Peaks, from Tangerine Games, is a game about mountaineering for 2-6 players, and with a solo option for solitaire play. It's a game where players are mountaineers who are collecting the experience and resources needed for them to conquer various mountain peaks around the world. You'll be placing flags out on the map to reflect your achievements and it's these flags that will score points, with area control and set collection bonuses for each continent.
On your turn you choose a Rest, Prepare or Climb action. Rest lets you travel to another location on the world map game board and resets your energy to your current stamina level. When you Prepare, you select a mountain card from those in the display and you collect some gear. Climb lets you tackle one of your mountain cards by expending the requisite energy and gear. It's an incremental game as your climbs give you experience and you'll in turn need a set level of experience before you can tackle certain climbs... Or at least to tackle them safely: there's always the option to push your luck and try an ascent for which you don't have enough experience but that will mean rolling a 'danger die' for each experience point for which you fall short. The 'danger die' is a custom six-sided die with a danger symbol on one face and blanks on the other five. Fail the roll and you'll find you're excluded from some of the better rewards for the ascent.
Peaks is a competitive rather than cooperative game but mountaineers usually rope together to climb and that's reflected in the game, so that when you attempt a climb others can decide to join you. They'll also have to pay energy but the shared effort means the energy cost for each player is reduced. Players sharing in a climb also pool their experience for the purpose of meeting that climb's experience requirement. There are rewards set out on each mountain card and on taking a Climb action you have to announce in advance which reward you will take. Any players who decide to join you on the climb will therefore know what choices of reward they will have (ie: a reward that the lead player hasn't chosen). Particularly at higher player counts you need to weigh up whether it's best to join a rival's climb or hold out for the possibility of a better reward on another player's ascent.
With Peaks, designer Sam Gray has created a tactical game that pulls together several familiar eurogame mechanics but without bogging players down with complexity: this is a game that's easy to learn so you will quickly be up and running - or should that be up and climbing? And tho' the world map board is unremarkable, some of the other game components are very impressive. There's a deck of around 100 mountain cards, all representing real-world peaks and each with a picturesque photo of the mountain. The boards are dual layer and the game uses custom dice as markers for upgrades.
Peaks has successfully completed its recent run on Kickstarter. Our preview copy was held up in customs so we weren't able to feature the game during the course of the Kickstarter but Tangerine Games are still accepting late pledges at www.kickstarter.com/projects/tangerinegames/peaks