SNAP Review – Alpina

Andrew, have you ever been to the Alps?

Nope. I’ve been to Germany, but that’s as close as I’ve ever gotten. How about you?

I’ve been to the Rocky Mountains, does that count?

Anitra you’ve even been to a resort called Zermatt, but that was in Utah. And no, the Rocky Mountains don’t count. But it sounds like you’ve got Switzerland on the brain.

A little bit, yeah. This is a SNAP review for Alpina.

Game

Alpina is a game celebrating Switzerland’s largest national park, situated in the Alps. It was designed by Luc Rémond and published by Helvetiq.

Alpina is for 2-4 players to play in 20 minutes or less, and it’s best for ages 10 and up.

Art

All right, let’s talk about the art in Alpina. The art here is beautifully illustrated. Each card combines one of three animals – a bird, a goat, or a frog – with one of three landscapes – mountains, lakes, or forests.

The bottom of every card has scoring conditions, which are marked only with numbers and icons.

Besides the cards, there are very cute hiker meeples in four colors, plus clever pieces that clip onto the edges of the box for score keeping.

Mechanics

Let’s talk about the mechanics of Alpina. How do we actually play this game?

Well, you start the game by placing any goat card in the center of the table. Then deal six cards to each player, and give them a number of hiker meeples, depending on the player count. Choose a player to go first, then take turns clockwise.

On your turn, you must play a card from your hand, and it must be orthogonally adjacent to at least one other card on the table. Players will gradually form a 5 by 5 grid of cards, and no card can be placed outside those bounds.

After playing a card, decide whether or not to place a hiker – this can be on the card you played, or any empty card that’s adjacent. Placing a hiker means that you will score victory points, as indicated on this specific card, at the end of the game.

At the end of your turn, draw another card from the deck.

The game ends when the 5 by 5 grid is full, and now it’s time to calculate scores.

Every card that has a hiker meeple on it scores points for the owner of that meeple.

For example, this frog gets two points for every forest in its column. This bird gets two points for every unique animal that’s to its right. And this goat gets a point for every frog card with a hiker on it.

Move the score markers around on the box edge as you calculate each player’s score. When you’ve finished tallying everything up, the player with the most points, wins! Shocker, I know.

Expectations

So Anitra, it’s that time again, what did we expect from Alpina?

I don’t know, it’s lovely. I liked the idea of creating a grid and the asymmetric scoring conditions.

I love the small box game approach, and I’ve always appreciated Helvetiq’s take on games. There’s usually a lot of similarity with other games on the market, but there’s usually a unique twist as well.

I also kind of love this flat, cel-shaded style of art.

Yeah, we saw this in Strato as well.

Yes, we did!

Surprises

So let’s talk about surprises. I had both good and bad surprises on this one. First, the bad one: the symbology used here is a LOT. Each scoring condition has a combination of two or three symbols used to indicate how it scores, and there’s over a dozen different symbols. Sadly, the rulebook doesn’t list each symbol separately, it just gives a dozen examples of different kinds of scoring conditions.

I taught this to a group and ended up being on hand to constantly answer their questions – what does this card do? How about this one, what does this mean? I could not step away at all during their game. And that was really frustrating.

But on the plus side, being faced with ALL the different symbols over that game forced me to learn them all. Now when I play Alpina, I might have an unfair advantage, since I don’t have to consult the rulebook anymore for those examples.

Now for my good surprise: just how much tactics there are in this game. The dual nature of the cards forced me to keep swapping back and forth and think of both aspects of every card – how it could be used for its scoring condition, and how it could contribute to the goals I’d already set out. You’ll also always have more turns than you have meeples to place, which means that you’ll HAVE to put some cards out without using their scoring conditions – and you’ll have to choose whether to do this early or late in the game. Having a meeple left to use on your final turn CAN be very rewarding – but only if you can hang onto a card that will work for you at the end of the game. And playing cards without meeples in the early game opens up opportunities to your opponents to grab goals that might work well for them.

This game reminded me a lot of the EcoSystem series of games by Genius Games, where everyone is playing cards into their own grid, and the card placement impacts scoring of all of the other cards. Does that sound familiar?

Yes.

The twist here is that the game is actually a bit simpler: players play into a central grid, and use hiker meeples to only score the cards that they claim. This makes the game a lot more interactive with other players, too, which I really like about it.

In this way, Alpina reminds me of games like Sunset Over Water, but I find myself enjoying Alpina a little more.

I’d love to see a variant or expansion here that provides a little bit of asymmetry in the form of unique goals or something like that, but since it doesn’t have anything like that, I Alpina could go down to age 7 or 8.

Finally, I do totally agree with Anitra that there are a lot of symbols here. Given this is only a 2-4 player game, it would have been nice if there were multiple player aids that could be shared, or maybe just one for each person.

[Anitra] I disagree that this game could go much younger. You have to juggle a lot of different goals in your head even once you’re solid on the symbols.

And I wish there was a way to put multiple scoring markers on the same number on this track on the box, to show when scores are tied. The pieces are too wide, or maybe the tracking spots are too narrow, to fit more than one on any number. The idea is really clever, but the implementation is more annoying than it is helpful.

Recommended?

All right, well it’s that time, because it’s what we do. Would we recommend Alpina?

I’d tentatively recommend it. The learning curve on this game is harder than I really wanted it to be. And if you’re introducing it to kids, you’ll really want someone to sit out the first game to keep explaining all the symbols.

But, like Anitra said, once you get the hang of all these symbols, Alpina becomes a game that’s strategically interesting while staying pretty speedy. And since it’s only a stack of cards and a few wooden meeples, it’s easy to set up and pick up when you’re done.

We give Alpina 3½ animals out of 5.

And that’s Alpina, in a SNAP!

Get it on Amazon, from Asmodee in the USA, or ask for it at your local game store.

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The Family Gamers received a copy of Alpina from Helvetiq via Asmodee for this review.

This post contains affiliate links, which do not change your price, but help support The Family Gamers.

SNAP review music is Avalanche, provided courtesy of You Bred Raptors?