Two Rex Plays #2 - Whistle Mountain
Next up is Whistle Mountain by Bezier Games - build scaffolding above a raging river, attach machines to build your points engine, all the while navigating airships and saving workers from a watery fate. Here are the mechanisms and design choices that we enjoyed:
Building machines above a certain height causes the river to rise, flooding lower lying scaffolding and eventually triggering the end game. This means the timer is integrated into the gameplay, making it a natural way to mark progression. We’re fans of systems that reduce or hide in-game admin, and if you can find a clever way to make it fun and thematically consistent, hats off!.
Nice artwork that flows across the token stacking zones and the grid where you place your polyomino scaffolding, helping to connect them to the wider theme.
The combination of unique starting abilities, player upgrades, and machines creates a huge amount of variability. This increases replayability and mimics a feature of roguelikes which I enjoy, being encouraged to adapt and work with what you have on the board rather than sticking too rigidly to a predefined plan.
The first phase of each turn involves placing three differently shaped airships to gather resources and trigger machine effects. This adds an extra spatial puzzle to proceedings which compliments the polyomino placement of the scaffolding.
Another great Tabletop Simulator mod that works with the software rather than against it. Great idea to suspend the rising river above the playing surface (I’m sure that was designed for the physical version, but it works a treat in TTS and avoids what would otherwise be a nightmare scenario of triple stacked tokens). If you’re familiar with TTS, we’d recommend locking the scaffolding after it’s been placed to make it easier to layer the machines on top without accidentally moving everything around!
As mentioned in previous blogs, living several hundred miles away from each other means we do most of our gaming online, so we’ve only played the official Tabletop Simulator version of this one. I love physical versions, but the game needs to be playable by at least one of my children and for now this one is a little too complex. That’s a shame because the production quality looks amazing and the physical version looks great in photos. For now TTS screenshots will have to do!
Interested in Whistle Mountain? Find out more here:
Bezier Games
Official TTS workshop
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2171268289