Five Peaks 

• Designer: Adam Strzelecki
• Publisher: Trefl
• Players: 2-5
• Age: 9+
• Time: 25 min/player
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

It’s a warm September morning, the first day of a long-awaited vacation. You have arrived at the parking lot at the foot of the picturesque mountains. You unpack your backpacks from the car, tie your shoes properly and set off on a gentle uphill route. For the next few days you will travel mountain paths, collect undergrowth and enjoy the beautiful views. Perhaps you will be able to discover the forgotten, unbeaten paths that will lead you to the Five Peaks. After reaching the top of the mountain, add your pebble to the traditional stone tower and in the evening pitch your tents and enjoy the panorama of the mountain slopes.

Five Peaks is a game about mountain hiking. During the game, you will use your own sets of cards to perform various actions. You will develop your decks to find more efficient ways to move or gather resources. Discovering new places, building towers of pebbles on top of mountains or collecting panoramas are just a few ways to gain victory points and leave the rest of your teammates behind. Who will be able to visit all Five Peaks and collect the most points?

To start the game, each player takes the backpack and starting deck of 5 cards in their color.  The first tile is placed on the table (it has the parking spaces on it).  Each player also gets 5 scoring stones of differing sizes: two x3, two x2, and one x1.  A market of 5 hiking cards is dealt to the table, and the panorama piles are set up as well.  The terrain tiles are setup so the the forest tiles on top, then the alpine tiles, and the rocky tiles at the bottom.

On a turn, players play a hiking card from their hand and then perform the action on the card.  Examples of starting cards:

Walk – move your pawn one space, ignoring all occupied spaces. Take the effect of the space you end on.  You might collect resources or be able to trade resources for other things or to place a peak tile.

March – move your pawn two spaces, ignoring all occupied spaces. Take the effect of the space you end on.

Discovery – place the top terrain tile from the deck adjacent to the tile you are currently on OR trade in resources for endorphins.  When you add a new tile, you connect it by the triangular areas in the corners.

Training – buy a hiking card from the market (cost in endorphins), and then refill the market  OR trash any number of non starting hiking cards from your hand for 2 endorphins each.  There are 11 different varieties of non-starting Hiking cards, so you will be able to craft a deck that meets your specific needs.

Camp – buy a panorama card or take 2 endorphins; then take all played cards back into your hand (including the camp card).  There are six levels of panorama tiles, and you must always start with a level 1 card, and then each later time you buy, you must buy the next higher level.  Each has different costs, rewards and end game scoring bonuses.

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Certain resource exchange spaces allow you to place a peak tile.  If you do this, it must be connected to an open path on the tile where you are currently located, and it must match the terrain of your tile.  Take a hiking badge matching the terrain type.  Later in the game, a player who stops on a peak tile can drop one of their stones.  If someone else has already placed a stone, you can only place a stone smaller than the previously placed stones.  At the end of the game, you will score points equal to the base value of the peak multiplied by the multiplier on your stone.

During the game, you may be able to pick up a campfire tile.  Some of these provide ongoing bonus effects while others give endgame scoring bonuses.  

The game continues until one of the endgame conditions is met:

• The 5th and final rocky peak is placed
• A player has placed his 5th and final stone on the board
• A player has completed their 6 card panorama

All players get exactly one more turn after a game ending criteria is met.  Then scores are tallied.  There are four ways to score points

Hiking badges (obtained each time a peak tile is placed)

Panorama cards (scores in upper right of each panorama card)

Campfire cards (each with its own scoring criteria)

Stones (worth points equal to the peak tile they are on times the multiplier on the stone)

The player with the most points wins. There is no tiebreaker.

My thoughts on the game

When I was doing research for SPIEL 2023, this was a title that caught my eye as possibly a hidden gem.  I had not played many games from Trefl before, so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect.   The designer has a pretty decent ludography, with 11 titles to his credit at BGG, so that also seemed to be a positive point in its favor.

After my initial plays, there’s a lot to like here.  I like the resource management part of the game, and I love the way that you have to look at the map to try to find the best places to both gain the needed resources as well as where to spend/convert them.  There is also a bit of a deck building aspect in that you can choose which hiking cards you want to add to your “deck” – though it’s not really true deck building as you’re not looking to deal yourself a combo in a particular hand, you’re just adding different action options to your arsenal.

I would say that movement is a big first goal – you need to be able to move around the board to get to places, and each stop generally gives you something.  If I had a beef with the game, it’s that there is no way to flush the hiking card market.  In one game, we had an initial market filled with 5 endorphin cards that would be quite useful in the endgame (allowing you to make your own containers with only a pair of goods) – but no one was willing to buy one as they weren’t overly useful to start.  That particular game dragged on quite slowly as people had to camp more often to replenish their cards that allowed them to move.  There are a few cards that allow you to flush the hiking card market as an action, but if they don’t come up early on, it is quite possible for the market to stagnate and slow the game down.

As the game moves forward, you’ll have options to run (move 4 spaces), to paraglide (to move to a lower level tile) or to bicycle (move to any space with a bike on it) – all of these are really great to move large distances.  There are also a couple of other options – and ideally, you’d like to have a number of movement options both for flexibility as well as efficiency (so that you don’t have to take as many camp actions).

There is a nice pacing to the game, early on you mostly need the basic goods (mushrooms, herbs and berries), and later in the game, you’ll need more of the refined goods.  The board will set up differently each game due to the placement of the terrain tiles, and you’ll have to find the best areas to allow you to efficiently collect goods and then convert them into what you want.  It is important to note that you can also use some Hiking cards to do this work for you – but again, each player will be building their own strategy based on the cards they buy.  There are also campfire cards which can be invaluable with their ongoing action benefits.

There are four ways to score, and it does feel like they are balanced pretty well: placing peak tiles, putting your stones on peak tiles, and collecting panorama cards all can play a huge role in your final score.  The game though forces you to branch out a little bit because the game won’t end until two of the three criteria are met – thus, even if you rush out to buy your six panorama cards as fast as possible, you’ll still have a good bit of game to play until one of the other two conditions is met – thus, you’ll have to still try to score points in one of the other major areas.

The campfire cards are a bit more of a wildcard and I find that I like to draw some as early as possible and then use my choice of card as a way to guide my strategy for the rest of the game.  In my most recent game, my first campfire card was +3 per hiking badge (for placing a peak tile), and I worked on placing as many of the plains and alpine peak tiles as possible – knowing that the +3 bonus would add up nicely; and also, it would take less effort to place those peak tiles as the smaller ones are cheaper.

Our first games have been on the longer end of things (well over an hour for 3p), and I would like this game to be shorter time-wise.  As the game length rises, the resource collection/trading churn grows old.  That being said, learning games are always slower, and I think we had a particularly unfriendly Hiking card display to start one of our early games.  Once the game settled down, I really enjoy the puzzle of figuring out where to go and how to most efficiently achieve my goals.

At the moment, I’m still looking forward to playing Five Peaks again, and early on in the game discovery phase after Spiel, that is maybe the best recommendation a game can have.

It is probably too early to rate the game, but right now, I’m between I like it and Neutral.  The final rating likely will be determined by how well we’re able to get the playing time down.  If this turns out to be 15 to 20 min per player, it’ll hit the table often.  If it stays at 25-30 min per player, not as likely.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

I love it!

I like it.  Dale Y

Neutral.  

Not for me…