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.
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.
—description from the publisher
- Accessible narrative through concise flavor text and meaningful choices
- Strong integration of set collection and tableau-building with exploration
- Ghost mechanic adds interaction and tension without overwhelming the game
- Serves as a welcoming gateway for players who enjoy Euro games with exploration
- Luck is present but mitigated by decisions, cards, and boat mechanics
- Boats provide reliability in exploration and reward consistency
- Harvesting resources can feel like a less engaging core action
- Luck and variability may frustrate players who prefer low-luck euro designs
- Narrative flavor is relatively light; not a deeply narrative-driven game for some
- Exploration, settlement-building, ghostly haunting, community growth
- Frontier settlement expansion with cave exploration and ghostly elements; players build and expand as they seek a new home
- Flavor-driven micro-stories embedded in exploration and decision making
- Sleeping Gods
- Sleeping Gods: Distant Skies
- Sleeping Gods: Primeval Peril
- Creature Caravan
- Ticket to Ride: Legends of the West
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- boats as exploration aids — boats help guarantee certain rewards and provide stability in exploration outcomes
- dice-based resolution in exploration — exploration outcomes rely on dice rolls, introducing luck balanced by strategic choices
- exploration with cave cards — exploration phase uses cave cards and branching flavor stories; outcomes affect resources and future options
- ghosts, hauntings, and reputation — ghosts appear in buildings; they can be exercised or moved to other buildings for rewards, affecting reputation
- outpost building and cave-card placement — outposts sit on caves and provide beds, capacity, and abilities; cave cards are needed for placement
- set collection — players collect goods to score points and access special actions or bonuses
- tableau building — players develop a personal tableau of cards that grants ongoing abilities and resources
- worker placement — actions are accomplished by spending villagers with symbol-specific traits to build, hire, or explore
- worker placement / action selection using villagers — actions are accomplished by spending villagers with symbol-specific traits to build, hire, or explore
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- This is a set collection tableau builder with exploration components highlighted with little story.
- There is a sense of luck with mitigation related to whether you succeed or not.
- That is really the core game loop.
- This is very much a snowball game.
- My absolute favorite part of the game.
- it's not incredibly storyheavy, but it's just enough to, I think, become a gateway drug to some people that aren't really in that space.
- This gets that Eurogamer, I think, just kind of up to the line. And that is why I frankly I love this game.
- This was the perfect little snippet with interesting decisions that actually had impact on what you could get possibly that made her interested.
- I think we're building some pretty cool stuff over there. I have a lot of videos on it and many more to come.
- I would rather explore over absolutely anything else in this game really at any time.
References (from this video)
- deeply thematic with expanded storytelling
- multi-layered choices add personal agency
- increased player interaction through haunt elements
- can be longer and more complex than lighter games
- still tethered to the base rules of Above and Below; not a standalone experience
- exploration, settlement-building, haunted storytelling
- A mythical world called Arzium, blending surface town-building with subterranean exploration; the Haunted edition expands story paths.
- branching, multi-path narratives with evolving story choices
- Above and Below
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- Dungeon Crawl — Combination of village-building and dungeon-crawl style storytelling with evolving outcomes.
- hybrid game structure — Combination of village-building and dungeon-crawl style storytelling with evolving outcomes.
- Narrative choice — Players affect which narrative branches they encounter as they explore above and below ground.
- story-driven choices — Players affect which narrative branches they encounter as they explore above and below ground.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- This is Spooktacular. Definitely check it out.
- It's so asymmetric and the fact these monsters also have different difficulty.
- Origin Story really is one of the more thematic trick-taking games that I've ever played.
- This is a fantastic deck building game.
- There’s so many captains that you play in it feel so distinct. It really nails the Star Trek theme.
- Pandora's box. Oh, so fun.