Wouter & Ymke 
After weeks at sea, you finally reach land. The soil is fertile, the surrounding waters are full of fish, and the island looks like a pretty good place to start a new life. So naturally, it’s time to decide where to put the farms, mills and fishing docks.
In Alta, every player builds their own island using cards. What starts with a single location eventually becomes a 4-by-4 grid filled with farmers, villages, wheat fields, markets and other buildings. Where those cards end up determines most of your score.
👥 2-4 players, ages 8+
⌛ Playing time: 20 minutes
📝 Designer: E. de Haan
🎨 Artwork: Roman Kucharski
🏢 Publisher: 999 Games (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
Alta is played over eight rounds. You start your turn with two cards in hand and place one on your island. You then choose one of the two face-up cards from the shared display and place that as well. Your remaining hand card goes into the empty space in the display, and you draw two new cards for your next turn.
Cards have to be placed horizontally or vertically next to something already on your island. Once placed, they can’t be moved, and after eight rounds you’ll have a completed 4-by-4 grid of sixteen cards.
There are nine types of island cards. Farmers score for adjacent wheat fields and markets, villages want mills and fishing docks nearby, and taverns score for neighbouring fishing docks and markets. Cottages and mills want exactly one farmer next to them. Wheat fields prefer a mix of different neighbouring card types.
Fishing docks need to be on the outer edge of the island to score, with wheat fields and cottages next to them increasing their value. Towers can score for other towers further along the same row or column.
Markets give you merchant cards. Each merchant shows two island card types and scores when you have matching pairs on your island, with more points when those cards are adjacent.
Once everyone has sixteen cards, you add up the points from your island and merchants. The highest score wins.
Artwork & Components
Most of the box is cards. There are 81 island cards, nine merchant cards and a scorepad, with nine copies of each island card type.
The artwork is bright and cartoonish, with plenty of green fields, blue water, yellow wheat and orange rooftops. There are little details scattered around the illustrations, but the different locations remain easy to tell apart when they’re all sitting next to each other. We rarely needed to check whether we were looking at a mill, village or cottage.
I like the islands most once they’re finished. By then the separate illustrations have turned into a patchwork of fields, buildings and coastline. Ours weren’t always particularly sensible settlements, but they looked nice enough from a distance.
The cards use icons to show their scoring conditions, and the merchant cards clearly show the two locations they’re interested in. There’s quite a bit to count at the end, so the included scorepad gets used.
Our Experience
A lot of our time with Alta was spent staring at a space and trying to decide which of several cards should get it. A farmer might work next to two other cards, only for the same position to be useful for something else later. Wheat fields made us look at the variety around them, and merchants occasionally changed which pair of cards we wanted to keep together.
The edges caused problems in several of our games. We’d sometimes filled useful spaces before the fishing docks appeared, leaving us with fewer places to put them. Other times there was a gap that seemed to be waiting for one particular card type and we simply didn’t see it. Near the end, with only a couple of empty spaces left, there wasn’t much room to work around an awkward draw.
We preferred Alta with two players. When you return your unused card to the shared display, the other player gets the next chance to take it. That had us looking across the table before deciding what to put back. With three players it became harder to know where a card would eventually end up. At four, we mostly stopped worrying about it and concentrated on our own islands.
Our islands did change over subsequent games. We left more room around the coast and paid more attention to where farmers were going. That didn’t suddenly make everything fall into place. We still finished games with odd gaps, misplaced cards and combinations that would have worked much better if one particular card had appeared a turn or two earlier.
Turns themselves went quickly. There isn’t much to do besides choosing and placing your two cards, and there was very little administration while we were actually building.
Our Thoughts
We enjoyed the spatial part of Alta. Sixteen cards isn’t much room once farmers, wheat fields, towers, fishing docks and merchants all start asking for different things. Some cards care about their immediate neighbours, others about the edge or an entire row or column. We often had several reasonable places for a card rather than one obvious answer.
The card selection gives us less control than we’d like. Sometimes you know exactly what belongs in a gap, yet there’s no way to go looking for it. You have your two cards and the shared display. If the right type doesn’t appear, you put something else there. We noticed this more as we became familiar with the scoring conditions because it became easier to see what our island was missing.
We didn’t particularly like scoring at the end. Every card has to be checked, often against the cards surrounding it, and then there are the merchants. It takes longer than we’d expect from the rest of the game. We’d happily have fewer scoring conditions if that made the final count quicker.
The nine card types also started to feel familiar after a few games. Merchants can change which combinations you’re interested in, but most of the island is built from the same relationships each time. I don’t see us playing Alta several times in quick succession.
We’d bring it out every now and then, though. Building the island is enjoyable, the rules don’t take long to explain and our games moved along quickly.
📝 We received a copy of Alta from 999 Games.
