Snowcrest

• Designer: Philip duBarry
• Publisher: Grail Games
• Players: 1-4
• Age: 14+
• Time: 15-60 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Deep in the remote mountains of a snowy land, holy ones seek to rediscover powerful knowledge that has been lost for centuries. Not only are the ancient scrolls hidden, but they are said to be protected by magical beasts. Through offerings, meditation, and cultural development, they believe the knowledge may be revealed, then peace and prosperity will be restored throughout the land.

In Snowcrest, you lead your village and its monastery towards enlightenment. Control a unique faction of priests, farmers, and laborers. Build structures, tend the barley fields, harvest juniper from the forest, present offerings, become lost in meditation, and uncover the secrets of a bygone age. Overcome the monstrous guardians of this knowledge and bring peace and prosperity to the snowfields. At the end of the game, players tally up points to determine the winner.

The cloth board is unfolded and placed on the table; this is used to hold all of the resources/cards in the game.  Place the appointed number of Scroll, Barley, Offering Bowl, Prayer Bell and Gold tokens on the right side of the mat, and the building tiles next to them.  The Guardian deck, Forest deck (with Juniper tokens on top) are placed in the middle.  The Achievement cards are placed at the top, and N+1 cards are revealed in a display.  At the bottom, there is a display of five Villager cards.

Each player takes their own player mat and a 13-card Village deck in their color.  Their Farm tile is placed on the first building space and a marker placed on the 0 space of the Omen track.  The area above the Omen track is a 3×3 grid for cards, and this area is called the Player’s village.  The four starting villagers are randomly placed in the corners of this grid. The remainder of the Village deck is shuffled and a 3 card starting hand is drawn.  Each card has a barley purchase cost in the upper left.  There is a box at the bottom of the card which shows the action the card can have when activated.  In the upper right, you will see some resources; this card can also be discarded from your hand or exhausted in your village to produce these resources.

The starting player gets 3 Barley and each player further in turn order gets one more. Each player uses this starting income to buy one of the Villager cards in their hand, and this card is placed in the central space of the Village grid.  If they do not have enough Barley to buy their desired card, the player can move their Omen marker right one space for eac barley missing.

On a turn, the active player takes one action, though this may trigger other card effects:

1] Rest – if you have a complete row of 3 face down cards in your village (horizontal, vertical or diagonal), you MUST rest.  First gather resources by looking at all the faceup cards in your Village and gaining the resources seen in the upper right corner of each.  Also, note that any of your starting Villagers also produce 1 Barley even when they are face down!  Finally, flip all face down cards back to the face up side.

2] Activate a face-up card in your Village – take the action shown on the bottom of the card and then flip the card face down.  Examples of card actions are:

• Gain a Resource/Scroll – take this from the supply
• Gain a card – draw a card from your own deck
• Gain a Omen – move your Omen marker one space to the right, if you are already at the rightmost -5 space, take an Omen token instead which is worth -1VP
• Gain Juniper – Juniper tokens are found on top of the Forest Deck. This is the only place you can take Juniper from. If the Juniper supply on the deck is exhausted, then the top Forest card is flipped over. Each player has a Curse penalty they must pay (discarding things) or else they take an Omen for each thing they didn’t discard. Finally the player who flipped over the Forest card gets a small bonus as shown at the bottom.
• Construct a building – add a building tile face up to the leftmost open space on your building row. If your row is full, you can discard any building and then build in that spot. Later in the game, the building can be flipped over to provide a resource matching the color of the building. 
• Restock buildings – flip all of your building tiles back to the face up side

• Veneration – Reveal the top Guardian card, and see the offering required in the top left and discard those things. For each thing you do not discard, take an Omen.  All other players must discard the penalty shown in the Opponent’s Curse box. Finally, the active player gets the reward shown at the bottom
• Meditation – spend as many Prayer Bell tokens as you wish as well as exhausting any other Prayer Bells you have access to and announce this total out loud. Each player clockwise has the chance to show greater powers of Meditation by spending/exhausting more Prayer Bells.  If they do, they get a Scroll token.  If they do not beat your total, then you get a Scroll token. When everyone has had a chance to do this, any player who did not gain a scroll with this action is allowed to keep their Prayer Bells.
• Remove an Omen – move your Omen token to the left as directed

3] Add a new Villager – choose a card from your hand or from the face-up row of Villager card on the cloth board, pay its cost in Barley, then add it to an empty space in your Village (or replace any face up card in your Village) and then perform its action. Finally, flip the card face down. 

During your turn, check the Achievement cards at the top of the board. If you have ever met the criteria for a visible Achievement card, announce this feat, flip the Achievement card over and take a reward of 2 Scroll tokens.  No one else can do this Achievement.

The next player then takes their turn.  This process continues until the end of a round when the last Scroll token is taken from the supply – if needed, get extra Scroll tokens from the game box. Players now calculate their final scores:

• Scroll tokens: 1 point each
• Building tiles: 1/3/5 points for 6/7/8 buildings built
• Omen track: score positive/negative points based on the position of your Omen tracker
• Omen tokens:  -1 point per token
• Resources: for each resource, the player who has the most of each type scores 1 point. Players are allowed to flip over any face up Village cards and buildings as well as discarding any cards left in their hands for resources.

The player with the most points wins. Ties broken in favor of the player with the most resources.

My thoughts on the game

Snowcrest is a fun game with a bit of resource management combined with a touch of deck building/tableau building.  This is definitely the year of the 3×3 card array; and you will construct a set of cards on your player board to give yourself the actions that you need.

Each player starts with the same four basic action cards in the corner of their board and from the very first turn, players can really start working on some divergent strategies.  The reason for this is that all players have access to the common Villager cards – and these cards can provide some strong actions.  After my first few games, there are a few cards that maybe seem a bit too strong – but I’ll admit to not having played enough to make any claims using the dreaded B-word.  Instead, I will always keep my eye out for those particular cards and make a move to buy them as soon as I see them.

There is a neat process of filling your player board up with the action cards – and the actual location can make a big difference.  You’re forced to take a rest turn each time that you have a full line of cards flipped over – so this means that you’ll never be able to use more than 7 of your cards prior to a rest.  If you put your three “best” cards in a row, you might be resting as often as every third or fourth turn!  And that would definitely not be an efficient way to play Snowcrest – so trying to space cards with related actions is a fun challenge.  I have also started to find cards that provide resources I want to spend on actions – and then never plan to activate them, using them instead to gain those wanted resources each time that I rest.

The starting cards provide very basic actions, but they do also provide a bit of game security as those cards when used give you a barley resource on resting.  This is a nice way to ensure that your engine keeps running, but admittedly, the actions you get on these cards are the weakest in the game – so as you gain experience with the game, you’ll have to decide when the right time comes to replace those cards with better actions from the Common Villager deck.

The resource management part of the game is also quite fascinating, and you have so many different ways to generate those needed resources.  I find that I need to remind newbies that they can always discard cards from their hand for the resources in the upper right.  There are also times where players will want to form a line on their player board quickly in order to gain all the resources on the faceup cards during the mandatory resting phase.  The buildings also give you a nice renewable resource buffer.  With so many ways to generate resources, players usually have a number of different options open to them.  This also makes the decision on Meditation a bit difficult as you’re never quite sure what people will be able to come up with.

Both your player board and the main board are actually cloth mats – pointing to another trend I’ve seen this year – so many games that are choosing to use fabric as opposed to traditional cardboard boards.  Is this a change that will pick up momentum?  Only time will tell.  I think they look nice, but I will admit that the creases in the fabric are a little annoying when you’re trying to lay out cards over those raised areas.  I suppose you could iron them flat, but you’ll just be folding them up again to put the game away. 

Otherwise, the cards and components are nice; one thing that got some complaints was the Omen track on the player board.  It is non-intuitive; with the positive direction going to the left (so that it’s opposite of just about every other number line you’ve ever seen in your life).   The rules are also a bit text-dense.  I felt like it could have used a few more illustrations (and a piece manifest) to help first-timers figure out what is going on in the game.  The icons on some of the cards are also not clearly explained; we had to try to intuit some things from the limited explanation illustrations that were provided in the rules.

All that aside, once we learned the game, Snowcrest was well worth the work.  There is a lot going on here and I have really enjoyed the challenge of building my action card tableau and then figuring out the right order in which to activate those cards.  I expect this to get a lot of play in early 2025 when it’s time to revisit the best games from Spiel 2024.

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Mark Jackson (1 game – solo): This is a very think-y 3×3 game… it worked well as a puzzle-y challenge and the production was gorgeous.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it! Dale Y
• I like it. John P, Mark Jackson
• Neutral.
• Not for me…