Grand Mountain Adventure Beginner’s Guide: Tips, Cheats, and Strategies

Grand Mountain Adventure is a whimsical skiing adventure that challenges you to explore a variety of mountains beating high scores, collecting unlockables, and pulling off tricks like you own the darn place.

Doing all of that isn’t the easiest thing in the world – especially for newcomers – so we thought we’d put together a beginner’s guide to help ease you into it all a bit more gently.

If you’re not sure about playing the game at all, shame on you. To help convince you, why not check out our Grand Mountain Adventure Review. If that doesn’t convince you, nothing will.

Grand Mountain Adventure Beginner’s Guide

How it Works

Grand Mountain Adventure kind of plays like classic skateboarding games Skate or Tony Hawks, except on snow with a skii or snowboard. You play through a series of mountains seeking out challenges, and beating them to earn stars. These stars allow you to unlock further mountains, and this is pretty much the core loop.

Challenges include slalom, which involves skiing through a bunch of flags within a certain time limit, and tricks. These can be simple stunts to perform or trying to get as high a score as possible. Each mountain has upwards of 40 challenges to beat, and the next mountain will require you to beat a certain amount before you can move on.

To perform tricks, you simply swipe on your ski poles (or hands, if you’re snowboarding) to pull off a variety of stunts. Swipe up on both to jump, hold to perform a backflip, or swipe down to perform a frontflip. You can also provide spins by swiping left or right on a pole, and combine them all to perform some crazy stunts.

Aside from beating challenges, there are also unlockables to collect, which are dotted around each mountain. These include new skiis, snowboards, and pieces of equipment that can make your journey more fun or help you to perform better.

There are also a variety of lifts you can unlock that allow you to fast travel around the mountain or simply reach spots that were previously inaccessible. These are worth unlocking as a first course of action, as it makes getting around the mountain a heck of a lot easier.

Tips and Tricks

Now that you understand the basics, here are a few tips and tricks we picked up along the way to help you master it:

• Check your map and head to sparkles: Sparkles on your map mean that there’s a challenge. Beating them is the whole point of the game, so you should be chasing these down as often as possible.
• Visit the help section of the menu to learn the controls: If you tap the map button, you should see a help button that looks like a question mark at the top of the screen. Tap this and you can get a good look at the controls, which are quite complex.
• Learn the pros and cons of each ski or board: Each pair of skis or snowboard has its own pros and cons. For example, the Twin-tip Skis allow you to land and ski backwards. Learn these so you know you’ve got the right equipment for the task ahead.

• Prioritise unlocking lifts: Lifts help you speed back up the mountain to try a new challenge, so we’d recommend unlocking these as a priority. Once you get close to one, you should get an indicator pointing you towards it, so they’re not too difficult to spot.
• Seek out diamond challenges: Once you’ve beat every challenge on a mountain, you’ll unlock diamond challenges. These are basically harder versions of the original challenge, with a new time limit or something like that. Beat them for fun.
• Tap left and right to build speed: To build speed, tap left and right to ski in semi-circles. Once you’ve learned this, beating time trials is a heck of a lot easier.

Glen Fox

Head of Editorial

Glen has over a decade's worth of experience in gaming journalism, writing for Pocket Gamer, Pocket Tactics, Nintendo Life, and Gfinity. When he's not badgering everyone about the dangers of passive text, you can probably find him playing Wild Rift.