Snow Climbing

Snow Climbing

calendar_today 2026 settings Gabriel Toschi, Yuri Morroni palette Chris Borges factory Grok Games person 2-4 players timelapse 40min

How long can you climb the highest snowy mountains on the planet? Rely on your partners until the top, managing your resources in an innovative cooperative climbing mechanic. Be careful not to lose important items and try not to cause an avalanche. Surviving the cold is only part of this extreme challenge!

In this ladder climbing game, cards represent the players' gear when climbing the mountain. In each turn, a person plays a card that has a larger number than the card on the top of the climbing pile. Another possible action is to "Change Route", adding the values of two cards of the same suit. The smaller card goes to the top of the pile — restarting the counting — and the largest goes to the "snow area". When no action is possible, players start the Camping Phase, creating pairs of cards with the same suit to save them from the "snow area".

Every round, a new avalanche condition is revealed: if, at the end of that round, the cards on the "snow area" met any of the conditions revealed, the players cause an avalanche and lose the game. Special abilities of each suit can be used to protect cards or save cards from the "snow area".

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Awards

Behind the design process

This game started in a period that I wasn't investing much time to game design, but when Yuri found out of a publisher wanting games with exactly 40 cards, we decided to give it a try. The main idea was what would become the "Change Route" action: you could combine cards to reduce the number on top of the pile instead of just discarding it like other ladder climbing games.

It started as "Escavada" (a pun on "escalada" and "escavar", Portuguese for "ladder climbing" and "digging"), a competitive game where you were actually going down digging instead of climbing up. But, after some weeks of playtesting, became Snowy Peaks, a cooperative game for 2 players about facing an ice mountain.

The publisher didn't like the game, so we submitted to the Cardboard Edison Award in the last week just to see what was gonna happen. At the end, we got 2nd place against hundreds of amazing protoypes from all over the world, days before the largest game fair in Brazil, a perfect time for sign my first game. Grok Games, one of the largest hobby publishers in the country, licensed the game, extended it for 2-4 players and turned it into a great product that I'm very proud of.

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