One of my local friends had a rare occasion of actually being free at a weekend, so we managed a short-notice evening of board gaming. The game of choice tonight was Above and Below, a new acquisition by one of our number that I'd not heard of before.
Above and Below is a kind of hybrid game: it incorporates both Euro-style worker placement gameplay with the "storytelling" component of titles like SMERSH and Arabian Nights. Interestingly, it doesn't go super-hard on either of these things, making for an interesting game that isn't too heavy, but has a nice variety of things going on.
The concept of Above and Below is that you are attempting to rebuild your village after it was destroyed by barbarians. In order to do this, you have to gather resources, earn money, expand your population and build structures. On top of all that, though, there's also a network of caves beneath the village which you can go and explore; successful explorations open up underground areas to colonise, in which you can then build "outposts" to extend your village beneath the ground as well as on the surface.
Each round, you ultimately have the option to take up to as many actions as you have available villagers. Each player takes one action with one or more villagers, then play passes around the table until everyone has had a turn. The actions include harvesting materials from structures that produce them, constructing new buildings by paying the appropriate cost, recruiting new villagers, labouring for a small amount of additional income, and exploring the caves.
Most of that is fairly self-explanatory and typically Eurogamey; there's no real direct player interaction and you building your village is pretty much group solitaire, though there is the option to mess with other players a little bit by purchasing buildings from the communal pool that someone else might have wanted, or acquiring villagers with particularly potent skillsets.
Where things get interesting is in the exploration aspect. Upon taking two or more villagers into the caves, you draw a "cave card" and roll a die. The cave card tells you which passage you need to read from an encounter book according to your die roll. Each encounter consists of some flavour text — which presents a variety of weird and wonderful situations, and really rewards those willing to put a bit of "oomph" into their delivery — and generally provides two options on how to proceed.
These options will either take you to another passage in the encounter book or ask you to make an "explore check". This involves rolling one die per villager who is participating in the exploration, then consulting their token to see how many "lanterns" you score with them according to the die roll. For example, a low-skilled villager might only score one lantern if you roll a three or higher, while a more valuable villager might provide you with three lanterns if you roll four or more, and guarantee a single lantern by providing you one if you roll one or higher.
Passing an explore check is a simple matter of acquiring enough lanterns to meet the difficulty level requested — an "explore 3" check requires three lanterns, for example. Many of the options provide two possible outcomes: one for a small number of lanterns, one for a larger number. Generally speaking — though not always — the larger number of lanterns results in a bigger reward, and if it's impossible to acquire that many through just rolling, you can "exert" your villagers to earn additional lanterns, but they'll be injured in the process, putting them out of action for the following round unless you have a potion to give them.
At the end of the game, you earn points for a variety of things: a flat rate per building constructed, a gradually increasing range of points for the different types of resource you can harvest, and various bonus points from the specific buildings you constructed. Some buildings simply give you a flat amount of bonus points, others give you bonus points per something — per building, per villager, per specific resources.
It was an enjoyable game that plays quickly and has the potential to be quite different each time you give it a shot. I like it a lot more than other, similar games because there's not so much reliance on, say, knowing the deck of cards like in Agricola, and the variety of ways to score points at the end of the game means that there are multiple possible strategies you can employ along the way. You need to pick one pretty quick, though; there are only seven rounds in the game, and those pass by alarmingly quickly!
Unlike in other games where time is tight — such as the aforementioned Agricola — I didn't find this frustrating, however, because there wasn't an obvious "perfect play". Agricola pisses me off because there is a perfect play — fill up your farm board and have some good point-scoring cards to go with it — and there never seems to be enough time to achieve both of those things. Here, however, it's a simple case of "do as well as you can within the time available", and that makes things much more interesting. It also makes the final scoring a lot of fun, since you can never quite predict who is going to win — the people I thought were going to take the bottom spots (me and my friend Tim) actually ended up taking the top two!
It's a good time then. Hopefully it'll hit the table a few more times, because it's that delightfully rare thing: something we all seemed to enjoy.
