Alpenglow Board Game Review

Ever wanted to build your ski resort? I’m pretty sure that once upon a time there was a simulation / tycoon game on PC that allowed you to do this, but I don’t remember if it was any good. How well would a board game fair? Alpenglow is a game with lots going on, from tile laying and card playing, to engine building. While each turn flows pretty well, there are lots of decisions along the way that will keep you on your toes. Is this one worth getting down to the table, however? Let’s take a look.

Alpenglow is played over two seasons, and in each season players will expand their mountain presence while working with other players to build out the ski resort area. There is a bit of a give and take mechanic here when it comes to  your fellow aspiring ski resort entrepreneurs. While the central resort will be built out cooperatively – although whoever builds the buildings, will get bonuses when others go there – snatching up the best ski routes is a VERY competitive affair. This makes deciding what to do and when in Alpenglow a pretty big deal, and sometimes I felt that a few wrong decisions at the wrong time could have long term implications on your strategy, and potentially lose you the game.

I love how the game works, and how the theme rolls into the various mechanics. Players start each season by mapping out a route through the growing resort area with their bus player pieces. These must be in a connected line orthogonally, and deciding where and how to place your bus route is going to influence what you will be doing that turn, and who you will gather to ride the slopes! The balance between expanding your own slope routes and expanding the village is tough, which I really enjoyed. Building out the village provides different opportunities for everyone, and potential bonuses for you should you be the one placing buildings others want to use.

Ultimately, though, the game is a great balancing act of making sure the village has options, your player board is upgraded in ways that will allow you to maximize your turns, dollars, and points, and making sure you have good access to a variety of routes on the central mountain board. Because of this balancing act, this isn’t a game that fully comes together after only one or two plays. To really understand how best to make your strategy work, you need to have a good understanding of what is available, what COULD be available, and more.

Thankfully, I found that Alpenglow was very intuitive to play. Turns were logical, giving you both required actions – taking your bus and the benefits from the village space – while others were optional. Perhaps you want to forgo sending skiers to the slopes until you’ve built our your route a bit more fully. And building out the routes is one of the most satisfying puzzles I’ve played in a game in recent memory.

Each of your chair lifts can only accommodate so many skiers, so making sure you are building the right lifts in the right places is pretty important. For example, it’s great to have quad-lifts near your lodges to bring a maximum number of skiers up to another hub on the mountain, from which perhaps you can get away with branching off with double lifts to other places. Or, perhaps you’ve done a good job of connecting your lodges together with lifts, which means you can get away with cheaper lifts earlier since you can bring multiple skiers from multiple lodges to the same place, but along different routes.

So much of how you end up playing Alpenglow is based on what’s in front of you on the table. What upgrades can you get for your board? Where are other players heading on the central mountain? What hub spaces are you prioritizing (the mountain runs provide different bonuses depending on what they are built next to, or daisy chained to).

There is a subset of board game players who LOVE games where a single strategy could pay off game after game if executed correctly. I’m not one of those players. The sheer number of lodge tiles, village tiles, and honestly the difference in people you play against give this game so much variety. Sure, the turn-to-turn moments of the game don’t change, but your strategy most definitely will. There isn’t a one-size fits all approach to Alpenglow, which I really enjoy.

Alpenglow has been a delight to play, and frankly it was one of the games this year that I’ve had the most fun with. While the game is screaming for premium upgraded bits – base bits are fine, check out our components review here  – it’s also a game that was not on my radar at all. I missed the hype (if there was any) around the crowdfunding campaign, and only was made aware of it through a board game media Facebook group. For me, this is a diamond in the rough experience that I’m happy to have in my collection.

The best review I can give for this is summed up in this way – we get a lot of board games to review, which means my collection of games continuously cycles. As of right now, I have no plans to cycle this game out of my collection, despite watching dozens of others leave each month.