by Nathan Jenne

My game designing cohort Jake and I grew up in and live in the Rocky Mountains. We have spent a lot of time in remote mountain forests. I wouldn't say we are particularly adept at wilderness survival, but we've hiked many miles of mountain trails. We have seen waterfalls, lakes, moose, bears, mountain goats, marmots, elk, eagles, hawks, and many more animals and beautiful sights. Needless to say, we enjoy the mountains and the animals found in them.

Some time ago, we thought it would be fun to create a cozy game focused on the trails and wildlife found in the mountains near us. We started with square tiles that each had a trail and habitat type on them. We didn't want to constrain the size of the trails or shape of the forest. We wanted the players to use their imagination to make their map fun and interesting, something they could get lost in. One of our initial thoughts was players could score points based on the length of their trails and size of each habitat type. Building networks of trails and grouping habitat tiles together was fun, but the design needed more.


We wanted to introduce waterfalls, thinking it would be fun if we could score points for all the trail tiles surrounding the waterfalls. We tried putting them in the supply with the trail tiles, but some players would draw a ton of them and others would get none — and since the waterfalls could potentially score up to 8 points, this set-up was too random and players who drew the most waterfalls would always win.

Then Jake had a breakthrough idea: Why not earn waterfall tiles every time you created a loop in your trail network? This worked beautifully, putting players in control of gaining waterfalls. As an additional bonus, you now had another purpose for the trails you were building. I knew the game was really starting to get interesting.


At this point we were opportunistically scoring habitats while we created trails — but it didn't feel like habitats were an actual way to earn points. The points earned from the largest habitats were only happenstance, so we added habitat tiles in addition to the trail tiles and made them worth 2 points toward that habitat as compared to the 1 point for the habitats on trail tiles. This brought a new dimension to the game because you could start to focus on a specific habitat and score significantly more points in habitats.

However, this created a new problem. Now whether the draft pool was full of trail tiles or a pile of habitat tiles was completely random. It felt like things were going backwards. Players didn't have enough choice due to the random nature of pulling tiles from the supply.

Well, why not put both a trail and a habitat on each tile, I wondered, one on each side? This turned out to be a good choice — but created a new problem.

Up until this point, this game had been an open drafting game with several tiles to choose from. Once tiles had information on both sides, some players were taking much too long to decide what to draft, constantly flipping the tiles over — even with only three tiles on display. We had created a cognitive load much higher that what we were aiming for. We tried to put icons on the tiles to indicate what was on the back, but the cognitive load was still too high and this approach cluttered the tiles.

We valued the player interaction of the draft, but when faced with slowing down the game and driving the complexity to the high end of our target audience, it became clear that we needed to achieve player interaction in another way, so we went to a blind draw from a bag — which proved to be magic. The game sped up, and players still had choices since two double-sided tiles have four permutations, as well as many more choices as to where to place them in your forest.

After many more playtests, we discovered that we wanted more ways to score. We decided to add campgrounds that would earn players as many points as waterfalls. How would players earn these campgrounds? It seemed only logical that we'd need to constrain how close campgrounds could be placed next to each other. When we have been camping in the mountains, we've always tried to camp as far as we could from others. After all, we are out there to enjoy nature. After tuning, we decided that campgrounds needed to be six miles apart from each other. We also felt that players needed to sacrifice one of their drawn tiles to "develop" the campground.

At that point, the game was playing smoothly, but we noticed a small bias toward the players who drew the most tiles with forks. At the same time, we wanted to incorporate animals into the game and possibly add light player interaction. That's when we introduced the idea of animals being tied to each habitat, and you would get an animal when other players drew and placed forks in their trails. Players receiving the animal would still need to place the animal in its associated habitat to realize the points.


That final change helped balance out the game and also had the benefit of placing cute animal meeples into your forest. Win-win.

On a final note, if you have had a chance to play Alpine Trails you'll notice the personal objectives reward players with varied amounts of points. Throughout development, we tried many combinations of personal bonuses, and since some were easier to attain and others required sacrifice in order to score them, we continued playtesting and tuning until we found a good balance leading to varied points for each bonus.

If you get a chance to play this game, I sincerely hope you enjoy it.

Nate Jenne
Last Night Games

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Fun Fact 1: The gloss print on the box lid represents the topographic lines and trail leading to a prominent mountain peak nearby us.

Fun Fact 2: A few years ago Jake and I were snowshoeing on the lower part of that trail when we heard the rumble of an avalanche. We ducked for cover below a rock outcropping and listened to the tremendous noise for over a minute. Fortunately, we were not in the path of the avalanche, and we quickly and safely got off that trail.