Red Raven Games Above and Below Card Game

Product Information

When playing with the Groves expansion, once a building or grove has been placed adjacent to another building or grove, that card cannot be moved or rearranged on a later turn. It’s just one of those games that ends as soon as (or before if you haven’t played well) you feel like you’re getting to a good place. You’ll sometimes find him exploring at the exp

A mash-up of strategy and storytelling where players compete to build the best village but must also make difficult story choices as they send their villagers into a mysterious cavern beneath the surface! As you begin building your new homes you discover a vast network of caverns below your new village, and so as you and your fellow players begin building “above” those of you who are excited about the riches and wonders can also start exploring the caverns “below” and possibly build there as well. And the "Below" - exploring caves, reading paragraph length stories to each other and making choices about what to do. The successes that your workers earn determine your overall success level (or failure) for the encounter, and any prizes (coins, goods, etc) or penalties are awarded.It is not as directly competitive as most two player games, since it is hard to get a good handle on who is ahead in VP during game play.

Further, I find the rewards for successful explorations–particularly the mid-level ranges, which is just about all of the challenges players can face–to be skimpy. We're going to make some house rules, as it seems a bit short to establish and compare villages properly, but to each their own! The building is placed next to the player’s starting board and the player may gain and/or utilize the benefits it conveys. After you successfully fight off a group of glogos the encounter book simply states the rewards you receive. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.It’s not long enough to feel expansive and epic, but I want to keep learning more about its fantasy world. The story telling element in Above and Below is, for the most part, great; the only issue I have with it is that the resolution of any given encounter has no flavor, you either gain rewards or you don’t, which to me is a little half-hearted. Above and Below is a mashup of town-building and storytelling where you and up to three friends compete to build the best village above and below ground.

Above and Below, by designer and artist Ryan Laukat, is contained in a fantasy world of sky blues and vivid greens.I think that this is a necessary path to have available, and extra rounds would completely do away with that strategy. You barely had time to pick up the baby and your favorite fishing pole before they started the burning and pillaging. During each round players take actions by exhausting villagers, most of which are better suited for one task or another. Once you’re familiar with setup and rules actual games are fast and exciting with everyone having a chance to build up a point generating engine, or spend their time doing the adventure driven quests to acquire resources and reputation. The Starting player assigns one or more of their worker tiles to an action space, unless they want to explore, in which case they need a minimum of two workers.

Simply choose the villagers that you want to explore the cavernous regions below your settlement and another player will read a scenario from the included encounter book.

Base income is 4 coins, but is supplemented by the number of spaces on the advancement track occupied by resources and certain buildings. We are avid gamers who host a semi-regular game night, but also play two-player games together in the evenings. The artwork is beautiful, the pieces are well made, and the "Choose your own adventure" aspect makes for a very interesting twist to a resource management/worker placement style game. Furthermore, because the value of the reward seems to always correlate with its difficulty, 98% of the time you’re going to be choosing the most difficult choice you think you can succeed at, irrespective of what that choice actually is in the story.