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Altiplano
Alpine Economy in the Andes
Economizing means to make the best of scarce resources. Only when a com- modity becomes scant are you forced to use it economically. In that sense, any economy can be an economy of scarcity. If the flow of goods runs sluggishly because you are living far from any convenient areas, e.g.,
in the desert or in the mountains, forward-looking economic action is particularly important, of course. This is exactly the starting situation in Altiplano.
At the beginning of a round in Altiplano, all players randomly draw four round goods tiles out of their own bag. After that, players places these tiles on their personal action boards, planning in which of the seven locations he can produce profit in the upcoming action phase. With respect to the theme, everything seems rather plau- sible: If you place food and fish at the harbor, you obtain an additional
food tile. At the mine, you can
use two food tiles in order to
produce one stone in the sweat
of your brow. Alternatively,
you can gain silver by giving up
ore and food. At the farm, you can use alpacas to get food or wool or spend wool and food to produce cloth.
The forest allows you to cut wood or to use cacao in order to obtain food, glass, or cloth.
The locations of your action board are also shown in the middle of the table: At the initial set-up, the seven cardboard location tiles have been laid out next to one another in a circle.
Since you may move your figure clockwise or counter-clockwise, harbor, farm, forest, village,
mine, road, and market are only one to three spaces away from each other.
And since the available carts have a moving range of up to three spaces, they can reach any of the seven locations in the circle in one move – but inherently
only one.
If you have placed enough goods
tiles for carrying out actions at the harbor and at the mine and in the vil- lage, for example, but are currently located in the village, you have to decide where you want to move your cart. Or you purchase an additional cart in the village that allows you extra moves; this not only costs you money when you buy it, though, but also fuel in the form of food
when you want to use it.
You can get money at the
market by placing and using certain goods there, such as cloth or silver. All goods tiles you have spent remain in your own economic circulation. For the time being, you put all tiles spent into your own con-
tainer; only if you don’t have enough tiles left in the
bag from which you draw new tiles at the beginning of a new round (as described above) do you empty the contents of your container into your bag.
I Pickings from the bag
This has the effect as it is also known from deck-building games such as Dominion. Here, a bag that is bulging with many different goods tiles leaves much room for chance and can lead to rather ineffective turns. In the worst case, the pickings from the bag don’t allow you any reasonable possibilities for action. Even though the more valuable goods give you good points at the final scoring, you’d like to quickly get them out of your way once you acquired them. To do this, you can go to the village where you may put up to three tiles into storage with one
action.
You put the goods you want to store
on the shelves of your second board, the warehouse. Each shelf row provides room for three or four tiles of
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