Whistle Mountain

Whistle Mountain gave me that rare, quiet smile a Tuesday after work is meant to produce: it is excellent in its genre, without needing to announce the fact. Of my three plays, the one at the table and the one on Tabletop Simulator were terrific; Tabletopia instead made us wrestle with a miserable physics engine. TTS’s snap-to-grid matters when one wants to play a board game rather than retrieve virtual pieces from the floor.

At its centre, what lingers is the pressure of the scoring. Your choices become points, and the game lets that race build until a large total never quite feels like a comfortable lead.

The turn-by-turn flow, as I experienced it, keeps asking where you stand in relation to everyone else. It is not only about what you have built for yourself: you watch the score, measure the gap, and realise that the other players remain right beside you until the final count.

Then comes a finish decided by a single point, despite all that wild scoring, and the whole session acquires a little weight. Whistle Mountain is the sort of game that makes a good evening feel more complete; quietly excellent.