Red Raven Games Above and Below Card Game

Product Information

Underneath the die symbols are one or more lantern symbols, which are earned if the player successfully meets the die requirement.

It’s not long enough to feel expansive and epic, but I want to keep learning more about its fantasy world.Players ends up using varying strategies to get ahead, and there's also a bit of luck introduced through dice rolling and the randomness that workers and buildings may appear. Exhausted and Exerted workers can recuperate using an empty bed to regain one level of stamina (so, exhausted moves to ready, and exerted moves to exhausted). Systems are reasonably straightforward and make sense once you get used to them and there are a few videos online to help out if you get confused at all. 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.

It's really fun to train people up and then send them out to work (and there are some special villagers which you can only get from "below" which make things a bit more varied) but the undoubted star is the exploration and the "choose your own adventure" stories. Lastly, taking the Labor action allows you to generate coins for each villager using it, and you’ll need those coins for building. There are eight slots along the bottom of a player’s board where goods may be placed once harvested. The game itself sets 2-4 players as settlers of village in a new land after having been displaced by tragedy in their former home. I think that this is a necessary path to have available, and extra rounds would completely do away with that strategy.The central “reputation” board primarily depicts the reputation and round tracks, and various game components, including available villagers and buildings that will be placed around it. Where in other games you might have to feed your people to keep them alive, here they just need a good night’s rest, or else they stay “exhausted”…. The first player to perform this action on a turn acquires a “cider” token, which can be used to move a villager from the exhausted area to the ready area, even if the player does not have the required number of beds. Above and Below, by designer and artist Ryan Laukat, is contained in a fantasy world of sky blues and vivid greens.

Very often, one choice is much more difficult to achieve than the other and you realize that it’s actually impossible for you to even achieve the more difficult choice with your current explorers so your only real option is to attempt the easier one. Each worker tile has dice and lanterns depicted on it; the numerical value on each die is the number you must roll to acquire the number of lanterns shown below it.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. Every exploration is accompanied by a reading from the encounter book which will lead to a decision that needs to be made.

It becomes far too easy to reduce your villagers into just their abilities and think about your actions purely in terms of the math involved. It’s nothing special, but it is clever and can affect your decisions in the later parts of the game as you try to load up on one particularly valuable resource. Taking the Train action will let you recruit new villagers to your player board so that you can take more turns each round assigning tasks to them. Once a particular type of good–there are eight different types–is placed on a slot, only that type of good may be placed on that slot in the future.At the end of the game, points are tallied by counting up your total number of buildings, the value of the goods on your advancement track, your reputation, and VP's/bonuses. It reminds me of my old Dungeons and Dragons role-playing days, encountering unusual and enticing situations that force one to make decisions that often result in surprising results. The kicker is that as you gather different types of resources, filling the slots, your income each round increases.