You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. You’ll be given a choice and a lot will depend on which villagers you brought on the expedition, and who you’re willing to sacrifice to succeed. On it’s own, it’s an interesting take on pushing your luck, but it feels at odds with the main emphasis of the game, the storytelling.

Underneath the die symbols are one or more lantern symbols, which are earned if the player successfully meets the die requirement. 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). I think that this is a necessary path to have available, and extra rounds would completely do away with that strategy. Next, the Harvest action lets you gather some of the resources you’ve accumulated and move them to your player board for increases to your income you gain each round and victory points later. The central “reputation” board primarily depicts the reputation and round tracks, and various game components, including available villagers and buildings that will be placed around it.

I bought this for my husband for Christmas and it has quickly become one of our favorite games to play! But every time you place a good on the track you are committing it to that slot for the entirety of the game. As you begin building your new homes you discover a vast network of caverns below your new village, and so as you and your fellow players begin building “above” those of you who are excited about the riches and wonders can also start exploring the caverns “below” and possibly build there as well.

If a player is producing a regular supply of a particular type of good, the player may wish to wait, as victory points will be earned for each good. When you do, you draw an explored cave card and roll a die, the result of which indicates which paragraph in the encounter book another player must read out to you.A lost love, redemption, acceptance, a family rejoined-- these are the fires that fuel the wanderers' journeys, but can they overcome their own greed and inner demons on the way?

The kicker is that as you gather different types of resources, filling the slots, your income each round increases. Every exploration is accompanied by a reading from the encounter book which will lead to a decision that needs to be made.If all of your dice rolling and exertion reach the target explore number you will be met with success which means not only gaining the rewards, but also claiming an underground cavern as a site for future underground buildings. Players alternate using one or more villagers to take an action, after which those villagers are exhausted and are done for that turn. Once all players have completed all of their actions and passed, new villagers are made available, players rest their villagers and collect income. In addition, cider may also be used to move Exhausted workers to the Ready position, and potions can be used to move Exerted workers to Exhausted.

You have your own personal village board, and you slide the villagers on this board to various areas to indicate that they've been given jobs to do. It doesn’t have the push-your-luck element of Stone Age, where you’re just trying to squeeze as much benefit out of your workers as possible each round, while ultimately staying afloat.Exploration is certainly the most fun part of the game, and Above and Below would be far worse without it.