Designed by Ryan Laukat
Laukat’s games inspire you want to live in the world he has created. His games are immersive and expansive. Above and Below is the gateway to those lands that you just want to travel through. First and foremost it’s the art that draws you in. The character portraits, maps, resource tokens and cards all just flow . . part color pallet and part creative detail. Above and Below just gives you a taste of Ryan’s creativity. Most of this is made possible because Ryan does his own art, and it just inspires fun gameplay. Right out the gate, he has us hooked.
Once you start playing, the gameplay and mechanics are amazingly seamless. The thing about Above and Below is that the mechanics and game flow are fairly flawless. Basically, you are managing a group of colonists as they develop and improve their community. Through assigning your colonists to tasks that they specialize in, they can construct buildings using resources collected by harvesting, recruit (Re: above) and explore the Glogo Caverns (Re: below) for supplies while making ethical and moral decisions based on a choose your own adventure style book of moral conundrums. These decisions have an impact on gameplay as each decision may or may not increase or decrease your colonies reputation.
Reading the rulebook is fun. The writing is clear and well thought out, which leaves little room for questions ambigious gameplay mechanics. Again, the art that accompanies the game, is reflected in the graphics design and layout of the rulebook. You just wish Ryan would include more anecdotes, stories and histories that reflect the richness of the world he has created.
As the first in this immersive series of games Above and Below is the perfect gateway to a richly creative world where design compliments gameplay. It’s fun and beautiful and just complex enough to play with family and friends.
If Above and Below is Ryan Laukat’s gateway into his amazing world then Islebound is the seamless extension of traveling across the seas of this same world. The narrative just continues and plays out so well. Think, some of your colonists decided to build a ship and travel, do some trading and maybe hire some pirates to kick some butt.
Of course the art is gorgeous and only accentuates gameplay.
Mechanics are familiar with a few new tweaks for sailing. Though, once you’ve played any of Ryan’s games you have an intuitive sense of how gameplay unfolds. Instead of managing a small town, in Islebound you are managing a ship of diversely skilled skilled adventurers.
Islebound is. a great extension to Above and Below as it offers a little more complexity and depth that work together to immerse you in this outstanding and imaginative world.
The Ancient World feels like the history of empires, now long gone, that Above and Below Islebound and City of Iron are built on. The world Ryan Laukat created needed a history, here it is. Once mighty nations now fallen to ruin, nothing left but city ruins and the bones of the titans across a landscape. But not quite yet, In Ancient World we get to experience that history, going back, building and expanding an empire while fighting off the relentless Titans hellbent on the destruction of civilization.
Right away, and I know it seems redundant, Ryan’s art is exceptional. The color pallet is less vibrant that Above and Below and Isle Bound, though no less gorgeous. The iconography is well designed and leads the player through an intuitive turn of decision making. The main game tableaux, aside from just being inspiringly gorgeous, (where players alternate interacting on) is very well laid out, uncluttered and spread out. As you develop your empire a player may choose to add different facilities to their player tableaux which are (as you might expect) really fun to just day dream about. Equally fun to look at are the titan cards. With three levels of titans to contend with players develop their military prowess in order to attack and defeat the titans as they approach civilization. The artwork that depicts the titans looks awesome and ominous and accentuate the immersive experience of the game.
Mechanically there are a couple of interesting innovations that Ryan introduces into the game. The first is the worker placement sequence. Each player start with three citizens that are labeled with a one, two or three, respectively. When placing your citizen on the central tableau, the one through three matters because the next player to place a worker, in the same place, must place a worker with a higher number. It’s not ground-breakingly amazing, but does serve as an elegant way to put some tension into a worker placement driven game. The mechanics makes sure that players are not just in each others way, but provides a bit of strategy and tension, just what most worker placement games lack. The other innovation is the military ‘retirement’ process. As your empire develops and you want a more effective fighting force to attack the larger and more threatening titans with, you have to contend with the limitation of only being allowed two military mercenary units. The mechanic solves it’s own problem by allowing players to retire a unit that has become too expensive to maintain. These mercenaries only fight when they are paid and each time they fight they want double the pay they received from the previous fight. When a mercenary army is too expensive to pay players may retire them. They become a cadre of elite trainers and commanders and the card is flipped over and placed just above unit they are replacing. On the reverse side of each military card are random icons that add to the replacing units capabilities. The new unit is a little more elite and the cost of paying them is reset. I like this mechanic, it adds another layer of decisions that players can meditate over. Again, nothing ground-breaking, but enough to make the game fun.
Although The Ancient World is a departure from Above and Below and Islebound it fits artistically, mechanically while supporting the narrative that Ryan Laukat has created.
City of Iron is set in Ryan Laukat’s fantastic world of Above and Below, Islebound and The Ancient World. And, though it might seem repetitive to keep tapping into the same setting, artistically and mechanically, Laukat manages to create a captivatingly fun game.
City of Iron is an evolution from Above and Below and Islebound in the sense players are managing and aggressively pursuing their own agenda in direct conflict with each other. Its mechanics and game sequence is more complex, though, if you are familiar with Ryan’s game design, the complexity is not overwhelming. City of Iron is a welcome deepening of more complex gameplay. The game revolves around players competing with one another to expand their capitol cities power. There are multiple paths to winning; political, military and economic. Each of these paths diverge and converge with other players agendas. Loukat’s design prevent players from playing a mildly annoying Euro-style game of occasionally inconveniencing each other through first paler worker placement. The game and includes mechanics where players are intentionally and strategically confronting one another.
City of Iron draws your attention immediately to the central tableaux. The artwork is (as we have come to expect) gorgeous and compelling. Sweeping landscapes that read like an atlas of the different lands in this world. The iconography, once you’ve played a few rounds, is intuitive and enhances tracking and record keeping. The various cards and tokens that revolve around the central tableaux visually enhance the game.
Mechanically players will compete for resources to create an economy that fuels city expansion. Expansion through political and / or military is left up to players. As city states are co-opted into the expanding empire players have access to an increased range of choices. Though in order to expand players are challenged to ‘re-focus’ their own capitol tableaux by replacing outdated technology and resources with newer and more efficient options.
Uwe Rosenberg’s Caverna is a masterpiece of Euro-style gaming. It should be, Uwe singlehandedly invented the genre in 2007 with Agricola. Then reinvigorated the genre he helped create with Caverna in 2013. Caverna is the apex of Uwe’s earlier masterpieces: Agricola, Le Havre and Ora et Labora. Though, because Caverna is only somewhat re-skinned from previous Uwe worker placement games, its not quite an unique take on Euro-style gaming. It’s a pattern with Uwe, once you’ve played his games, you are pretty familiar with his next game release before you even start. He never seems to cut ties with previous game mechanics and themes, though his evolutions in game design are usually an improvement. That being said, if you love Uwe Rosenberg designed games, then you’ll love Caverna.
The thing about Caverna is that it’s no less challenging than any of the other games that Uwe has developed. It’s deceptively nice and fun. Caverna is just as likely to cause you to break out into a cold sweat when trying to decide how to feed your family of Cave Dwarves. Do you plant crops for the upcoming harvest (Agricola), annex land to expand your properties (Ora et Labora), or dig out that new cave for a cuddle room to keep your sheep safe (Le Havre)? Caverna is forgiving in the sense that there are always options. So many options that another player passive aggressively getting in your way is annoying, but not as impactful as it might be in Agricola. The tension in the game is created because Caverna demands that you are efficient and focused on your plan for improving and developing your colony the way you want. And there are plenty of choices to do it with. There’s a lot of work for your family of dwarves to do, but not as much time as you quite need so that you can be unfocused about it. The amount of options are balanced by the need to get so much done.
The gameplay in Caverna is solid, and as you might expect, feels play tested to perfection. The rulebook is unambiguously specific and clear; including a bit of a tutorial that helps new players work through their first few games. The game mechanics are solid, but not terribly innovative. Mostly, mechanics are a series of refined and developed ‘worker placement and upgrade resource’ choices that are familiar in all of Uwe’s previous games. One innovation new to Uwe’s game design is the ability to send members of your clan on quests. Abstractedly moving gameplay off of players tableaux which serves mechanically as another way to obtain resources and improving your colony. Each strategy in the game is matched by an improvement in your colony that can help players improve their point total at the end of last round. So, developing your dwarven family into a clan of adventuring heroes can pay off, if you put into your colony a series of improvements that work together centered on that strategy. For example, adding an armory room to your cave system gives extra points for having adventuring dwarves. Just don’t forget that in Caverna being too specialized doesn’t pay off, as you are penalized for not developing the entire colony. Great, your clan of Dwarves are hearty adventurers . . what about those empty farm fields barren and without livestock? What are you going to feed your children with . . rocks? Heck yeah, there’s a room for feeding members of your clan rocks! Shut-up and eat your coal.
One design challenge in most euro-style games is that the end game can often be quite unsatisfying. Euro-style games are amazing at getting you to invest in gameplay. Developing your colony from scratch is an exciting challenge. However, as players really start to see their choices pay off, the game ends. Giving enough turns for players to develop their tableaux that they can now feed their workers while having a wider range of options when the game ends. Ending the game that way is quite unsatisfying. More often than not leading players into a kind of orgy like non-thematic point grabbing. (Think: Kirby in Scythe). Caverna is not immune to this design flaw. Just got your colony to sustain itself? Nice job . . . game over. One solution might be a campaign mode or having players place a series of colonies on a kind of world map and have a level of gameplay that involves colonial management would help make the game more exciting?
All in all, Caverna is a really fun game to play and absolutely it should be in your game collection. I just wouldn’t go out of my way to include any previous Uwe Rosenberg games in a collection. You don’t really need too, they are already in Caverna.
