Above and Below Haunted

• Designer: Ryan Laukat
• Publisher: Red Raven Games
• Players: 2-4
• Age: 12+
• Time: 60-120 minutes
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/44SwbsK
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

You and your family have lived in the marshlands for generations. But your hometown is getting crowded and you’ve heard of a group of villages to the west, in a landscape of azure lakes, where the constantly flowing water has created a maze of watery caves, sinkholes, underground streams, and porous bedrock. There’s opportunity to start a new life there, catching fish, living in a stilt house on the lake, and exploring the deep sinkholes for rare ingredients and rusty treasures. You’ve packed up your favorite fishing pole and strapped the baby to your back, ready for a fresh start. If only you’d known about the ghosts, you might have stayed where you were.

Above and Below: Haunted is a standalone sequel to Above and Below (The character tokens are compatible between editions), planned to release on the 10th anniversary of the original game. As in the original game, players compete to build the best village by recruiting villagers, constructing buildings, and exploring the caves below ground. Above and Below: Haunted features new stories and explores a new setting in the world of Arzium.

Each player gets their own board, seeded with three starting villagers.  The villages go in slots in the middle portion of the board: ready on the left, exhausted in the middle and injured on the right.  There is also a row for goods to be placed at the bottom of this board, with your income increasing with each additional token placed in this row.

The reputation board is placed in the center, with 5 regular villager tiles placed in the five slots along the top.  There is a reputation track at the bottom of this, and each player puts a cube of their color on the starting space.  A market of 8 star house cards and 5 key house cards is built on the table.  Elsewhere, the house card deck and the outpost card decks are placed with a market of four face up cards from each of these next to the deck.

The game is played over seven rounds. In each round, players in turn will assign one of their villagers to an action.  The options are nicely summarized at the top of the player board, and the options include:

A] Explore –  Players may send two or more villagers into a cave in hopes of finding fabulous riches and new places on which to construct outposts.  The more villagers sent, the greater the chance of success.

The player first draws a new cave card (there are two types, easy and hard) and then rolls a die, consulting the chart on the cave card to determine the paragraph number that must be read from the “Encounter” book.  A fellow player reads the corresponding paragraph aloud.  The paragraph, which can be one or even several paragraphs, describes an encounter.  The book will then present the player with a choice of possible responses (flee, interact with the character, offer money, accept item, etc.).  The player must then attempt to meet the numerical requirement of that choice by rolling dice.

Each character tile will depict 1 – 3 dice, each with a value ranging from 1 – 6.  This is the number (or greater) that must be rolled on a die in order to be successful.  For example, if the die value depicted is “3”, the player must roll 3 or greater on a die to be successful.  Underneath the die symbols are one or more lantern symbols, which are earned if the player successfully meets the die requirement.  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.  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.  If the tally was less than the required amount, the player fails and the appropriate section is read.  

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.  Exerted villagers are moved to the injured area of the player’s board and generally take one more turn to fully recover and once again be available for use.

Success usually results in the discovery of money, resources, artifacts, etc.  You can also get bonus things if you succeed by at least two more than the stated goal.  You might even gain extra villagers to add to your board!   Often, reputation increases as fellow villagers are impressed by one’s bravery and cunning.  The player is also allowed to keep the cave card, placing it to the right of his board, in a row under his house cards.   If it was a hard cave card, you also gain a Pearl.  Put all the non-exerted villagers used in this Explore action into the exhausted area of your board.

Failure is often relatively painless, but sometimes does cost the player reputation. Even if you fail, you still get to keep the Cave card.

B] Build –  Several buildings are available to construct each turn, including special “star” buildings and underground outposts.  The cost to construct a specific building is in the upper left corner of the card.  In order to construct a building, the player must utilize the skills of a villager who possesses the building attribute, clearly indicated by a hammer icon. The building is placed next to the player’s starting board and the player may gain and/or utilize the benefits shown on the card.  Benefits can include additional money, more beds (needed to house villagers), goods to harvest, ability to manipulate dice rolls, and more.  Houses are built in a row to the right of the player board.  Outposts can only be built on top of previously explored caves. 

C] Banish – you must have a ghost on one of your buildings to choose this action; use a villager with a quill icon.  Then remove all the ghosts from your buildings.  Take one of those removed ghosts and place it on any opponent’s building that does not already have a ghost on it.  You gain a reward depending on the type of building you placed the ghost on.

D] Hire – first exhaust a villager with a quill icon on it.  Select any of the available villagers from the row above the reputation board. Pay the cost as shown underneath the villager.  Also, depending on where you bought the villager, either gain a mystic brew or place a ghost token on one of your unghosted buildings.

E] Labor – For each villager you exhaust, gain a coin. Then take 2 goods tokens if your villager had a hammer icon or 1 good token otherwise from one of your houses – you can keep it for later, put it up for sale or add it to your advancement track.  If you put it on the advancement track, there can only be one type of good per space, always filling left to right.  You can have multiple tokens of the same type on a space.

Free actions – there are a few things you can do for free on your turn when it makes sense.  

• You can place up to one good for sale – in the upper left corner of your player board.  
• You can also try to buy an offered good.  The cost must be at least 3 coins and/or mystic brews – but the buyer and seller must agree on the price.
• You can use a boat token – by moving it from your ready area to your exhausted area – and either gain a coin or change any die used for exploring to a “6”
• You can stake a claim on an ingredient if you are the first person in the game to gain that type

When your turn comes around, and you don’t want to do anything else (or you have no more actions possible), you Pass.  Play continues around the board until all players have Passed.  When everyone has passed, the turn marker is advanced and all players move a step back on the Reputation track for each Ghost on one of their buildings. The Villager display is refreshed, and then all villagers rest – meaning they move one space to the left (injured become exhausted, and exhausted become ready).  Finally, players take income based on the goods on their Reputation track as well as from any cards in their area that grant income.

If the round marker is past the end of the track, the game ends.  At this time, players take all their collected pearls and place them on top of the rightmost occupied space in their Advancement track.  Now victory points are tallied:

• Advancement Track – each good token scores VPs as shown above the slot
• Buildings – each building is worth 1VP
• Reputation – 5/3/2 VP for being the 1st/2nd/3rd place on the reputation track
• Card Bonuses – some cards give straight VPs while others give VPs based on certain criteria
• Ingredient Track – score 1, 2 or 4 VP per marker you have on the ingredient track

The player with the most VPs wins, ties broken in favor of the player with the most coins.

My thoughts on the game

Above and Below is designer Ryan Laukat’s attempt to combine the storytelling feature of Arabian Knights to an actual strategic game.  Players represent refugees who recently fled a horrific barbarian invasion and eventually found a new land to settle.  This new version, Above and Below Haunted follows the same path, but in a new setting.

Believe it or not, it’s been years since I played the original Above and Below – so I don’nt remember much about it.  But, the Internet tells me this:  Above and Below: Haunted includes some new features:

• Ghosts! Your buildings can become haunted, lowering your reputation. The game includes wooden ghost tokens that are placed on building cards. Players can perform a banish action to remove their ghosts, placing one of the ghosts on another player’s building and gaining a reward.
• Two Cave Types! There are now two types of cave cards: normal and dangerous. Dangerous caves have higher lantern requirements, but give larger rewards, including a pearl. Pearls are a new type of token that count as your highest placed good at the end of the game.
• New Buildings! There are many new types of key and star buildings included in the game to encourage new strategies. All buildings have been designed from the ground up especially for Above and Below: Haunted.
• Boats! Players can gain boat tokens, which can be used to alter die rolls or gain coins.
• Adventure Cards! There are now 40 unique adventure cards which are gained as specific rewards for exploring the caves.

The funnest part of the game is in the Exploring – where you get to read snippets from the book and then make choices. The encounters and ultimate results are fun, as the stories are often clever and entertaining. There are often numerous choices a player can make, with the more difficult ones to achieve generally resulting in greater rewards…or more severe penalties. Achieving the required results of these more challenging choices can be tough and usually requires numerous villagers to be part of the exploration party.  

Of course, the game will still be won if you have better luck when rolling the dice!  The stories are always different as the cave cards come up in a random order and the actual passage is still dependent on the roll of a die.  Thus, each time you play, you’ll likely hear new parts of the story – and this makes it easier to get this out to replay the game.  For me, it was also nice that the text passages are short.  There’s enough there to give your imagination something to work with – to help you visualize and experience the story – but it’s never more than a minute of reading.  

If you’ve liked any of the previous Red Raven story games, this is more of the same.  I do adore Sleeping Gods, and thus I really liked reading the story from the books here.  Sure, it’s not the sort of game that I’ll want to play every week, but it’s definitely a nice change of pace.  Here, you get a bit of exploration, a bit of story time, and a nice enjoyable evening spent in this Haunted world.  If you’re new to the narrative genre, this is a fine place to jump into the pond and see if you like this style of game. 

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it.  Dale Y
• Neutral.
• Not for me…

Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/44SwbsK