K2: Digital Edition serves as an eye catching video game adaptation to the intense mountain climbing board game, K2. While the game’s campaign serves as a pretty nifty way to understand the game while playing solo, it leaves much to be desired to play the game alone. I could imagine however, that with other players it could be an amazing experience.
K2: Digital Edition has a demo available on Steam for anyone interested to try the game now.
What Is K2: Digital Edition?
The game is an adaptation of the board game “K2” by Adam Kałuża. A board game in which players are challenged to climb the mountain of the same name. For the most part, the premise stays the same with the board game. Attempt to reach the highest point of the mountain while trying to avoid freezing to death. Being an adaptation, the game features a classic mode with rules similar to its board game counterpart. The board game is meant to be played with 3-5 players but you can play the video game solo. Aside from the classic mode is the addition of a campaign mode. Unlike solo mode, in the campaign the gameplay is slightly different. The campaign has different scenarios with specific objectives for players to complete. Completing more objectives earns more stars and unlocks some collectibles.
While the demo lets you play an entire match with AI as well as two campaigns, most of the content are still locked until the full release.
Gameplay Overview
K2: Digital Edition is a hand-management board game where resource management and counting cards is key to survival and victory. Each player controls an expedition of two mountain climbers and attempt to reach as high up the mountain as possible. Reaching higher spots on a mountain merits higher points in which the game’s winning score is computed from.
Card Types
There are two types of cards in the game. Movement cards and Acclimatization Cards. Both types have a range of 1-3 points. Each point corresponds to the use of the cards. Movement cards lets you spend their points to move through locations with some movement cards having varying points for moving up or down. Acclimatization Cards adds health points to your explorers. At certain sections on the mountain, explorers will start to take damage per turn.
Turns
Each turn players choose three cards. Once decided, players get to spend the card’s points to either move or add health to their explorer. Aside from the cards players can also spend movement points to pitch up a tent once per expedition. The tent serves as a safe haven for explorers, regenerating 1 health point per turn while under its influence.
Winning
Every match takes 18 turns or 18 in game days. Everyday sets up a unique weather condition that may add hazards to certain sections of the map. Hazards that will add to the health lost when staying on the section. The objective to winning the game is fairly simple. Reach the highest possible point on the mountain while preventing others from overtaking you. While the game doesn’t really have anything that lets you hinder your opponent directly (at least in this demo), you can still do so by placing one of your explorers on specific locations. If you can predict which cards your opponents have left, you can deduce which tile you can occupy to block their path. The game ends after 18 turns have passed and the player who reached the highest point of the map wins the game.
Conclusion
The demo perfectly showcased the mechanics of the board game in its new video game format. However, with what I’ve seen so far, the singleplayer aspect of this game leaves much to be desired. The silver lining is, the multiplayer has the potential to actually be fun with friends. While this demo doesn’t include the function to play with others, I had the opportunity to go against the AI. And despite going against computers, I have to admit that I kinda had fun screwing over other opponents while trying to get the gold. And can imagine the scenarios that can take place in an actual friendly multiplayer match.
