Above and Below:

Today when I arrived at the meet up spot for gaming (Silver Grill Cafe in Austin Tx) I ran into one the group reading through a game I had just gotten on Kickstarter myself.

This is the game Above and Below. A.....well, hard to say what type of game it is. It has elements of worker placement and lots of resources from rope, to pots, to fruit and paper. That part reminds me slightly of the game Euphoria. Then, it also has the "below" part where you adventure through the endless caves below the ground in this world. It unfolds with stories as you send your people of to adventure. That part reminded on of Agents of SMERSH, or Tales of the Arabian Nights, complete with an adventure story book.

This is a game by Ryan Laukat who also designed The Ancient World and Empires of the Void, to name a couple. You know it is one of his games by the signature art style ( He is both game designer and the artist) that while different in each game is still distinctly his.

Anyway, we played a test few rounds then invited a third to play a full game. It is fun! While I liked The Ancient World there were elements of that game (Ryan's last game) that weren't as smooth as other games he has done.

Above and Below manages to blend two very different types of games into a game that works well at both. The way the adventuring is managed is part of your decisions with what to do with the folks in your growing village. You can build, harvest, labor, recruit, and adventure and it all just works.

Getting your head around all the different ways you can score is a bit of a challenge but you totally get it after one play.

We played two games with three players, the third player was different for each game and everyone enjoyed it. I can see that adding a fourth player would not add any appreciable time to the game and might make the trading between players more prevalent.

I would not call this a gateway game. it is a bit deep as it does require to manage resources and worker placement. The decisions are critical and like most of these games you never feel like you have quite enough of what you need.

I think this might be my favorite Ryan Laukat game and if there is any one thing I might say as a negative there always seemed to be a big score gap between the first place winner and the rest. Though, it was not totally obvious until we totaled up scores at the end.

I came in second both times. grrrr. but was nearly twenty points away from the first place winner each time. I was scoring in the high 40's while the first place each time was near 70-80 pts.

Like the game Euphoria, that this one reminds me of a little, it appears to be one of those games I am not going to win ( I never win at Euphoria for some reason) but is fun enough to lose.

Check it out! This is not an official review but just my thoughts. Having only played two full games I don't believe I could fully review it but my thoughts might help you as to whether this is a good game for you.