Red Raven Games Above and Below Card Game

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Every villager in the exhausted area will require a bed to sleep in and move them into the ready area to be available for next round. Many gamers are familiar with Tales of the Arabian Nights, the story-telling board game designed by Eric Goldberg. Each player is given their own player board, which they will add to with cards they acquire to create their village tableau. 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.

These can include, among others, training new villagers, harvesting goods, constructing new buildings and exploring the underground labyrinth.During each round, players take turns using their workers to complete various tasks: build, teach/recruit, explore, harvest, or labor. Harvest: you may use one or more workers to harvest available goods from your established buildings above or below ground. Lastly, taking the Labor action allows you to generate coins for each villager using it, and you’ll need those coins for building.

It’s filled with quirky characters, from frog people to sentient cats to the lizard-like glogos that live underground. That said, I did manage to have some fun once I let go of that notion that winning was within my control. The rewards from these explorations are the primary means of gathering various resources, although frequently they seem more or less random. Looking back at the art he’s done for both his own games and for other designs, Laukat seems to enjoy deep, rich colors (particularly blue, green, and gold), and it’s on full display here, to great effect.Neither is strong enough to stand on their own and together they don’t do much to elevate the whole.

The grove card gives bonus village points at the end of the game if adjacent to a building card with a symbol matching the icon on the arrow on the grove card. Once all players have completed all of their actions and passed, new villagers are made available, players rest their villagers and collect income.All photos on this site are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4. You must declare which of the options you are rolling for as well as which worker and if you fail you either get nothing or if there is a lower lantern condition, gain the rewards for that. So if you pile a mound of plentiful mushrooms in the first slot, they are only worth 1 point a piece. However, a player may boost his total by one for each villager in the exploration party that he is willing to “exert”, which may often spell the difference between success or failure. 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.

They say that it takes a minute to learn, the rules are fairly simple to understand, and it's quick to play. And to that end, Above and Below injects a bit of storytelling into what would otherwise be a fairly standard game. In a relatively short, 7-turn game, there is little chance to recover from one or two failed explorations.The cider token allows you to move a worker from the exhausted area back to the ready area on your player board.