Above and Below: Haunted Preview - There's Something Down Below

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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, 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.

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.

TimeStamps:
0:00:00 - Introduction
0:00:45 - Overview
0:23:30 - Summary

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[successfulgeek]

Super excited for this campaign, thanks for the overview

[AngelAlita]

I would appreciate if you said in the beginning what this game actually is and what is its relation with the first Above and Below... is it an expansion? Stand alone? Can it be combined with the original game?

[patricksteele]

Nice preview Meg. It's another Ryan Lauket game so I'm in!

[What_Up_Rob]

Some notes about this Above and Below “sequel”:
-Lantern success ranges on the caves are helpful. Still clearly seems better to do the tougher cave b/c the rewards will be better and whatever the pearl is, but if you aren’t ready for those, knowing you will succeed in the easy cave is nice.
-Boats are a bit annoying personally. Games should have risk/reward and failure is okay. Yes, if you roll unluckily it can stink to waste an entire action, but to make each die a 6, that is nuts!! That is an auto success and with the right villagers you could auto get the dangerous caves every time. Seems op.
-Combo harvest and labor + hammer is a super good choice. Harvesting in OG A&B was okay, but needing two workers was definitely weak; and your last odd worker was the labor for one coin action, which didn’t feel great. Now you can do both, plus harvest both items, that seems like the goods track is now a viable option to win with - not sure if it will be as good compared to boats/exporing.
-Curious why potions were dropped as a resource. Seems like it was combined into this new mystic cider thing, but potions were a valuable resource in OG A&B. Requing time/effort to seek another resource brings compelxity to a game, maybe they were seen as redundant, or could be refined down for a cleaner path, or allowing for a new path (pearl?). Idk I liked using potions.
-I could be playing A&B poorly, but in all my games of it I’ve never seen anyone sell or buy an item. 3 is not expensive, but not cheap in A&B. If my dragon fruit is expendable to me, but worth 8 points to you, I’m obviously not selling it to you haha. Thought something could have been updated here to entice selling more/make it more reasonable.
-Adventure cards seem like a huge add in the game to supplement the vast story flare and keep the game fresh every time. Very neat!
-Hiring 2/3 or 4/5. 4/5 villagers in OG A&B were expensive, so kicking in a cider here is nice, but why do it? If you hire a 2/3 you get a ghost, banish it to a bed, and you get a cider and 3 coins, aka your money back, plus money you didn’t spend getting a 4/5, oh and you get the cider you would have gotten with a 4/5 hire… Just like the easy cave vs the dangerous one, why do it when you can do the other one, the bigger option seems to be better every time, so hiring cheaper seems to be better every time. I could see a stack of villagers who only populate 2/3, and another stack of villagers who only populate 4/5, and thus all villagers have stats to represent those areas and now be the reason to spend 4/5 on a villager to get the stats you need for a dangerous adventure, but because they slide you can just wait a round to get the villager cheaper.
-Ghosts… the main gimmick… is it all that bad? You get them, but banish them and get legit stuff – arguably the 2 rep and 2 coins won’t ever be your first or second option; your op will lose rep – boo hoo; and back and forth this goes helping each other get stuff, you aren’t really hurting them. Idk.

[AaronRose-qd]

A BoardGameCo review without Alex? Now this is what the channel needed! Great review.

[What_Up_Rob]

I always make my boats sleep on a bed. It's basic math.