Above and Below

Above & Below is the first game in Ryan Laukat’s Arzium setting. This family also includes Islebound and Near & Far; I gather that there may be at least one more game coming (as of this writing), but I don’t know what it might be just yet.

In Above and Below each player controls the actions of a number of refugees as they strive to build a new home in a strange land. The events detailing the loss of their former home are chronicled (lightly) in the rulebook, but happen before play begins.

At the start of the game, each player (2-4) has three villagers each with their own skills which they will need to build a new village. The game played over a set number (7) of rounds in which each player takes as many actions as she can until there are no more villagers to activate. Play then passes to the next player. Once all players have performed as many actions in their turn as possible, the round ends, some book keeping is performed, and the next round begins. After 7 rounds, victory points are tallied and the winner is determined.

Simple, right?

Not so fast…

Let’s start by looking at the villagers. Each of a player’s starting villagers will have some symbols on the top—a Hammer (he’s a Builder), a Quill (she’s a Trainer), and all villagers will have one (or more) d6s on them with a number (1-3) of small lanterns beneath them. Builders, well… build things, and Trainers train new villagers to grow your population. You start with one Builder with a Hammer and one die, one Trainer with a Quill and one die, and one non-specialized villager with two dice but no skill icon.

On your turn you can perform various actions:

1. Build: You can “exhaust” one villager with a Hammer in order to buy a building. Aside from needing a builder, you’ll need some gold to pay for the building. There are four areas on the table which you can buy buildings from.
   1. The House track is a row of four buildings which you can choose from; these represent the buildings Above ground.
   2. The Outpost track is a row of four buildings which you can choose from; these are the buildings Below ground (we’ll come back to that). NOTE: you can only build these buildings if you have explored the caves and have staked out a spot to do so (again, we’ll come back to that).
   3. The Star track is a row of six buildings which is that same in each game; these are high value buildings which will help you win the game.
   4. The Key track is a row of four buildings randomly selected from a set of nine possible buildings at the start of each game during set-up. The buildings all have perks which will help you in one way or another.
2. Train: You can exhaust one villager with a Quill symbol to train a new villager to join your ranks. New villagers are selected from a row of five currently available villagers, each with a cost listed beneath them (ranging from 2 to 5 gold). New villagers join your population exhausted, so they can’t be used immediately.
3. Harvest: You can exhaust as many of your villagers as you like in order to harvest any goods which your buildings produce or provide. This is an important distinction as some buildings provide a set number of a specified good (say Fruit), but once you have harvested it all, they produce no more. Other building produce goods on an on-going basis—once you harvest from it, it will refill with more at the end of the round. Goods are key to winning, so we’ll come back to them as well.
4. Labor: Much like harvesting, you can exhaust as many of your villagers as you want and gain one gold piece for each one who labored. In addition, if you are the first player to have performed a labor action in the round, you will gain a coveted Cider token (useful during bookkeeping or to sell for gold).
5. Explore: You can send 2 or more (as many as you like, but always at least two) villagers underground to explore the caves. This is how you get to build underground Outposts (and you want those), as well as how you go on Adventures (and you want to do that). Since you want the things which go along with Exploring, let’s take a look at why…

Forward! To Adventure!

OK, so you’ve chosen some villagers to go underground. Did you choose the right ones? This is where those dice symbols on the villagers will come into play. Look at the villagers; each one has at least (a possibly two) dice symbols with some lanterns (aka exploration successes) beneath them. The value on the die face must be equaled or exceeded on 1d6 in order to score the indicated number of successes; so a die showing 5 with 2 lanterns beneath it means you need to roll a 5 or 6 in order to gain 2 successes. Why do I need successes?

So, now you’ve chosen your villagers. Next you draw a card off of the Cave deck. This card will have six die results on it, each with a number beside it. These numbers represent a specific paragraph in the Adventure book. You pick a card, roll 1d6, and get a result. One of the other players takes up the Encounter book, turns to the indicated paragraph and reads it to you, thusly (NO SPOILERS):

31. Your party reaches a camp in a sandy-floored cave. A lone man with a short beard sits near a fire, roasting what looks like a rodent of some kind on a stick. ‘Got anything to trade?’ he asks. Do you sit and haggle or keep exploring?
Keep Exploring: Explore 3 (reward)
Trade With the Man: Explore 3 and pay 1 Coin (reward), Explore 6 and Pay 1 Coin (reward)

The first part sets the scene for you. The next parts offer you possible choices (Keep Exploring vs Trade) as well as how many successes you’ll need to accomplish the various choices (3, 3 or 6). All of these things are read to you; what isn’t read to you are the rewards. Rewards can be various items—Coins, Goods, etc…—sometimes, it can point you on to another paragraph (for a longer adventure), or, it could even lead you to find a unique special villager (such as the Metal Man).

Now, you choose you option—say, Trade with the Man—and roll 1d6 for each villager on the adventure. You compare your die rolls to the symbols on their tokens and see how many successes you got. If you got a number equal to or greater than one of the success options, you get the reward. In the above example, if you chose to Trade, and you got 4 successes you could pay the man one coin and gain the reward for 3 successes. If you got 6 successes and pay him one coin you would get the reward listed for that level of success (not both rewards for 3 and 6, just the reward for getting 6).

Now, if you didn’t get successes to get a reward (say you only got 2) you may choose to injure a village for an additional success. For each villager you choose to injure, you’ll get an additional success, but it will take them longer (potentially) to recover and be ready to perform actions of future turns, so choose wisely.

Neat, huh?

But wait! That’s not all… IF you succeeded at your adventure you also have scouted out a place Below ground where you can build an Outpost. Outposts are much like the buildings you build above ground—you need a builder to build one, you choose it from the current list of four available Outposts, they take Coins to build, and they give you some sort of bonus/perk for having built them. Unlike Above ground buildings which you can pretty much just build willy-nilly, you have to have a cave card (which you get by succeeding at an adventure) to build an Outpost on. However, many of the Goods which are available in the game—Amethyst, Fish, Mushrooms, and Ore—are ONLY available from Outposts (we’ll come back to why you want goods soon). The other reward you can gain from Exploring is Reputation. At the end of the game, the player with the highest reputation will gain additional victory (Village) points; have a very high (or very low) reputation can also gain (or cost) you victory points.

Now, Goods; each player has a Player Board where he keeps track of his Villagers, Coins, and Goods. Goods can be placed in various places on/around the board; placed up for sale to other players, held aside for use later, or they can be committed to your Advancement Track (at the bottom of your Player Board). The Advancement Track has a number of spaces on it for goods to be placed. Each space can only hold one type of Good, and once chosen, can only hold that specific Good for the rest of the game (choose wisely). Placing Goods on the track does two things: 1) increases you Income (aka the number of Coins you will get at the end of each round. Income starts at 4, and then goes up from there). It also gains you victory points at the end of the game. Each space on the track will have a victory point amount associated with it (ranging from 1 to x); at game’s end, you’ll gain a number of victory points equal to that number times the total number of Goods in that space (so if I have 5 pieces of Rope on a space worth 2 VP, I’ll get 10 VP at game’s end).

OK, so you’ve built, labored, harvested, trained, and explored, and now all your villagers are shagged out. Not having any further villagers to exploit, err… activate… you declare a Pass and play moves to the next player who does the same to her villagers.

At the end of each round (after all players have had a turn) various bookkeeping takes place:

1. Advance the Round Marker The round marker is advanced by one, the Cider marker is replaced on the main game board (we’ll get there soon).
2. New villagers are revealed. Remember training (above)? When you Train/buy a new villager from the track of available villagers you don’t replenish the track (until now), so gaps will appear in the list until now. When the track is refilled, any villagers still on the track are slid down to the left (thus decreasing their cost for the next round) and any empty spaces are refilled from the stack of remaining villagers.
3. Rest your villagers. So, after your villagers do things (Labor, Harvest, etc…) they become exhausted, or they may have been injured while Exploring the caves below. Now is when they get better. Probably. Various buildings will provide you with beds. For each bed you have (either Above or Below) one villager can move one step (from Injured to Exhausted, or from Exhausted to Ready). What if I don’t have enough beds? That’s where Cider and Potions come in. Cider will allow you to move one Exhausted Villager to Ready without needing a bed. Potions (found on Adventures or produced/provided by Buildings) allow you to move a Villager from Injured to Exhausted. And yes, you can use a potion to move from Injured to Exhausted and then a Cider to move the same Villager from Exhausted to Ready all in one bookkeeping phase. Same goes for beds. Got an injured villager? Give him a potion and now he’s Exhausted, but if you have an available bed, he can also rest and then move right into Ready all in this round. If you still can’t get all your villagers back to Ready for next round, you choose which ones get to which state (Exhausted or Ready).
4. Collect Income. Gain a number of Coins equal to your income. This starts at 4 Coins/round, but will be increased based on how many goods you have on your Advancement Track.
5. Refresh Goods on Buildings. As mentioned above, some building will produce Goods on an ongoing basis. If you have such a building, and you Harvested all the Goods it contained (i.e., it’s now empty), you now put one of the specified Good back onto it (so it can be Harvested next round.
6. Pass the First Player Card to the Left. Whoever was the first player this round, now passes the First Player Card to the Left and that player goes first in the next round.

If you reach bookkeeping and are unable to advance the round marker, do not perform any of the rest of the bookkeeping actions. Instead go straight to Village (victory) point calculation and determine the winner.

There’s a lot going on this game, and various paths to victory. You’ll need to balance the availability of your Villagers, with your ability to rest the sufficiently to be able to use them on the next round. You’ll need to look at what buildings are available to be built and what bonuses they grant you. Some are good for harvesting Goods, while others allow you to rest more villagers, others grant you bonuses to use while Exploring, and still others grant you Village points outright (or based on how many villagers/resources/etc… you have at game’s end).

I like Above & Below, but don’t play it very often. It takes a little bit to set up (not as much as others, say Firefly or Twilight Imperium, but more than say The Lost Expedition). My biggest gripe with it is that seven rounds seems just a wee too short. I like having a set number of rounds, it limits the game from going on endlessly, but seven often seems abrupt. It seems that you get your engine going right around round 5 or 6, and then only get to exploit it for a round or two at most.

That being said, it can lead to some surprise endings as one player suddenly jumps out ahead as the VP leader.

As always, my highest recommendation is that I would buy this game, but I already own it, so you decide how I feel about it.

I think this is the best of Ryan Laukat, in terms of game play and illustration. I love the art and how the game plays.
Ryan did a great job to create an original setting of the universe in this game and it is remarkably full of imaginations.
In this game players will lead their villagers to venture deep inside the tunnel into fascinating world of underground in rich story telling aspect that drives the game in such a compelling way to keep players interested, while building their villages into something more advance and getting points to win the game.

The core element of the game is that players will explore new places underground which they will be facing a certain encounter from the book of encounter based on their die rolls. The outcome is countless, many combinations of encounters can be found that lined up as a one big story for a player in a single game.

I love how the story telling really works in this game, it keeps you engaged within the story, the character and the game. It drives you to make an important decision along the way, which everything has consequences while keeping it simple and easy to resolve.

But aside from the story telling, you can still enjoy Euro aspects of the game by building something up and by doing that getting the maximum points you can. I enjoy it very much and this will likely stay in my collection forever.

The good thing is if Ryan want to make expansion, he can easily make a new book of encounter with different plots and stories to be included to make new and fresh things.

If you can get the KS edition, the wooden resource tokens are way much better than the tiles.