Welcome to the mountain
Bergbahnen is a cosy ski resort builder on a small hexagon mountain, where every run, lift and hut comes out of a card pack. A fourteen-day season that plays in an evening, one goal, a train full of opinions, and weather with opinions of its own: blizzards, thaws, and ... wait, are those footprints up by the summit?
Whether you've built a hundred resorts or never stood on skis: the rules fit on a postcard, and your critics will tell you exactly what they want. (Mostly another blue run. It's always another blue run.)
The season
Choose by Night, Build by Day
The night is quiet: open your packs, pick your cards, plan your next move. At dawn the lifts start and the mountain is yours to shape, one hexagon at a time.
Trains and Timetables
Guests arrive by mountain railway at eight, ten, noon, two and four. Nobody gets off the four o'clock, and everyone gets on it. A guest without skis looks for a rental shop, and if there isn't one, they walk back to the train, grumbling. End a run where its lift starts and you've built a circuit: those guests never touch the valley again.
What's in the pack
What Bergbahnen offers
- A whole ski resort on one small hexagon mountain
- Cards instead of cash: no ticket prices, no spreadsheets
- Guests who arrive by train and wear their mood in a little cloud above their heads
- Pistes from green to black, chairlifts, T-bars, gondolas, an Alpine coaster, snow groomers, helicopters and a lot more
- Piste signs the way you know them from home: European, North American or Japanese
- Storms, thaws, and the occasional powder day
- A cosy alpine postcard come to life, from valley fog at dawn to lit cabins at night
- A mountain that carries on season after season
- A new Mountain of the Week to take on your resort-building friends
- A Yeti. Possibly
What Bergbahnen does not offer
- Money, loans or ticket prices
- An endless map: one mountain, and space is the puzzle
- Skiing yourself (though you can ride along on a chairlift)
- Realistic snow physics (it's just realistic enough to melt)
- Multiplayer, beyond beating your friends on the weekly board
From the valley
Bergbahnen is German for “mountain railways”: the trains and cable cars that carry everyone up the Alps.
It’s made by Ninguid, a few friends who are skiers and snowboarders, and people who’d happily spend all year in a lift queue. Most of us are teachers twice over: in a classroom during the week, and on the slopes as ski and snowboard instructors when the snow comes. Everything in the game is something we’ve seen on a real mountain: the rush for the first lift on a powder day, the guest who forgot their skis, the chairlift that stops for no reason while you swing in the wind. And after years of teaching students to make games and beginners to link their first turns, we know the fastest way to learn is to fall over a few times. Luckily, here it’s your guests who do the falling.
No guests were harmed in the making of this game. Most wipeouts end with a two-second shake-off. For the rest, there’s a helicopter.
Inspired by every winter we’ve spent on the mountain, and the friends we’ve dragged up there with us.