Saving the nature reserve

In 🏞️ Peak Team you are wildlife rangers, protecting a nature reserve and its animal inhabitants from dangers. This is a recently released co-op game from Matagot Studio, with a clever “reverse” card drafting mechanic, where you have to split your drawn cards into two and give them all to your neighbouring teammates. This game really puts the focus on cooperation in some deliberate and clever ways, like this style of drafting. 🙂

The game board depicts the nature reserve, which is a bunch of nodes, connected by different pathways. Each path needs a specific type of movement to traverse, like snowshoes for snowy landscapes or climbing axes for mountainous areas. These types are depicted on the cards 🃏 with values ranging from 1 to 3. So when you are “reverse drafting”, you have to try choosing the right cards for your teammates. Everyone also has a joker move token, that they cannot use - they can only lend this as a help to their friends during their turns. 🤝

To win a game, two things have to be done. 👇

First, you have to complete a bunch of missions. A mission itself is simple in principle: Get to the lettered node and you are done. 👍 Getting from one point to another can be challenging though, especially as missions drawn can be quite random. Each round you need to complete several of these missions, or you drift closer to losing. If there are 4+ unsolved missions at the end of a round, you lose! 😦

Secondly, you have to record all of the animals 🐾 in the reserve. To do this you have to be in the correct region, and spend a card depicting that animal type. Another thing to keep in mind when drafting! Not only movement symbols are important, but the animals too.

💬Planning the movement through the map is really fun, as there are always different routes you can take. Maybe this is where a bit of alpha-gaming can come into play, as sometimes there are obviously better routes 😶 - even though the drafting mechanic and other rules work against alpha gamers.

Peak Team also has 5 difficulty levels, so after learning to play you can quickly start adding some new mechanics and challenges - more on those in a future post! 😉