That said, I did manage to have some fun once I let go of that notion that winning was within my control.

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. Are you going for the minimum of just having a cave slot on which to build an outpost, or do you really want something?Quería que fuera algo extraordinario que permitiera usar la imaginación y me recordara al Señor de los Anillos o Game of Thrones. Of course, a player must have enough beds to house those moving to ready status without using cider. Here is a break down of your possible actions during a turn:Teach/Recruit: workers with the feather icon are considered teachers, and are able to recruit other workers (from an available pool) into your workforce. And those looking for strong strategy will be disappointed by a run of the mill set collection game.

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. From its evocative art to its individual villager portraits, the game does a great job of pulling you into this strange world. Earn income, recruit characters, purchase buildings, harvest resources–all pretty familiar territory. 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! In a relatively short, 7-turn game, there is little chance to recover from one or two failed explorations.

A villager with a feather symbol is chosen as the teacher and a pupil is chosen from the available student supply. It’s filled with quirky characters, from frog people to sentient cats to the lizard-like glogos that live underground. If you put mushrooms in the first slot, for example, all subsequent mushrooms must be put in that slot. Once all players have either exhausted their available workforce (or taken a pass at continuing), the round ends. 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.

This isn’t necessarily bad–the game presents interesting decisions throughout and encourages risky plays–but it’s a hair disappointing.When you harvest a resource, you can assign any number of workers and gain that many resources from your buildings/outposts, which are then placed into your advancement, track on your player board. Above and Below, by designer and artist Ryan Laukat, is contained in a fantasy world of sky blues and vivid greens.

Which means that on the next round you’ll need to figure out who you want to revive and who you want to keep in a state of perpetual exhaustion. The only downside for me is that you only discover who has won at the end when you total up the points and the game ends after a certain number of turns, which can make it feel a little bit like you've not completed the story yet.The Explore action has some great opportunities to gather resources to further your score and everyone will enjoy taking a turn reading the scenarios. It doesn’t have the push-your-luck element of Stone Age, where you’re just trying to squeeze as much benefit out of your workers as possible each round, while ultimately staying afloat. Each player is given their own player board, which they will add to with cards they acquire to create their village tableau.