Mountain Goats

Here's one of the games we picked up at On Board Gaming last weekend.  Since we're often looking for goats & sheep in our Minecraft worlds (Animania mod), Mountain Goats caught my eye.  We have so many cat and dog themed games.  None with goats until now.  But yeah, most of our collection has animals of one type or another.

Right away, I was a bit surprised at how big the mountain tiles were, compared to the picture on the box.  We could probably fit a dozen goat meeples on each tile.  The setup was easy, and the rules were easy.  Place the mountain tiles as shown, then roll the four dice, combine them into sets of numbers and use those sets to move your goats up the mountains.

If your goat gets to the top of a mountain, you get the matching score chip, and you get to kick any other player's goats back down to the bottom of the hill.  If you roll a 6 and your goat is already king of that mountain, you just stay on top and take another score chip.

When you complete a set of score chips (5-6-7-8-9-10) you get to take the next bonus chip (starting at 15 then 12, 9 and 6) and start collecting your next set of chips.

When three mountains run out of chips, the game is over.  Add up your chips.  Our scores were 157 to 130 the first time and 125 to 207 that time I won three of the bonus chips for three full sets of numbers.

There was a weird additional rule that when you roll the four dice, if two or more come up ones, you can switch all but one of them to whatever number you want.  This felt completely unneccessary to us.  Just a bother.  Sometimes you're left with a die or two you can't use.  It's a die-rolling game, right?  Anyway, a 1-1-3-4 can be a 5, 6, 7, 8 or 9.  Plenty of variety.  Sure, I could bump a die up by a few pips and move two goats this turn. Just let the dice fall where they may. I don't expect to get the numbers I need every time.  And these are goats, not race cars.

One cute detail I saw was that the score chips all showed different grasses and flowers.  So we were really running up the hills to get a bite to eat.

This was enjoyable.  I couldn't help role-play the goats a little, making goat sounds and jokes, butting the pieces around, bumping each other off the mountain tops to score points.  The pieces were bigger than usual, and easy to handle with shaky hands.  It seemed like the scoring would be a bother, but we just counted how many of each tile we had, and I used the calculator on my phone.