Nanga Parbat

Can you navigate the perilous peaks of Nanga Parbat – the 9th largest mountain on Earth? In this two-player game from Dr Finn’s Games, you play as a member of the Sherpa community, establishing basecamps on the mountain for foreign explorers, and, slightly troublingly, trapping animals for food and clothing. All this sets you on the way to scoring points in different ways to win the game.

Let’s strap on our climbing gear and explore this a little more.

Setup & Play

Give each player their own player board and pieces in the matching colour – 15 meeples, 12 base camp tokens and six cubes. Each player puts a cube on he zero scoring space and sets the remaining five aside to be used for scoring during the game.

Place the mountain board on the table and randomly assign the animal tokens to the six spaces in each of the six regions. One player chooses which region to place the guide token to start the game and the other player takes the first turn.

It’s a quick and simple set up, and the animal tokens being separate shapes and colours makes it fun, and it’s easy to not inadvertently group all of the same animal in one region.

On your turn, you’ll choose an animal to trap (or ‘rescue’ if, like me, you’d prefer a friendlier way to think about it) and place its token on your player board in the matching space. Add one of your hiker meeples to the space you’ve cleared, and move the guide to the corresponding region on the mountain. So if I’ve taken a yak from the fourth space in the first region, I’d place a meeple on the fourth space, put the yak on my player board and then move the guide to the fourth region for my opponent’s turn.

There are six spaces in each of the six regions, but single spaces in some regions are also considered to be adjacent as they’re connected by dotted lines, allowing you to connect hikers across multiple regions on the mountain.

Animal Power

Each of the six animals have a different ability that you can choose to activate at any point on your turn. When I first started playing, it didn’t immediately seem obvious to me how these would necessarily help me navigate the puzzle, but a few turns in it becomes pretty clear.

Three of the powers allow you to manipulate combinations of tokens on the mountain. The Snow Leopard allows you to swap two adjacent hikers, the Musk Deer lets you swap two adjacent animals, and the Tahr allows you to swap an adjacent hiker and animal. Remember as well that dotted lines between regions might mean you’re able to move these into some quite advantageous positions.

The Yak will allow you to move the guide to a different region, potentially letting you finish off a perfect grouping, or a vital part of your animal set collection. The Bharal acts as a ‘wild’ animal (not an actual wild animal…) but only for the purposes of trading animals. You can’t use that ability to mimic other animal powers. Finally, the wonderful red panda token scores you a point if you’re tied or behind on the scoring track.

How Else Can You Score?

The board has a specific scoring area that you’ll be able to place your five scoring cubes on at various points in the game. You score for either trading sets of different animals, sets of identical animals or establishing basecamps.

At the end of your turn, you may choose to place a cube in the scoring area as long as you have a minimum of three animals to trade, or at least three adjacent hikers to form a basecamp. You can also only score for a maximum of six hikers or animals so there’s a clear upper limit for your endeavors.

This gets especially tactical as each space is only available to score once. If your opponent gets a six-hiker basecamp on the mountain, the best you can do is score for a camp with five people in it, even if your turn allows you to chain that sixth and final person together. There’s only a point in it, so it doesn’t feel like a lot at the time – more a sense of pride being hurt than sacrificing a big score. But the odd point can make a real difference to the outcome.

Establishing your basecamp means taking your hikers off the board and removing them from the game completely, though you do get to replace them with some charming wooden tent tokens to mark the camp.

As the game progresses, the value of the animal powers can get harder to activate. You can swap hiker meeples as much as you like with enough tokens on hand, but once a basecamp is out there, those tokens are fixed.

You can trade animals regardless of whether you’ve activated them or not, which makes it feel easier, but racing to get six different tokens to trade, only to realise you would quite like to have used that Tahr to get your solitary meeple over with their friends can hinder your progress

Reaching The Summit

The game ends when both players have placed their last meeple or their last scoring cube. In theory that sounds like you could sneak an extra turn or two at the end if your opponent scores quickly. In practice you’re using nearly all those turns to get combos big enough to score, and in every game I’ve played, each player has taken their last turn consecutively so there’s little opportunity to gazump your rival.

That being said, there’s one tiny detail that feels incredibly well tied to the theme of this game that can potentially change the entire result.

Much like what I assume climbing a mountain to be like, you can’t occupy the same space as your opponent. So if you’d move to be level on points on the tracker, you actually advance an extra space to be out in front. Being able to time that well at the end of the game gives you the same sense of elation that Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay probably felt when they reached the top of Mount Everest. Having that happen to you however, is less exhilarating.

A Rewarding Climb Or A Walk In The Park?

For me, Nanga Parbat is a little of both. There’s definitely a great puzzle a relatively unassuming box here. It’s quick to learn and get to grips with which is really important. My first game was with my 12-year-old daughter, and we finished way inside the 30 minute guide time on the box, including reading the rules, setting it up and packing it away.

It’s intuitive as well. Set collection is a pretty common mechanism in a lot of games, so the idea of trying to get loads of red pandas instinctively makes sense, as does trying to place all your hikers together. You gravitate towards it without thinking so it feels really familiar right from the first few turns.

But sit and play a few more times and this next level of strategy starts to emerge. Realising you can manipulate the region that the guide will move to just to limit the set collection options for your opponent can be satisfying. Activating one of your animals to move their meeple away from a group, and then trading it in as part of a set for some big points also feels pretty good.

But it’s a tight game. There are 36 spaces on the board and you each have 15 meeples, so there’s little room to manoeuvre once it gets going. The space to make good decisions can narrow quite quickly, and suddenly you have two meeples left, all the big scoring spaces are taken and you’re trying to shift pieces round the mountain to stay in the game.

For those reasons, it feels like it’s an inherently close game. Every time I’ve played the physical copy, there’s been a solitary point in it. A similar number of games on Board Game Arena has meant a maximum of two points difference at the end. Part of me likes knowing that it’ll be close – it makes me feel like I’ll win or lose on my own decisions. There’s another part of me thinking that no matter what I do, there’ll be the odd point in it at the end.

Final Thoughts

There’s a lot of replayability in Nanga Parbat, and it feels comforting and familiar. After my first play I knew what to do, I knew how to teach it without ambiguity or referring back to the rules. Games like that will always have a place on my shelf because they’re easy. There’s also a part of me that wants to keep playing to truly get my nose out in front. To win by four or five points and feel like I’ve come close to mastering it is a drive to keep playing.

I’d definitely recommend it if you’re looking for a neat, easy-to-learn two player experience. That’s often a crowded marketplace, and whilst this might not leap out and get in your face as something unique, I think it makes up for it in how easy it is to just sit down and play.