The Starting player assigns one or more of their worker tiles to an action space, unless they want to explore, in which case they need a minimum of two workers. The player rolls dice for all of the characters in the exploration party and tallies the total number of lanterns earned for the successful dice rolls. While in the course of establishing their new village, a massive system of underground caverns and passages has been discovered. Anyone not already familiar with Above and Below will be very surprised with the narrative adventure decisions they can make. The writing throughout the encounter book is excellent, sometimes funny, and sometimes very dark and the choices players are presented with are usually interesting if somewhat limited.

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. Excellent communication, everything is processed very promptly after purchase and all items purchased have arrived exactly as described/pictured and well packaged for protection in transit. If the total number of lanterns equal or exceeds the number required by the choice the player made, he is successful, at which point his fellow player reads the results of that successful encounter. It’s not uncommon for us to goad players uncertain of what action they want to do into exploring, just so we can hear another story and see if they can successfully push their luck into a big prize.The rewards from these explorations are the primary means of gathering various resources, although frequently they seem more or less random. Players may send two or more villagers into the mysterious underground caverns in hopes of finding fabulous riches and new places on which to construct outposts.

Additionally, you can exert as many of your villagers as you want to increase their contribution by one, but putting the extra strain on their bodies means going to the injured area of your player board. Explained simply, time preference is how much one values income immediately over income in the future. The building is placed next to the player’s starting board and the player may gain and/or utilize the benefits it conveys.We've also had fun with reading the scenarios to each other, adopting funny voices and occasionally making up our own flavor text to go along with the outcome if nothing more than a reward/penalty was outlined.

And there’s the traditional strategy game world that is betrayed by the randomness of the encounters. 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.

Petit bémol dans les choix d'explorations: je ne vois pas l'intérêt d'indiquer le score exact à atteindre aux dés pour réussir. On the contrary, I think if it were any longer it would become imbalanced towards those that efforted to get early extra beds. However there are also plenty of choices to make and lots of nice systems in place to make this enjoyable for adult players as well. The player boards themselves show spaces for your worker tiles (active, exhausted and injured) as well as iconography for the actions you can take with each worker (explore, harvest, build, train and labour). In addition to these actions, a player may offer one good, cider or potion for sale by placing the appropriate marker on the “for sale” space on his player board.