Essen Spiel is perennially one of the largest gaming events on the planet, often showcasing hundreds of titles from designers and publishers all around the world. And like clockwork, the convention doors don’t even close before we experience a flurry of speculation over which titles may or may not be making their way to North American publication.

One of the biggest such questions at this year’s board gaming bazaar is who would land the rights to the alpaca farming game Altiplano, which had generated a substantial amount of buzz even before Essen started.

Well, the wait was short on this one to get an answer. Continuing with their rapid catalog expansion of game titles in 2017, Renegade Game Studios today has made one of their biggest announcements yet by unveiling that they would be partnering with designer Reiner Stockhausen and his studio dlp games to bring Altiplano to North America.

Altiplano is built on many of the same mechanics as Reiner’s previous game Orleans, including its bag-building resource system, which helped it become a highly successful US release in its own right under Tasty Minstrel Games. Altiplano, however, trades out building a medieval city for building up the majestic high plateaus of the Andes mountains of South America (hence the name). There players must carefully use their turns to stock werehouses, build roads, and try to corner the market on different resources, each of which is required to take specific actions. Competition will be tight for goods such as fish, silver, corn, and of course, alpaca wool, and careful management of those goods will likely prove essential.

Also, did we mention it has alpacas? That alone should be worth considering.

Luckily, those in the North American territories won’t have to be waiting for long (yay!), as Altiplano is aiming to be carted down the mountain and to US shelves for a Q1 2018 release, joining the ranks of other popular Renegade games such as Clank!, Lanterns, and Honshu.

Hopefully it won’t still be cold enough we’ll need all that alpaca wool by then, but we digress…