Alpenglow Components Overview and Impressions

There are some themes that are becoming a bit oversaturated in the board game space. Nature, for example, is starting to become one that I gloss over a bit when I see new titles full of animal or plant cards. Building civilizations has become something I’m a bit less interested in as well. Building ski slopes and running a company? That’s something I can get behind. Let’s take a look at everything that comes in Alpenglow!

Alpenglow is all about building the best ski resort and making the most money. Everyone is working on a central board for running ski lifts and routes, but each player has their own player board and components. Outside of the main board, all the additional boards are thin cards, although they feel really great and have held up well over our half dozen plays of the game. I’m not overly worried about damage to these components, but I suppose one could laminate them to future protect them!

All of the boards are wonderfully detailed, which is amazing. So often, I find that central boards waste a lot of real estate on imagery – while creating an immersive board is important to the overall production of the game, when it is balanced well with helpful information that aids players as they go, is fantastic. And Alpenglow does a great job of filling the board full of tidbits of information that will help players in the long run.

There are a TON of pieces in Alpenglow, so I was really happy to see a nice insert for the cardboard Ski Run Tokens, Backcountry tiles, Terminals, and skiers. This made getting the game setup and ready to go much quicker than it would if we had to sort and/or stack all the tiles before starting. The cardboard components are nice to handle, and look like they would hold up well over time. They have a nice finish to them as well, which I find not all games tend to prioritize.

The card quality is solid, and I don’t feel the need to sleeve this cards in any way. I do like the unique art on all the Goal cards, but do wish there was a bit of variation in the Run cards (seems to be one piece of art for each colour). The artwork on the Ski Area Boards that each player gets, as well as the buildings, village squares, and resort upgrades are also fantastic, and give you a nice sense of actually building a ski resort!

The highlight of the box, as with most board games, is the included wooden pieces. Each player gets a number of tokens in their player colour, including 5 buses, 4 double chairlifts, 3 triple chairlifts, 3 quad chair lifts, 3 lodges, and a score tracker. Although none of the pieces are screen printed – that would have been a cool touch! – they are still fantastic. I could see how cardboard tokens could have been used to replace these pieces, but the game wouldn’t have the same feel and table presence in my opinion.

What you get in Alpenglow will make you eager to play the game. Even if you aren’t a fan of the ski / snowboard slopes – I’m definitely not! – I still really enjoy getting this to the table purely for the aesthetic of it all. When the game is over and everyone has built everything out, it’s pretty neat to look at, and gives you as a collective group the sense of accomplishment. This is your ski resort! Overall, very impressed with what is here!