Ice Coast Revival: Ski Tycoon

A village at the base, trail ratings that read the real pitch, and 57 achievements. Play free with no winter limit. Buy one hill or the whole region.

New England is littered with the ghosts of ski areas. Rope tows rusting in second-growth forest. A base lodge with the roof caved in. A hand-painted trail sign nobody has read in forty years. There are hundreds of them, and every one was somebody's home mountain.

You just bought one.

Ice Coast Revival is a management sim about bringing a dead ski area back to life on the wrong coast — where the snow is manmade, the light is flat gray, the granite shows through in March, and nobody is coming to save you.

WHAT YOU ACTUALLY DO

• Cut trails. Clear ribbons of run through mixed birch and spruce, one narrow line at a time. Every trail is carved out of forest, not painted onto an open bowl.
• Run the lifts you can afford. Start with a rope tow. Graduate to a fixed-grip double if the season goes well. The high-speed quad is a long way off.
• Fight the weather. Freeze-thaw, boilerplate, wintry mix, the January thaw that erases a week of snowmaking. Point the guns, push the whales, groom overnight, and open in the morning anyway.
• Watch the books. Every lift ticket, season pass, cafeteria chili, and payroll line is modeled. The loan does not care how much you love this place.
• Earn your stars. Take the mountain from a foreclosed shell to a hill people drive two hours for.

THE COMPETITION

The Apex Summit Collective owns everything around you. They have detachable lifts, a marketing budget, and no interest in a hill that seats four hundred cars. You have a cupola, a woodstove, and locals who remember. That is a fairer fight than it sounds.

WEEKLY CHALLENGE

Every week, the same mountain, the same weather, the same starting cash, for everyone. A fixed scenario with one right-ish answer and a hundred wrong ones. Post your season and see where you land.