His foray onto the internet exposed him to the wonderful world of German and European games and now nearly all of his gaming time is devoted to this area of our hobby. Are you going for the minimum of just having a cave slot on which to build an outpost, or do you really want something? 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). The artwork is quite attractive and a finished game looks great on the table, all your buildings lined up beside your player board have a nice flow and look like a completed fantasy world village. You’ll roll a die and be presented with a tiny snippet of an overall themed story from the underground world, and then be given choices of how you’ll proceed.

Accompanying the standard a rule book is a spiral-bound encounter book full of stories and adventures. It’s incredibly earnest and even with all of its faults, Above and Below manages to get by with a wonderful sense of place and provides some light entertainment if you’re willing to succumb to its charm. However, while I certainly applaud the effort, I find the most fun aspect of the game–the story-telling and encounters–to be too luck dependent and problematic. In any given paragraph, a player is presented with a problem, a character or a physical barrier and then a choice of what action to take.They’re quirky, varied, and provide just enough of an insight into the weird ecosystem Laukat has created to make you want to keep reading more and more of them. There’s also a bunch of free actions you can take like putting goods up for sale, which seems completely unnecessary. Generally villagers move one step (injured to exhausted, exhausted to ready), but this process may be sped-up by using potions and/or cider.

The final of the four primary actions is gathering resources, and this involves a clever little mechanism that I don’t think I’ve seen in any other games. Of course, new villagers cost money, and a player must utilize the training skills of the an appropriate villager. For example, several building cards available have a set amount of resource tokens (such as fish, ore, rope or parchment), which you can harvest from the card by using the harvest action. In most engine building games, your time preference starts out low and shifts to extremely high by the end of the game (because unlike the real world there’s a known end point in a game that forces your hand).When players explore, they may choose to explore the top-most grove card instead of a cave card, the difference being that no story is read and the player can see the possible rewards. 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. To go on those adventures and take unnecessary risks to see what kind of treasure you can find; to select the frog-person villager simply because it’s a frog-person.