going to upgrade one of these dice here. These dice are going to be turning around and getting better each of them.

They start on the lowest level. And when I do this, when I get to put a flag up. Now, each action also can get better because there are things on you have an experience track that will let you move these up. So, this action is when I take a rest action, I get to do everything here. At the beginning of the game, it's just going to be more of a mundane one.

So, for example, the rest action lets me travel to any continent on the board, and then I gain energy up to my stamina. So, let's say my energy was zero, I would move it up to six. Or, let's say it was at 11, I just can gain whatever number shown on the die here, which is two. Prepare gives me mountain cards.

I'll simply take one of these, then discard the one that's the farthest to the left, and that brings out more mountains for everybody else to choose from. You also can gain equipment, which you're going to need to climb mountains. Speaking of climbing mountains, that's the main focus of the game. So, on your turn, you can say, "I'm going to climb a mountain.

I'm going to climb Mount Albert here." So, the first thing that you will do when you climb Mount Albert is you're going to say, "Okay, these are the rewards I want." So, I want to I'm going to move my stamina up one and get a companion, or do I want an experience? And you know, I have the different actions.

I can get equipment with the different actions. So, I tell everyone I'm doing X or Y. I then look at the continent that this one's in. This is in the USA. So, I move there. Anybody else can come with me, too. Now, this matters because if people come with me, they'll get an extra experience for coming along, but the energy I spend is eight if I go by myself, but if more people come with me, then it is only five.

And there's going to be multiple things as you go through. There also might be experience of four. So, everyone has a level of experience. You're going to keep track of that up here, and that big green number is your experience that you will be your main experience and experience that you add when you help other people out.

You'll be moving on that and moving up experience is one way to upgrade your actions and dice and just have more experience to climb bigger and better mountains. If the mount you can ignore the experience level for mountain if you want to, but if you do that, you'll roll this die, and if you roll the exclamation point, any reward that has a red arrow on, you don't get because well, you were a fool and went into danger.

Otherwise, you will take that mountain card, say it's one of the climb mountains, and put one of your flags on the board. The game is going to continue until someone has 16 flags on the board. You will also get to put out more flags in each area where you have the most flags. I should also mention there are bonuses for some of these that you will get depending if you're in the right continent.

Uh when you get a bonus tile, there are companions. As I already mentioned, also known as various different people. Maybe some of them are kickstarters, I don't know. But these companions will give you different bonuses. Like this person, uh an Asian mountain expert, if the climb is in Asia, reduce your energy requirement by five.

You can use each of your companions a certain number of times, and it shows you by the cubes on the bottom there. And there are also these bonus cards you can draw, which will give you more flags at the end of the game. So, the number of climb mountains that have this reward, if I had that four of those, I get an extra flag.

Five of those, two extra flags. That matters cuz the most flags is the victory point condition, and that's how you win the game. And that's pretty much it. You're going to be keeping taking these actions until the end game is triggered and one person wins. >> [music] >> Tangerine Games always does an absolutely fantastic job with how their games look.

They really do. The The The little containers, the flags, the cards, the slots, the thing The Really, I often I often complain sometimes like this is too over wrought. But Tangerine Games, they feel right there with it. They Their games are beautiful and gorgeous and deluxe without feeling like a pressure to bring to the table.

Like, "Oh, it's so much work to open this up." It's not. This game is pretty cool and there's a lot of mechanisms in this game that I really enjoy. I really enjoy the die upgrading. I think that's that's fun. Like, you're going to go up in levels and also the tile upgrading. I'm a big sucker for actions get better.

And so, this action, the rest action, only lets me do this, but once I upgrade it, I can now do two more things and I also have the energy up to a nine, so I get nine energy when I take that action. That sort of thing feels really good. Um the The mountain climbing itself, where you need a certain amount of requirements, that's less exciting to me because you're kind of like looking at the mountains out there.

As an aside, one mechanism I did not particularly care for in this game was every one time you take a card, you also discard a card and move cards over, which means if multiple people do that action in a row, it just feels really fiddly. Like, "I'm going to take a mountain card, okay. This one's discarded.

Move them over. Draw some next person." Like, "I'm also going to take a mountain card." But there's two new ones. Hang on. Okay, I'll take that one. All right, this one's discarded. Move them down. And I know they do that so you get through the decks and get to the B mountains quickly, but it just felt a little fiddly that that aspect of game.

Not a huge deal. But the mountain climbing itself, you're like, "I need these requirements." And as time goes by, you need more more requirements. You need a lot of equipment to climb those higher mountains. There's a lot of but the rewards are also really good as you're moving up on that experience track.

It can be a little difficult. You You don't want to fall behind in this game, especially in experience track. And I don't know that the board felt a little superfluous. Yes, I know that the board is there so you know where the mountains are and you put the flag in the continent that you're in, although you often are like, "Well, this is the mountain I can climb." It's in Australia.

Well, then that's where I'm going, you know. [laughter] And the fact that people can just kind of travel to where the mountain is, you don't necessarily get all these bonuses, so you you're going to want to move with the rest action, but since you can just travel to a spot to to climb a mountain, it just made the map feel almost like it it wasn't necessary.

It's a nice board centerpiece and it's a good place to store the mountain cards and it also again it stores the flags that you score. I did like the flag scoring. I thought that worked really well. Um the bonus cards, the ex- the companions, and the equipment, it does have a case near the end where you're like, "I'm just kind of scratching along trying to get more equipment, get more equipment, get more equipment so I can finally go to Mount Everest or Mount whatever is in, you know, Kilimanjaro.

I'm trying to get climb these mountains in my hand." I don't know if I would call it super thematic in the sense of you feel like you're climbing a mountain, but I don't think that's necessarily the point of this game. The point of the game is about going around the world and finding different mountains and I think that's cool.

While I said at the beginning I would not climb mountains, I definitely can appreciate mountains. I think mountains are glorious and they look neat and I I think highly of people who do climb mountains. Uh and so I think this game brings that to life. But where does that leave me at the end of it? And I think it leaves me it it just is a little shy.

A 6.5 for me on this one. Um I don't dislike Peaks. I think there's some interesting concepts in it. It was slightly longer than I'd want it to be and there can be some downtime where someone sits there and goes, "Okay, what card do I want to do? I want to climb a mountain and I'm going to do this. Okay, I'm going to go here.

Who wants to come with me? And then everyone else pauses and the mountain climbing action is much longer than it comes my turn and I go, "I'm resting." And that I think keeps me from you know, at the end of the game maybe I also have this equipment. I'm like, "I hope a mountain comes out with that has the equipment that I have as it's as it's pre- pre-requisites.

Oh, it doesn't." So, there's a little bit of that at the end. They also the majorities you can try to grab mountains that are in Asia so that you have the Asian mountain majority, but they may not come out. Someone else might It just felt it felt like there was just something that just keeps this game from me wanting to do it all the time.

So, a little bit longer than it should be, but man, some of the stuff like I said, the upgraded actions I like that a lot. I thought the experience track was interesting, having companions. There's lots of fun rewards. You climb a mountain you can go with someone whether they want you or not. They're like, "I'm climbing this mountain.

Please don't come with me." You're like, "I'm coming anyway." I don't know why that amuses me, but it does. I like a lot that's in here. It's just shy of being something I think I would pull out on my own all the time. Uh but man, Tangerine is just knocking out of the park with how their games look and and feel and this is much better than the last game I played from Tangerine Games.

So, I'm I'm I I will be gladly looking to see what they do in the future. But uh that is Peaks from Sam Gray. I'm Tom Vasel and you're watching The Dice Tower. >> [music] >> Hey everybody, thanks for watching this video. If you like this [music] review or whatever you just watched, wasn't it amazing?

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