A copy of Mountain Goats and The Big Mountain expansion was provided by AllPlay for review purposes.

The last time I talked about Mountain Goats, I framed it in comparison to Can’t Stop. On the surface that comparison makes sense, both games involve rolling four dice and moving pieces up numbered tracks. But the more I’ve played Mountain Goats, the more I’ve come to realize how much of a disservice that framing actually does to it. The similarities are superficial. Underneath, they’re trying to create very different experiences.

Can’t Stop is one of the purest push-your-luck games ever designed. The entire experience revolves around that moment where you ask yourself if you should roll the dice one more time, knowing full well you might bust and lose all the progress you’ve made. The tension comes from risk and greed. Mountain Goats, on the other hand, isn’t really about that kind of gamble at all. If I had to place it in a category, it feels much closer to a light area control game. Yes, you still roll four dice every turn, but the way you use those dice is far more flexible. If you roll a four and a five, you can combine them to climb the ten track twice, or push the five track four times, or split them up and advance on both. There’s none of the rigid pairing that defines Can’t Stop, and because of that freedom you’re rarely stuck without options.

That flexibility means you’re almost never losing entire turns. Sure, sometimes the dice won’t cooperate. Like, you might be desperate for a nine and just can’t seem to roll the right combination, but there’s almost always something productive you can do with what you’ve rolled. The game itself is made up of six numbered tracks, and each player is trying to climb those tracks with their goats. For most of the climb nothing particularly dramatic happens. As long as you’re somewhere along the track and not sitting at the summit, you aren’t earning points, but you’re also completely safe. No one can block your movement, knock you down, or interfere with your progress in any way.

That is, until you reach the top.

Once your goat hits the summit of a track, that position starts generating points for you every time you commit dice to that number, and will keep doing so for as long Mas you remain there. The catch, of course, is that the summit of each track only has room for one goat. The next player who manages to climb to the top immediately knocks your goat all the way back down to the bottom. That’s where the real tension in Mountain Goats lives: sitting comfortably at the top of the mountain, collecting points while watching the other players inch closer to you from below with daggers held between their teeth.

Those moments can get surprisingly dramatic. It can feel quite tense, sitting at the summit when only one or two points remain in the stack, while two opponents are parked on the space just below you. Every roll of the dice, both yours and your opponents, has small prayer whispered that they don’t hit the number they need. When they miss the roll, and you manage to drain the last points from the pile before they can take your place, it feels fantastic. It’s not a huge, bombastic victory, you won’t be jumping out of your chair and shout your victory, but you surely will exhale out your nose, smugly satisfied that your gambit paid off.

There are also bonus points available for players who manage to reach the summit of every single track at least once. Completing that full set awards a nice chunk of points, though in practice I’ve often found it more efficient to focus on one track and squeeze as much value out of it as possible. Spreading yourself across the board means investing multiple actions just to climb into position, and sometimes that effort feels like it could have been better spent reinforcing a single scoring engine.

The Big Mountain expansion introduces another wrinkle to the decision-making. It adds a separate mountain track off to the side with spaces numbered from eleven to twenty-four. Whenever you want, you can commit one of your goats to that mountain by climbing onto one of those spaces, but doing so requires combining dice in larger values to reach those numbers. At the end of the game, the player who sits the highest on that mountain earns a sizeable point bonus.

There’s an important catch, though: you don’t get extra goats for this track. If you want to send one to the Big Mountain, you have to remove it from the main game. This is supposed to create an interesting little risk-reward moment. Maybe you’d rather sacrifice the chance to keep scoring on a regular track in order to secure those endgame points. In theory, it sets up a tug-of-war between short-term scoring options and long-term positioning.

In practice, what often happens is the big mountain lays empty until one or two of the point piles on the main board run out entirely, those goats naturally migrate over to the Big Mountain because they no longer have anywhere else to score. Part of me wishes there were a rule preventing goats from leaving the summit for the big mountain once they’ve reached it, just to create a stronger push-and-pull between staying put for points and abandoning that position for the endgame race. Still, even without that tension dialled up, the expansion fits so nicely into the base game.

The Big Mountain is the kind of expansion I immediately folded into the base game and haven’t looked back since. It adds very little rules overhead but solves a niggling little pain points that I had with the base game. Like, What are you supposed to do when one of the tracks runs out of points, what happens when your dice rolls don’t line up with the available tracks, especially if you roll four 6’s. The Big Mountain gives those scenarios a natural outlet, and because of that it feels a lot less like an add-on, and more like something that has been there all along.

One small surprise about Mountain Goats is the physical footprint it creates on the table. The box itself is tiny, a small square only slightly thicker than most card game boxes, but much smaller in length and width. You might reasonably assume that means the game itself would be similarly compact, but you’d be mistaken! Once you lay out the twenty cards that form the mountain tracks, the game demands more table space than its box would suggest. It’s not quite the portable pub or airplane game that the packaging might imply. This isn’t really a complaint so much as an observation. It’s a small box that stores everything neatly, and respects my limited shelf space, and then sprawls into a surprisingly large play area once the game begins. My expectations were simply shaped by other small-box games that tend to stay small once they hit the table.

Even with that slightly larger than expected footprint, it’s hard to not fall in love with Mountain Goats. The whole game takes between 20 and 30 minutes, serves some emotional highs and lows, the art direction is bright and playful, and the rules are easy enough to teach in just a few minutes. It’s light without feeling trivial. For such a small package, it manages to create a lot of memorable little moments, like the time you managed to drain the 6 pile before anyone could kick you off the track, locking them all out of the set bonuses for the entire game. I suspect my partner wanted to literally push me off the mountain after that game!