The five levels of Peak Team

We already talked about 🏔️ Peak Team, the newest co-op game from Matagot, and learned about the core of the game: “reverse drafting”. 👉You don’t keep the cards you draw, instead you split them up evenly between your neighbouring teammates, considering what they might need on their next turn. Your task is to complete missions by moving around on the map using the cards you got. This way, cooperation is truly brought to the forefront.

Peak Team is cleverly divided into 5 difficulty levels (or modules). Learning to play at level 1 is really a breeze, and you can gradually add more elements to make it more complex, making it suitable for all experience levels. 👇

Level 2️⃣ adds tokens into the game that can block certain paths. Some are randomly placed during setup, and some will enter the game later, depending on how efficiently you solve missions. To help you out, rescued animals now have a one-time special ability: they can either remove these blockages or add extra movement.

Level 3️⃣ adds Special Missions. These can only be solved if every player is at one of the special flags 🏴 at the same time. Additionally, to win you all have to get to a final “evacuation” flag 🏳️ at the very end. You get some help here as well: asymmetric player abilities! 😉

Level 4️⃣ only raises difficulty by requiring you to do more special missions, but Level 5️⃣ is awesome: It adds Weather cards that change some core rules each round. These provide great variety and are also thematic, like the river freezing (normally you can only go downriver with your paddle cards, but you can go upwards on the frozen river), or a snowstorm making climbing harder.

💭 At Level 5 the game gets fairly challenging, but it never feels hopeless! I think the movement rules and managing your hand of cards is super engaging. 🥰 

A note on 2-player games: You need a shared Dummy player to help you out. It makes things a bit more difficult as you get random cards from them, but in exchange you have more flexibility, as they can keep cards between rounds. While having dummies is a red flag for many, I am glad they thought about the 2p experience and it works quite well! 😊