Wouter & Ymke 
In Alto, you want your discs to go up. The higher they end up in a stack, the more points they’re worth. Sounds straightforward enough, except your opponent is allowed to move those same discs. Sometimes they’ll send one somewhere you really didn’t want it to go. At other times, you’ll happily move one of theirs upwards because it happens to help you even more.
Alto is a two-player abstract game played on a small 4-by-4 grid. Red and white discs move around, land on top of each other and gradually form mixed stacks. Meanwhile, the tiles underneath them are flipped and eventually removed, so the board slowly disappears as the stacks get taller.
👥 2 players, ages 8+
⌛ Playing time: 15 minutes
📝 Designers: Joel & Rafael Escalante
🎨 Graphic Design: Ajša Zdravković
🏢 Publisher: Helvetiq (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
At the start, you shuffle the 16 tiles and arrange them randomly into a 4-by-4 grid, with their light sides facing up and all movement symbols aligned in the same corner. Each player chooses red or white, then you take turns placing eight of your discs into the cutouts of empty tiles. The ninth stays in front of you as a reminder of your colour.
On your turn, you can move a disc of either colour. What you can do with it depends on the tile underneath. Different symbols let the top disc move orthogonally, diagonally or in either direction, while another lets you move an entire stack to an orthogonally adjacent space.
Move onto an occupied space and the disc, or complete stack, goes on top of whatever is already there. This creates mixed towers of red and white discs. Their order matters because scoring is based on height: a disc on the bottom is worth one point, one on the second level is worth two, the third is worth three, and so on.
Every move also changes the tile you leave behind. A light tile flips to its black side, while moving from a black tile removes it completely. The empty position remains part of the grid and you can still move something into it, but without a tile underneath, it won’t be moving again.
Once there are no valid moves left, you score all the discs in your colour according to their level. Whoever has the highest total wins.
Artwork & Components
Alto is about as minimal as it looks. Inside the small box you get 16 double-sided tiles and 18 chunky wooden discs, nine red and nine white. There isn’t any illustrated world around them or much decoration beyond what’s needed to play.
The discs work particularly well once towers start forming. Their red and white layers make it easy to see who occupies each level without having to inspect a stack too closely. The tiles have large semicircular cutouts for the discs, leaving their movement symbols visible in the corner. Their light and black sides are also easy to tell apart during play.
I particularly like how the table changes. You begin with a very orderly grey grid, but eventually there are black tiles, empty spaces and stacks of different heights scattered across it. It gives Alto more presence on the table than I expected from such a small collection of components.
Our Experience
We got the hang of Alto almost immediately, although that didn’t mean we were particularly good at judging the positions. In our first game, we were mostly looking at our own colour and trying to get those discs higher. Moving the other colour soon became much more common. An opposing disc could provide a useful platform, get moved out of the way, or be stranded somewhere without a tile underneath. After a while, having your opponent move one of your discs higher stopped feeling like the favour it initially appeared to be.
The stacks caught us out a few times too. Seeing one of our discs high up naturally felt good, but a disc on top can still disappear elsewhere on a later turn. Something lower down might score fewer points yet remain buried safely in the stack. We had towers that looked great for one of us until their top few layers started wandering off in different directions.
After several games, we were usually looking three or four moves ahead and had become much better at recognising what the other person was preparing. An inviting-looking stack started to look suspicious rather than useful. Playing repeatedly against the same opponent was probably the part we enjoyed most, because familiar tricks stopped working and we had to find less obvious ways to get the positions we wanted.
Our games weren’t always close. A poor sequence can leave you in trouble for quite a while, especially once movement options begin disappearing. We often finished by pointing at something we’d done several turns earlier that we wished we’d handled differently. That was usually followed by setting everything up again to see whether our brilliant post-game analysis survived another fifteen minutes.
Our Thoughts
I like the way Alto reduces its playing area as the game progresses. Early on, there are plenty of tiles available and discs spread across the grid. Later, the board is full of gaps and taller stacks, with far fewer places from which anything can still move. The pieces become more valuable at the same time as your options for changing them disappear.
The variable setup also suits the game. You don’t repeat the same opening every time, but once play starts there’s no hidden information or random effect changing the position. Both players can see exactly what is available. That does make Alto unforgiving when there’s a noticeable difference in experience. Once someone has made a poor sequence of moves, there may simply not be enough options left to repair it.
There isn’t much variety beyond that core idea. You always have the same pieces and movement types, there’s practically no theme, and there are no new abilities or effects to discover after several games. If you want a two-player game with lots of different strategies or mechanisms to explore, Alto will probably feel too narrow. Its appeal for us came more from playing the same person again and seeing how our approach to those limited options changed.
And that’s probably where Alto sits for us. It’s easy to understand, but we’re not finished figuring out what we can do with it. A move that appears helpful can still turn out to benefit the other person far more, and we’ve had enough games end with “I should’ve done that differently” to keep wanting another try. For a game with sixteen spaces and a handful of movement rules, that’s enough for us.
📝 We received a copy of Alto from Helvetiq.
