Other than my favorite gaming community ending its run, fall was a great season for gaming. I got to play several very new games, and many of them were very good. As usual this list is games that are new to me, no matter how long ago they were published, and as usual this is a rating of the games solely as I enjoy them, as a medium-weight eurogamer.

The Great (“I Would Buy This”)

Altiplano (2017). This new game by Reiner Stockhausen is very much a sequel to Orléans (2014). It’s another bag-building game where you draw colored disks, which can be used to power various actions. The difference is that where Orléans felt like a rather unique action-selection game, where you had to formulaically enable actions through the combination of specific “workers”, Altiplano instead feels like a resource-management game, where you’re pushing up through the supply chain, transforming lesser goods into greater goods. What a difference a bit of theming makes (and this also reminds me how wide the world of action selection is!).

Overall, Altiplano is a very tough and thinky game. You’re constantly trying to figure out the optimal use of scarce resources and which rewards you want to purchase from the board. Constraints are piled atop each other, but there’s also a lot of opportunity for careful, directed play. It’s not just that there are a lot of paths to victory (there are), but there’s also the opportunity to build a meaningful engine, allowing you to make better use of your resource-disks and also overcome the locale-based constraints of the game.

I don’t think this is a better game than Orléans, but it’s impressively different for a game that uses the same core bagbuilding and formulaic-action-construction mechanics, and so fans of the one might also want the other in their collection. (I’ve now got both in mine.) Continue reading →