Above and Below

3rd August 2021

Tuesday is here and I'm in Woking with the Woking Gaming Club at The Sovereigns pub for gaming night.

The game of the night was Above and Below. Published by the same company who also produce a game  called Near and Far.
Left and right, up and down, in and out: wiggle it all about, here and there, out and about, Far and Away and Home and Away! Some great suggestions for naming more games!

As the name suggest, the players will concerning themselves with the above ground settlement and exploring the caves below the village.

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What's in a game?

• ​Reputation board: This central game board shows an area above ground that displays a 5-space track for 'special villages' with a cost beneath each spaces that starts at 2 and rises to ​5.
  Below ground, the board depicts a series of caves which serves as a round tracker and what appears to be a tunnel, which is used as a reputation tracker.
  Additionally, on the left is an allotted space for a barrel token and a column that depicts the game's many goods in increasing rarity.
• Player board: This board depicts a grassy landscape dotted with a few buildings.
  The top left corner displays the player's colour as well as being a trading spot.
  Along the top it shows the different actions a player may perform. These are Explore, Harvest, Build, Train & Labour.
  The grassy landscape is divided into 3 areas by 2 vertical columns of trees. These 3 areas are the ready area, exhausted area and the injured area
  Finally, along the bottom is the goods advancement tracker which runs from left to right, as each space is filled with goods, it will increase the player's income as well as generating victory points at the game end.
• Player cubes: One each for every player in a colour that matches their player board.
• Starting villager tiles: There 4 copies of the 3 identical villagers. Villagers have a hammer (For building.), quill (For training.) or lantern (For exploring.) icon in their top left corner.
  All villagers will also have an icon in their top right corner, consisting of 1 or more lanterns along with associated die numbers above the lanterns, these are used in explore rolls.
• Villager tiles: Villagers that can be trained and recruited during play. As with starting villagers, they will come with come with icons for hammers, quills and exploring.
• Special villager tiles: Not just villagers, but special ones, one that come with special actions! Special villagers can only be found by exploring the caves.
• Starting house cards: There are 4 of these identical cards that each depict 3 beds along the bottom. Beds allow injured villagers to heal and exhausted ones to rest.
• House cards: These 25 cards can be bought during the game and list a cost in the top left corner and whatever special ability they confer along the bottoms; this may be extra beds or ways to earn victory points, or produce goods, increase reputation or money, etc.
• Star house cards: These 6 cards are rarer, more expensive but more useful houses.
• Key house cards: The rarest of house cards, there are 9 of them, but only 4 are used during a game.
• Cave cards: These cards are double sided. On the front is shows a small cave and the numbers 1-6, next to each of these numbers is a further number - which is used in conjunction with the encounter book.
  On the back of the card, a open cave is shown.
  There are 25 cave cards.
• Outpost cards: These are yet another type of house card, however, these can only be built underground as players explore. There are also 25 of these cards. As with other house cards, they may provide goods, victory points or other benefits.
• Goods tokens: These small round card tokens depict the game's 8 types of good. These are:
  Common: mushroom, fruit & fish.
  Uncommon; rope, clay pot & Paper.
  Rare: Ore & amethyst. 
• Barrel tokens: There 10 card tokens each depict a barrel and can be used to remove exhaustion from a villager without using a bed. Apparently those barrels are filled with cider, it must be pretty potent stuff considering what it does.
• Potion tokens: These smaller card tokens depict some sort of drinking jar, no doubt containing some suspect liquid? Using one will remove injury from a villager.
• Dice: Standard six-siders, there are 7 of them.
• Money tokens. Unusually, these card money tokens are rectangular.
• Encounter book: This book is a sort of 'choose your own adventure' book which contains a series of numbered and interlinked paragraphs which the players will encounter when they go exploring.

The components, which mostly consist of cards, tokens, tiles and dice are good quality and what you'd expect of a modern board game. It's nothing to write home about, but still solid.
The game makes good use of its cartoony artwork, particularly with the green, grassy landscapes and cloudy blue skies that appear on many of the cards. Buildings and villagers are also well illustrated. Finally, the underground cards have evocative, mildly forbidding artwork.
There is little iconography used throughout Above and Below and what there is of it, is easy to comprehend.

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How's it play?
Setup

• Give each player a player board, a starting house, the 3 starting villagers and 7 currency. The villagers should be placed on the board, where exactly on the board depends on the number of players.
• Put out the reputation board, shuffle the villager tiles into a face-down stack and deal 5 into the tracks on the board.
  Place a barrel token on to its allotted space on the board.
  Place the round marker at the start and each player's cube on the reputation track's starting spot.
  Put the special villagers to one side.
• Shuffle the house cards into a face-down deck and deal 4 face-up
• Put out all 6 star house cards face-up.
• Shuffle the key house cards and deal 4 face-up into the central area, the remaining 5 cards will not be used in this game.
• Shuffle the outpost cards into a deck and deal 4 face-up.
• Shuffle the cave cards into a face-up deck.
• Determine a starting player.

On to play.
Beginning with the starting player and going clockwise, each player performs a single action using 1 or more of their villagers, play continues clockwise until all players have used all their available villagers or have passed. After this, the next round begins.

• Actions: In order to perform actions, the active player must have at least 1 villager in their board's ready area. When undertaking an action, the relevant number of villagers must be moved to the exhausted area, with the exception of exploration - see below for further information.
  Explore: It requires at least 2 villagers to explore the caves below the village (I guess it's a scary place!).
  First a cave card is drawn by the active player, who then places the villagers they intend to use for the explore action on the top part of that card.
  The active player then rolls a die, this will determine which encounter they experience and its pertinent paragraph number.
  The player to the left of the active player takes the encounter book, finds the relevant paragraph and reads the text out to the active player, this usually includes a choice for the active player to make and a difficulty associated with those choices, sometimes there will be multiple paragraphs to play through in the style of a choose-your-own-adventure book. The active player chooses the action they want to attempt and then generates an explore roll.
  This is done by rolling a die for each villager sent exploring, if the die result equals or exceeds the value above the lantern(s), then that number of lantern(s) is added to the explore roll. Additionally, the active player may choose to have villagers exert themselves, which adds a further lantern to the explore result but sends the villager to the injured area on their player board.
  If the total of the explore roll exceeds the difficulty of the action they chose, then they earn the associated reward, this always includes the cave card which was just used for the encounter, which is flipped over to the other side and added to the player's area as an empty cave.
  If the player's explore roll is lower than the difficulty, they fail, which may result in a penalty.
  Regardless of success or failure, any remaining villagers are sent to the exhausted area on the player board.

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• ​Harvest: The active player may sent villagers to the exhaust area on their player board in order to harvest goods, each villager used this way allows the active player to acquire one good. This good must come from one of their houses or outposts that have generated a good.
  Once a player has good, they can choose to store it with their cash, put it up for sale in their trading spot or add it to their goods track.
  Putting goods into the advancement tracker both increases the players income and earns them victory points at the end of the game. However there are some rules about this.
  Goods must always be placed from left-to-right on the leftmost open space with no gaps between goods. Once a type of good has been put in a space, all goods of that type must now go on that space. Furthermore; goods placed on the tracker cannot be removed during the game.
  Players will need a variety of different goods to advance across the track to gain access to the higher income/victory points.
  Build: In order to build something, that is acquire purchase house or outpost card; the active player must exhaust a villager with a hammer symbol and pay the relevant cost for the house card or outpost. They may buy any house, star house, key house or outpost provided they can pay the cost.
  However, an outpost can only be built on top of an empty cave card, thus the player must first go exploring before they acquire outpost cards.
  When a building or outpost is bought, a new card is drawn to replace it so there always a choice of 4 to choose from.
  Train: The active player can exhaust a villager with a quill on their tile to recruit one of the 5 villagers along the top of the reputation board. They must also pay the associated cost, which increases going from left-to-right. Then the new villager is placed into their exhausted area on their board.
  Empty spaces are not refilled during a round, this is in contrast to how house cards are refilled.
  Labour: For each villager the active player exerts, they earn a coin, the first villager to be exhausted this way also earns the controlling player the barrel token in the reputation board. Only 1 barrel token may be earned a round.
• Free actions: As well as the main action, players can perform any amount of the following 2 actions.
  Sell good: The active player may put a single good, barrel or potion for sale. They also swap the good they have for sale during their turn
  Buy good: The active player may buy whatever another player has put up for sale, the seller may charge anything they want for the good they're selling, as long as it's at least 3 coins.
• End of round: Once all players have passed, the round is over and the following actions occur.
  Villagers: Move any villagers on the reputation board to the left to fill any open spots, new villager tiles are drawn to fill the spaces now on the right in a conveyor belt mechanic.
  Produce: Any house or outpost that has an empty goods production space will generate a good to fill that space.
  Rest: For every bed in a player's area, they can move a exhausted villager to the ready space. An injured villager may use a bed to move to the exhausted area, a villager cannot use 2 beds in a round, thus it will take 2 rounds to move a villager from injured to ready.
  Barrel and potion tokens change all of this though.
  A potion token can be used to move a injured villager to the exhausted area without needing a bed and barrel token can be used to move a villager from exhausted to ready without needing a bed. And yes, it is possible to use a potion and a barrel on the same villager in order to move them from injured to ready without using a bed.
  Income: All players acquire income. The base income is 4, the number of goods in a player's goods track will increase that, as will some times of building and outpost.
  After this, the player to the left of the starting player becomes the new starting player.

Endgame
Once seven rounds are completed, the game goes to scoring, victory points can come from a variety of places.
​Reputation: Whoever has the highest reputation gets 5 victory points and 2nd place gets 3.
Each house and outpost: Regardless of what it is, earns a victory point.
House/outpost bonuses: Some houses and outposts will confer additional bonus points, these may be straight up points or situational points, e.g., 1 point per barrel.
Advancement tracker: Players earn points for each good on their advancement tracker, depending on where the good is positioned. 2 goods on the 1st space would earn 2 victory points in total, 2 goods on the 8th and final space would earn 12 victory points! The type of good makes no difference here. The advancement tracker can earn a lot of points.
Points are tallied, highest score wins.

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Overall
For the most part, mechanically speaking, Above and Below is a fairly straightforward, unremarkable game. Players use their workers to increase their resources to acquire more workers and buildings create a strategy to earn victory. Pretty standard stuff, not that there's anything wrong with that, no need to reinvent the wheel.
Even so, there's some depth here and quite a bit of balancing to perform. There's little good acquiring workers without the ability to rest them which means acquiring buildings with beds instead of other benefits, particularly to ability to acquire goods and so on.

This brings us neatly to the merchant track, which is one of the game's two interesting mechanics. Firstly, it more-or-less forces players to diversify in goods in order to reach the higher scoring spots.
Secondly, it does something unusual with the game's 8 goods; which is that the rarity of a good has no bearing of it's worth for victory points, position on the track determines a good's worth and this is likely to be different for each player, meaning they may have different priorities for different goods, regardless of rarity.
Finally, it gives players a conundrum to navigate: Logically, players will want to put the most common goods on the later, higher scoring spots because, well, there's more of the common goods available to stack up for more points. This means using rarer goods earlier in the track, but rarer goods are harder to come by. So should a player start filling out the merchant track as quickly as possible with whatever they get to reach the later spots? Or should they hold off, hoping to get the scarcer goods and use them to fill the earlier spots.
It's an interesting decision to consider.

The second interesting mechanic is exploring, Above and Below really stands out from the crowd when exploring the below. The inclusion of a 'lite storytelling' choose-your-own-adventure element with flavour text and all, is both fun and meaningful, presenting players with sometimes story-based choices and risks to take which directly affect what they earn from their exploration. It's cool and a great addition beyond the usual board game fare. It makes Above and Below worth trying.