Mountain Goats

Have you ever wanted to do parkour? Have you ever wanted to headbutt something? Have you ever wanted to be able to eat anything you want without remorse? Like, literally anything?. Goats are supernatural terrors, to be totally honest. Right, goats. Did I mention this is a game about mountain goats, not a people? Oh, well it is. This is Mountain Goats.

Mountain Goats is fast to learn and features a surprising amount of strategy. “The Mountain” is made up of square cards, each numbered 5-10. Below that, the 5 and 6 have three cards, the 7 and 8 have two cards, and the 9 and 10 have a single card.

On each player’s turn, they roll the four dice and create groups of dice that equal 5-10. For each group of dice, the player moves their goat up one card in the line that those dice equal. Any other dice are ignored. When a goat reaches the top card, that player gets a Point Token from that column of the mountain (if available). If a player can get a token from each column, then they claim the highest-value Bonus Token still available. When all of the Bonus Tokens have been claimed or when three columns have no more Point Tokens, the game comes to an end.

This is a great little palette cleanser game. It’s fast enough that you don’t really notice what minimal downtime there is between turns, and with a good group of friends the competition is casual enough to bring you some pretty ridiculous smack talk. Add to that its compact size and you’ve got a winner.

This is a shorter review than this game really deserves. But short of adding some unnecessary fluff, it’s a game that’s so streamlined that adding filler feels wrong. Mountain Goats is great, and that’s really all that needs to be said about it.

The publisher, BoardgameTables.com, has just rebranded to Allplay to better reflect the expanding scope of their business. Things just like Mountain Goats and other games. You can find Allplay online at letsallplay.com and at the moment their Facebook remains facebook.com/BoardGameTablesDotCom.