Last night, my wife and I played '
Above & Below' by Ryan Laukat. I kickstarted this having watched a runthrough (against my wife's recommendations). For those of you who don't know Ryan Laukat, is a bit of a board game polymath capable of designing games and artwork and essentially self-publishing his games.
We recently played Artifacts Inc, which is a Dice Engine Building game, where you refine a mechanism for scoring points.
At its core,
Above and Below is an adventure game. Your band of merry townsfolk, must go off exploring and use your limited actions to build buildings or employ more workers. Ultimately, you're trying to create your 'engine' that generates points at the end of the game. The differentiator, is the storytelling aspect; you can go exploring (in caves) and by rolling a dice, select a paragraph from a pretty big book, your other players read to you.
The paragraph, sets the scene and you're left with choices, which require 'explore' points in order the achieve. Depending on the skill of your workers, this may be easy, but if necessary, you may 'injure' your party in order to earn a few more points and succeed at the event. The outcome of the events are not known to you at the time, so there is a great risk/reward element to this game.
We truly loved playing this game. It looked quite complicated to begin with, but within the first few rounds you should be well on your way to finding the 'engine/machine' you need to exploit to score-points at the end of the game. Like Artifacts Inc, we found it hard to determine each other's scores, so you're left trying to optimize every turn. The game only lasts 7-rounds, our 2-player game lasted 80minutes. My wife is not a gamer, but she loved the story element (and loved watching me get terrible luck in the caves). She totally kicked my ass. I think this is also a great family game, but possibly with 2-adults if the child's reading isn't confident.
The storytelling aspect is fantastic. Players don't really interact very much, so reading paragraphs to each other (and putting silly voices to the characters) was really fun. The book has about 300 paragraphs in it, so there's little chance of hitting a repeat any time soon.
Many boxes ticked for me here: Storytelling, worker placement, engine building, risk reward, dice rolling.
For those interested, you may want to check these videos:
Rahdo's Runthrough:
Watch It Played:
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