Summit is a game for 1-6 players. Games typically last roughly 20 minutes per player. Now, whether the game is cooperative or competitive will be entirely up to you and your group of “friends”. Both play styles are supported and the overall goal is much the same: get to the summit, plant your flag, and then get back to the base camp. In cooperative play, only one person needs to do this. In competitive play, it’s a race.
During the game, players will take turns moving up the mountain as much as they can or want to. To do this, they will play tiles from their hand of three. These tiles have different effects based on their color: brown tiles are normal tiles that are easy to cross, blue tiles are icy tiles that require extra movement to cross, and, finally, yellow tiles are low air ties that require the active player to pay an oxygen cost to proceed.
After a player has finished moving, they will roll both the event and the weather die. The event die has two blank spaces and four event spaces. If you get an event symbol, you draw and resolve an event card. Simple enough. The event deck distribution is 20% good, 60% bad, and 20% really bad. The weather die has one sunny side, three single snowflake sides, a double snowflake side, and a blizzard side. The sunny and snowflake sides dictate how much food the player has to consume on that turn from 0 to 2. A blizzard die result causes the blizzard tracker to move up one space and also forces every player to spend the resources indicated on the new blizzard space. Note that if the blizzard tracker reaches the top, everyone freezes to death. Otherwise, the active player will refill their hand of tiles, and play will pass to the next player.
Seems simple? Seems straightforward? You would not be wrong! Except for all of the resource management! You will have to manage the food and oxygen your character brings with them as they climb the mountain! Why don’t you just bring all the food and all the oxygen, you ask? Well, that’s because they have weight! And weight slows you down, meaning it will take you longer to reach the top of the mountain and therefore expose you to more of the elements!
So, yes, you have five resource tracks: food, oxygen, weight, health, and speed. The players boards are high quality dual-layered boards, so your tracking cubes will never be accidentally knocked off. The tracks are also cleverly designed: at certain points on each track, they display how other tracks are directly affected by moving onto or off of a space. When your tracking cube in the one track passes these symbols, you will need to move the other cubes in the affected tracks accordingly.
The biggest differences between cooperative and competitive play is how players can restock on food and oxygen. In cooperative play, each player has a Sherpa that carries additional resources and a heavy item, such as an ice pick. In competitive play, there is a camp halfway up the mountain that players can use to restock. In both cases, the resources each player may draw from are limited. One of the other big differences is that the competitive games have a karma track that is part of your score.
Whenever you actively do something that helps another player, you gain karma. Whenever you do something that hinders, you lose karma. Examples of helping are primarily letting players pass you or playing beneficial karma cards. If you let a player pass you on the mountain, they will not have to spend a point of movement to move through your space. But if you refuse, they can’t advance past you at all. In cooperative play, of course, you always let people leapfrog over you. Beneficial karma cards will do things like adding food or oxygen to a player, healing them, or giving them extra movement. Of course, you can still game this mechanic by giving food or oxygen to a player who has carefully balanced their inventory, thus pushing them over the weight breakline and decreasing their speed.
To be clear, most of the experience I have with this game is in cooperative gameplay. That said, this game is a delightful gem. This game has a solid core of resource management, risk-weighing, and push your luck. The point in the game where you have pushed too far will never come across as being completely from luck; you will look back and feel like you pushed just a bit to far at an earlier point in the game. Also, when things start to look bleak, there are always options to recover stability. These options always come with risk. Do you dare take more exposure?
My point here is that it never feels like there wasn’t something that you could have done. Not even in hindsight. It is a situation where you decide that you know the risk, but even so you will choose to press onwards. Not to say that playing extremely cautiously will win you the game. In both competetive and cooperative play, taking your time to climb the mountain will penalize your score, but more likely, the longer you are on the mountain, the harsher the blizzards will get.
So, do you dare? Do you think that you can conquer the mountain?
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