At this point I have put together a working prototype for Yeti Mountain. It's pretty rough yet but adequate to work out the rough mechanics.
The object of the game is to be the first climber to reach the top of the mountain and in order to do that climbers must search for objects and give them to the yetis that live on the mountain to get passage to the upper levels.
Now to breakdown the components:
The mountain is made up of Slope, Avalanche, and Yeti cards. The climbers can freely move through and search for objects on the the slope cards. The avalanche cards are blocked paths and climbers need to either go around them or find a different path up the mountain. The Yeti cards show what objects they'll accept before they'll let a climber pass by.
The mountain is broken up into ten levels and the column of ten cards represents each level of the mountain. Yetis are positioned on levels three, six, and nine. Slope and Avalanche cards are placed on levels one, two, four, five, seven, eight, and ten. Levels one and two are the 'green' levels which means that the green die is rolled to see if the climber found an object when he searches a slope card and has a 5 to 6 success rate. Levels four and five are the Red levels and a red die is rolled for searches which has a three to six success rate. Levels seven and eight are the Blue levels and the blue die rolled has a one to six success rate.
The reason to have the different color die is twofold. Thematically a climber would be more likely to find objects at the lower levels of a mountain because there's a higher chance that objects would roll all the way down the mountain and the higher the climber goes the less likely he would be to find an object. The second reason is to help balance out the game by slowing down the progress of the climbers at the higher levels.
As far as the other bits the objects the yetis want are currently represented by letter tokens as I'm still developing my object list. When a player successfully finds an object (determined by a die roll) they draw a letter token from a bag to see what they found. There are five different colored glass jewels-one for each climber and dark grey. The climber colored jewels show that a player has given an object to a yeti and can now move across that card. The dark grey jewels show that a slope card has been searched regardless if the search was successful or not.
As far as my initial game plays I've found that one player tends to be a runaway winner despite my efforts to balance the game so the climbers progress up the mountain in more of a head to head race. I'm currently considering dealing out the slope/avalanche cards to the players so when a climber declares where they will attempt to climb another player will place a card and decide whether they lay a slope or avalanche card instead of randomly drawing slope/avalanche from a deck which can be good for players that are ahead and bad for players that are behind.
