Game Spotlight – The Climbers
The Climbers by Capstone Games is a strategy game where you try to move your pawn to the top of the block mountain. Except, you can pile unoccupied blocks on top of other blocks to get your Climber higher.
To start, the two big beige blocks are placed upright on their short sides and the rest of the blocks are stacked around and or on top of them and each other. You can’t build the mountain with holes or overhangs and blocks must always have at least 1 side touching another block in the mountain. Once all the blocks have been placed, it’s time for the Climbers to climb!
Climbers can climb up on top of blocks that their heads can see over. You also get a short ladder and a long ladder which you can use as a 1 shot each to climb up on to higher blocks but mostly, players will be moving and rotating blocks so the Climbers can climb ever higher. One catch though; Climbers can only land on block faces of their own color or the neutral beige face. If there happens to be several moves a Climber can take, they are allowed to climb as high as they can in one turn. Theoretically, you could get to the top of the mountain in turn 1…if you are exceedingly lucky. A short note for the color challenged folks out there; the yellow faces are really hard to distinguish from the beige faces in low light- enough so that you may have to mark one or the other for clarity.
Other rules for Climbers are that they can only go up or horizontally in the cardinal directions (no diagonal moving for them!) and players can’t move a block that has climbers on it, a blocking disc, or the block that was most recently moved by the previous player. Each player has a single use blocking disc that they can place on any unoccupied surface which will prevent the other players from moving that block for an entire turn.
The game ends when there are no more moves to allow Climbers to climb higher. At that point, the Climber that is highest or got to the highest point first wins.
Things I liked:
- The parts are really solid; all the blocks are good wood and the Climber pawns, instead of being one solid color, are two piece pawns with separate wooden heads.
- I like the concept of this game and the blocks are not identical so for the ones where you can flip them on an axis for a different height, you aren’t necessarily guaranteed to find your color on the side you need to move your Climber upward. The game does allow players to rotate any number of blocks to see the sides (as long as the players put the blocks back to their original orientation if they aren’t going to use them) but I noticed in taking pictures for this post that often the blocks with sides I needed were unavailable for use.
- The first person determination is…amusing and topical but also I can see a discussion happening about what exactly constitutes a “mountain”. I like that they have an alternate “random” starting condition just in case you’ve lived your entire life in the Sahara or the Bonneville Salt Flats.
Things I didn’t like:
- Although I do love the quality of the parts, they make the game quite heavy, what with 35 wooden blocks, wooden ladders and wooden pawns. The box is solid and built for the weight but this is also not the most portable game on my shelf because of it.
- I would have preferred if the directions had been laid out with the gameplay before the explanation of the specific parts. That seems backwards to me to discuss details before getting the big picture. For a 7 page rules book it is really hard to find answers to specific questions because you don’t know if the answer is in the gameplay section, which is last, or in the specific rules sections, which come before general gameplay.
- I would have liked the pawns to have come with different shades of wooden heads. I know that may seem petty for a dislike because 5 different woods for the pawns is gonna drive the cost up, but it’s also another little microaggression for all the people who aren’t light skinned to open a game with no inclusivity for them. Again. I might rather have had the pawns all one solid color, honestly.
