Mountain Goats: Legacy

• Designers: Alex Cutler, Michael Mihealsick, Stefan Risthaus  
• Publisher: Allplay
• Players: 2-5
• Age: 7+
• Time: 20-45 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Each turn, roll and combine dice to race up the mountain. Get to the top to score, but don’t get knocked off! If you roll the goat symbol, activate new abilities — powers that rotate every mission. As your story progresses, you’ll unlock even more powerful abilities and face tougher challenges. The mountain itself might even transform beneath your feet.

Mountain Goats: Legacy combines dice rolling/combining and events into a longer version of Mountain Goats. But, after the first session, more and more hazards and gameplay tweaks show up. The dice now have a goat symbol — when rolled, you’ll get to use one of the unlocked player powers. These can change with every session! There’s also a new system called “Courage” that greatly affects your ability to mitigate luck and refine your dice rolls.

This game can be played as either a single session or a legacy game. As a legacy game, it is fully replayable and resettable. You will not be asked to destroy or modify components. The first session can also be combined with the original Mountain Goats game.

To set up, lay out the square mountain cards on the table with point cards at the top of each.  The 4 bonus cards are laid out  next to the mountains.  Each player takes a family of goats in a single color, placing one at the foot of each mountain. 

Now open the Storybook and read the intro to the current chapter.  You might learn new rules at this point.  You may also get New Discoveries which will let you dig in the box and find new components.  The Mountaintop tile that you discover starts above Mountain #9. Finally, place the ability board on the table. If you start with more than 1 ability card, keep one for the current game and discard the other to the box.

The goal is to climb the mountains and collect the point cards found at the top.  On a turn, players go through these four steps:

1] Roll the 4 dice 

2] Use abilities- if you rolled Goat icons, you may use them to activate cards on the Ability board.  Initially, this may allow you to turn a Goat icon into a set value or it may allow you to move a goat.

3] Move Goats – Split up your dice and sum the dice in each group. Move a goat up one space for each group that matches the number of the mountain.  You are not obligated to use all your dice (in fact, it may not be possible).  There is no limit to the number of spaces any particular goat can move.  You consider unused Goat icons as “1”s

4] Score mountains – when you reach the top of a mountain, take a point card from the stack there.  Once at the top, if you move that goat again, claim another tile for each movement.  However, there can only be 1 goat at the top of the mountain.  A goat remains at the top until another goat reaches the top space; the new arrival stays at the top and the previous one goes back to the foot of that mountain.  Each time you collect a full set of six points cards, one from each mountain, take the highest remaining bonus card. 

As you play, also pay attention to the mountain top tiles.  Each round, you will get a new tile, and it always starts on top of Mountain 9.  Previous tiles all move two mountains to the left, and a tile that started on Mountain 5 is removed from the game. These tiles might add in ongoing rules or changes to game end scoring.

The Chapter ends when 3 mountains are out of point cards OR all 4 bonus cards are claimed. Finish the current round so all players have the same number of turns.  All players calculate their score by adding up their point cards, bonus cards, and figuring out any extra points from mountain top tiles, etc.  The player with the most points wins.  Ties broken in favor of the player with the most goats on top of mountains at the end.

When you finish the chapter, you can log your progress in the Journal.  You note down which Mountain tiles were in the game and where they were. If you completed any Achievements, you’ll note this here as well. Finally, the winner of each game gets to choose the next chapter to be played – make a note of this choice so you know where to look when you return to the game.

You can play the game as a single chapter, or you can work through the entire 10 Chapter story.  There is a nice storage system provided so you don’t have to play through the whole thing in a single setting.

My thoughts on the game

To start, I would propose that this game be called “Mountain Goats: Campaign”.  Because there’s no Legacy involved here (at least not how I would define it…).  You play ten different Chapters of the story, and the rules change as you go.  Sure, you use different components in some of the chapters, but you simply put the unused bits back in the box.  That’s not legacy, that’s pretty much every board game that has modular scenario based components.  

The base game of Mountain Goats is a fun dice chucker where you try to get to the top of the mountain at the right times to collect the most victory cards.  That base game remains unchanged here, though there is even more flexibility in the dice manipulation given the ever changing goat abilities.

The goat board is a really nice evolution of the game, and if you play multiple campaigns, the set of goat powers will likely be different as the winner of the previous chapter gets to choose which one stays and which one goes.

The story itself will take different paths in different campaigns as well as the winner also generally gets to choose between two different scenarios for the next game. Thus, it is definitely unlikely that any one campaign will follow exactly the same path through the story book as any other.

The mountain tiles are another interesting addition to the game as they can definitely affect your strategy when going for which mountain.  Sure, at times it feels like you’re simply going for whatever numbers the dice provide you –  but with those Goat abilities, there is a lot more latitude to make different sums than you might first expect.

There are a number of other surprises that have come up as we played through the game, but for spoiler reasons, I’ll not talk about them here – but just let you know that they certainly kept the game interesting and new.  I’ll be the first to admit that I’m normally not going to advocate for ten games of Mountain Goats in a day, heck maybe not even in a month – but with the constantly changing setup, it is reasonable to play a game or two at a game session and see how things change over the course of the campaign.

If you like Mountain Goats, this seems like a natural thing to try.  Again, I don’t think I’d really consider this a Legacy game, but suffice it to say that every game in your campaign will be different, and possibly different than any game you’ve played in the past with all the different moving parts and choices that can be made.  

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. Dale Y
• Neutral. John P (rather just play Mountain Goats)
• Not for me…