Recently, one of my D&D players wanted her character to have a battle alpaca. Alpacas are, like, three feet tall and sort of fragile. The character is six-foot half-elf in plate mail.
No, Miranda, you can't have a battle alpaca.
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Altiplano is described as a bag-building game, which is... accurate in its own way. Given the alpaca on the front, maybe that makes you think you're creating bags out of alpaca wool, like a Peruvian Patchwork. But no, a bag is simply part of the game materials, from which you draw the tokens that create your engine of woolly victory.
Or not! You don't need wool at all, if you're not much for alpaca herding. You start with a handful of tokens (different ones, depending on your starting character) representing starting materials. Each turn, you draw tokens from the bag, which you can then put in different areas of your board to make new materials or sell for money. What makes this different from most resource generation games is that you don't trade out your resources for the new ones—you keep them all, and when your bag empties, everything goes back in to be drawn anew.
This creates a somewhat different strategic balance than a lot of gamers will be used to. Instead of figuring out how to acquire enough basic materials to create the expensive ones you want to sell or use to fill orders, you have to decide when you have enough basics and it's time to stop collecting them. This is especially relevant for food—food is critical for creating items that boost your ability to draw tokens, build houses, etc., as well as get stored in your warehouse for potential points. It also lets you move more often each turn. But food itself can't be placed in the warehouse, so if you get too much, it keeps cycling through the bag, making it harder to draw the more valuable tokens you need for higher-end actions.
Likewise, you'll need to gauge how many of the other resources you'll need, and if you can even acquire them. Not every item is available on the player board. There are extensions you can purchase at the market which give you extra action types to choose from, as well as an action unique to you on your character tile; if you can't gain, say, fish through those extra actions, and you didn't start with any fish, you'll never have fish. Most people end up dealing with this sort of limitation, though, and all the locations are usable in one way or another, so it's not much of a problem.
For the resources you can obtain, do you just want enough to buy the things you want (e.g. two stone since that's what houses require), meaning you'll have to go through the whole bag each time you want one of that thing? Or do you want more, leaving the rest to eventually take up space, unless the extras are stashed in the warehouse? Likewise, for higher value items, are you going to collect orders to use them on so you get them out of your bag, or are they just going to keep cycling through until the end of the game?
It's a nice balance... except for the warehouse. Many resources count for points at the end of the game if they're in your bag, but once they're in your warehouse, they don't count for anything individually. You only earn points for filling shelves with three or four items. It's possible to move up to higher-level shelves by just putting one item on the shelves before; however, if you have an incomplete shelf of a particular resource, you can't put it on any other shelves until you finish the first one (e.g. if you have one wood on the two-point shelf, you need to fill it with three wood before you can use wood on a higher shelf).
Furthermore, the zero-point items that you can store (fish and alpacas) can't be obtained through the player board. You have to acquire extensions or have a character that can make them, and obviously you can't start getting them without such a character or until you have said extension. Because there are only twelve of each, it's almost a given that at some point you'll need to use items worth points in the warehouse. If you use one of an item to bump yourself to the next shelf, that's lost points; if you complete that row, depending on what it is, you still may be losing points (e.g. three ore on the four-point shelf is -2 points overall).
It's possible to fill the warehouse, or at least the upper shelves, if you really emphasize it. Even then, it's extremely difficult to get to the top shelf, and given how many tokens you're creating, then removing from your game engine, there's an excellent chance you won't gain points anywhere near in line with the effort required to earn them.
More over—and more problematic—is how it affects new players if not explained or understood well. Everything else is easy to understand; fill an order for points, buy houses for points, hold valuable tokens for points, etc. The warehouse looks easy, since you just fill shelves for points. But a new player can very easily start shoving items in there that would be more valuable (potentially much more) used in literally any other way. Even veteran players can wind up getting shafted by the warehouse, although at least an experienced player should know the trade-off. Maybe it was tested and found to be too strong if the shelves were worth more points. I hope that's the case, because at least initially, it seems to be both the most complicated point-scoring option to use well and the one with the biggest drawback if used poorly.
Altiplano is fun outside of that, which is to say it's fun if you ignore the warehouse. So, it's... fine? Good?
Nice. It's a nice game. Let's go with that.
Score: Six happy alpacas out of nine.
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