Wouter & Ymke 
The Peak Team is a cooperative board game where you play as park rangers trying to finish missions and record wildlife before the park closes for the day.
Each round is basically a workday in the park. You move around, spot animals, and keep routes open while juggling missions that somehow never seem to stop showing up. You have to plan together, but the game makes you do that without actually speaking.
The idea sounds simple enough: coordinate well, make good card choices, and survive the silence. It turns out to be more tense than you’d expect for something that looks this friendly.
👥 1-5 players, ages 10+
⌛ Playing time: 60 minutes
📝 Designer: Scott Almes
🎨 Artwork: Crocotame
🏢 Publisher: Matagot (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
The goal is straightforward: complete all the missions and record every animal before time runs out. If the round marker reaches the park closed space, or if too many missions are still sitting on the current round space, the team loses.
Each player starts with a ranger mat, a wooden ranger, two flags, a support token and an overview card. You set up the double-sided board, place nine animal tokens in their starting spots, shuffle the supply and mission cards, and pick one of the two starting ranger stations to begin at. The youngest player gets the small “F.R.” token to mark who starts.
Every round has three steps: the supply drop, the action phase and the round end.
During the supply drop, everyone draws four cards but doesn’t keep them. You have to hand out all your cards to your left and right neighbours as evenly as possible. If you’ve got five, you pass three one way and two the other. And no talking while you do this. You just sit there, trying to guess what your neighbours might need based on where they’re standing and which missions you can see. Sometimes you get it right, sometimes you don’t, and you’ll hear about it when talking starts again.
In the action phase, players use cards to hike, climb or fly across the park, or to record animals in their current area. You can ask another ranger to use their support token, which gives you a wild route icon, everything except the helicopter. After it’s used, they flip it inactive. To recharge your own, discard cards showing a total of four icons.
After moving, you can do a few optional things, always in this order: finish a mission if you’ve reached its location, share cards with someone in the same spot, and if you’re at a ranger station, draw and hand out new missions in silence until everyone’s got what they need. You can also pass if you’re done for the round.
At the end of the round, the round marker moves forward. If fewer than four missions are left on the current space, you keep going. If there are four or more, the team loses right away. If you reach the park closed space, same story. You win only if every mission is finished and every animal has been recorded.
From level 2 onwards, blocker tokens come into play, representing damaged routes that stop you from moving certain ways. Four of them are placed face up on the map at the start. Animal tokens also get new uses: you can spend one to remove a blocker or to get a small bonus like an extra route icon or a quick draw of two cards, keeping one. Once used, the animal stays on the board for the rest of the game.
In two-player mode, you get help from Vicky, a shared virtual ranger. You set up as if you were three players. Vicky keeps her cards between rounds and doesn’t draw new ones, while the two human players draw two extra cards total during the supply drop. She can move, record animals and share cards, but she can’t take on new missions. It’s a fix that keeps the teamwork feeling alive, even if it’s not as natural as a full group.
Components, Artwork and Design
The components are very solid. Thick cardboard, sturdy cards, and nicely shaped wooden pieces. It feels well-made, like something that’ll hold up over time.
The board uses warm, natural tones and stylised landscapes that give each part of the park its own feel. There are mountains, rivers and trails connecting the areas, with hiking, climbing and road routes clearly colour-coded so it’s easy to follow what’s happening. The board is double-sided, with one layout for two or three players and another for four or five, keeping the park balanced for any group size.
The terrain artwork has a soft, painterly style, with greens, blues and oranges to separate forests, water and mountain zones. Each location is marked with a letter or number that links to the missions, and the animal icons are built into the map art to show where the animal tokens start.
The ranger tokens are colourful printed wooden figures showing rangers in field gear, each a different colour so it’s easy to tell them apart. They stand upright on the board, giving the map a nice sense of life. The little wooden flags, also colour-matched, mark your mission destinations and make progress easy to track.
The cards are probably the nicest part. The supply cards have soft backgrounds with detailed animal illustrations like wolves, beavers and more, and clear route icons for boots, snowshoes, ropes and wheels. The icons are big and easy to read, so you can plan fast. Mission cards use large, bold letters to mark park locations, and the animal cards share the same look as the board, tying it all together.
Each player gets a ranger mat that looks like an explorer’s satchel, complete with little stitched compartments for flags, animals and missions. The subtle wood-grain texture and muted colours fit perfectly with the park theme. There’s space for two missions, your collected animals, and your support token, which you can flip to show if it’s active or not.
Other bits include animal tokens shaped like badges, blocker tokens that show damaged routes from level 2, and the first ranger token, a small badge with “F.R.” on it, that marks who starts each round. Everything’s thick, neatly printed and visible across the table. It’s practical but still nice to look at.
Our Experience
Playing The Peak Team feels a bit like working in a small ranger crew where communication happens mostly through guessing and eye contact.
The game runs on a two-phase structure: first, the silent card pass, then open talk. It shapes every round and gives the game its identity. It’s the part that makes it stand out among cooperative games.
That silent pass always feels tense. You’re sitting there thinking, “Do they need climbing? Or river? Maybe both?” Then the silence ends and someone says, “I can’t use any of these!” and everyone groans or laughs. It’s the heart of the game and the moment that either makes or breaks your round.
The mechanism where you receive cards only to give them away adds a lot of pressure. You’re always keeping track of where everyone needs to go and which animals they might record. Your teammate won’t be thrilled if you hand them four cards they can’t use, and you’ll hear about it.
Shared tools that cross player boundaries make teamwork more interesting. Support tokens act as one-step wilds that you have to reload with four icons, and animal tokens can be used by anyone for extra routes or a small draw bonus. The rule that lets you spend four icons to flip your support token seems small, but it matters a lot. Having that one free wild step ready can completely change a turn.
The silence rules can feel a bit brittle. If your group doesn’t enjoy games where you have to read each other’s intentions, like Hanabi or Magic Maze, what’s best about the design can become its biggest hurdle. The extra silence rule during mission distribution is fun in theory, but sometimes it means someone ends up with a mission that just stops progress for a bit.
At three or four players, the game flows best. The card passing stays manageable, and the discussion that follows feels focused instead of messy. Five can slow things down and sometimes one player ends up steering everyone else’s turns. Two works fine, but controlling Vicky isn’t quite as natural.
Once the group gets used to the “don’t hoard, feed your neighbours” mindset, the midgame opens up. More players give you better card coverage but also more to juggle. If you keep those support tokens charged before you need them, things go a lot better. Late support-token reloads can lead to great table moments when someone needs a wild step but no one has saved enough icons. Those situations feel tense and satisfying when they pay off.
I’ve played a lot of cooperative games, but few where you need to pay such close attention to what everyone else actually needs. It’s clever, and it plays differently from most co-ops I’ve tried.
Our Thoughts
The Peak Team is a straightforward cooperative game built around one clever idea: the silent card pass. It’s quick to teach, looks great on the table and builds nicely as you move through the levels.
It fits right in with The Crew and Forbidden Island, combining that read-your-teammate feeling with route-building movement. It’ll feel special for groups that like communication challenges and teamwork through planning. If you prefer combo building, asymmetry or full freedom of play, it might feel a bit narrow, but that focus makes it what it is.
I’d call it a family-plus co-op. It’s easy enough to teach to new players but still interesting for experienced ones. The first levels might feel like a walk in the park for veterans, but they prepare you well for the later ones, which add more to think about. I won’t spoil those here.
A few small habits make the difference between a win and a long hike. Before the silent pass, do a bit of pre-pass scanning, quickly check your neighbours’ missions and nearby animals and pass icons that actually move them forward. Treat ranger stations like mission routers, going there when at least two players can take new missions so the silence actually helps balance things out.
Keep at least one support token active and reload early, ideally after a big move. When blockers appear, use some chokepoint mapping, finding the routes that block access to ranger stations and clearing those first with animal tokens.
After a few plays, I realised The Peak Team isn’t just about finishing missions or keeping the park open. It’s about learning how your group communicates, who takes the lead, who quietly supports, and how everyone adapts when things don’t go as planned. It’s the kind of game that grows with the people around the table. The better you understand each other, the better you do. And that, to me, is the best kind of cooperative design.
📝 We received a review copy of the game from Matagot.
