Matthew Bailey“Mountain Goats has been sitting rather unassumingly on my shelf for a few weeks now, and today we decided to get it out and finally give it a go. Needless to say, in short, this went from something that I wasn’t expecting all that much of to one of my favourite small box games there is.
Played with Jack(.8.) and Toby(5).
You start the game by laying out the board using the card tiles forming the numbers 5 to 10 along the top, with the other 5 to 10 cards below with fewer cards towards the 10 end of the board.
Each player then places one of the goats of their colour underneath each of the columns. Essentially, the purpose of the game is to climb your mountain goats up the mountains to collect points.
On your turn, you roll four dice and then, using those four dice in any configuration you want, try to make totals that match the different numbered columns.
You then can move one of your goats one step up the mountain for every number that you make, meaning you could use four fives to move a goat four spaces up the five column or two spaces up the 10 column.
When you reach the top, you get to take one of the number of tokens to add to your stash, your goat then stays there allowing you to potentially get more points until another goat knocks it off.
This gives a degree of urgency for other players not to let someone sit atop a mountain for too long and adds extra depth to your strategy.
This continues until three of the columns are empty or all of the bonus point tokens have been claimed.
While it does sound relatively simple, and to be honest, it is, there are other things going on here. One really cool mechanic is the fact that if you roll more than one “one,” you get to change one die to whatever you want, making a one essentially a wild card and extremely powerful.
Next, there are bonus point tokens which essentially you get once you have one of every number, meaning that you essentially get three more than the next person to pick up a bonus point token, encouraging you to race to get all of the tokens.
In terms of strategy, while you are obviously looking to get the higher amounts, you are equally trying to make the most efficient use of your dice rolls in order to maximize your potential points. Things equally get interesting when one or two of the columns start to empty, and therefore higher numbered roles start to become less valuable as you try not fall in the gaps.
In terms of how the game felt, it reminded me oddly a lot of the last part of Backgammon where you are trying to efficiently use your rolls to place all of your pieces in a good place to bear off, and it worked extremely well.
The components are really nice – the box is nice and tiny yet has a lot of table presence, the goat meeples are really nice and well-made, all of the artwork is lovely, and even the blue dice have a surprisingly nice feel to them. If ever there was a game I would love a deluxe version of, this is definitely one of them, and a near-premium matte alongside poker chips for the counters would be very welcome.
I expected nothing going into Mountain Goats, and very quickly this has turned into an absolute highlight of the already fairly crowded small box subgenre of games. The boys absolutely loved it, and the slight amount of mental math gave it a nice educational edge as well. Toby was particularly pleased with himself when he managed to make good use of his numbers to get to those higher-scoring tokens.
I have not given a super high recommendation in a little while, but this is one that definitely deserves it.
“Mountain Goats” was kindly provided by “All Play” (formerly “boardgametables.com“) for the purpose of review. Our thoughts and opinions are, however, our own.”
