Red Raven Games Above and Below Card Game

Absolutely charming game, there is plenty to love and enjoy for all audiences and we find the replayability extremely high. Once you’re familiar with setup and rules actual games are fast and exciting with everyone having a chance to build up a point generating engine, or spend their time doing the adventure driven quests to acquire resources and reputation. These two things combined make for an excellent choice of game to pull off your shelf and play with family or friends. Anyone not already familiar with Above and Below will be very surprised with the narrative adventure decisions they can make. The game itself sets 2-4 players as settlers of village in a new land after having been displaced by tragedy in their former home. 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. You will focus primarily on your own player board moving your villagers to one of the five actions you may take on your turn, Explore, Harvest, Build, Train, and lastly Labor. The Explore action will take at least 2 of your villagers and gives you access to the narrative part of the game. You’ll roll a die and be presented with a tiny snippet of an overall themed story from the underground world, and then be given choices of how you’ll proceed. The Explore action has some great opportunities to gather resources to further your score and everyone will enjoy taking a turn reading the scenarios. 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 Build action is where you will select from the available building and outpost cards, pay and then add them to your part of the village, the buildings have various powers and will let you set up an engine that helps you accumulate victory points or increase your ability to explore and grow. Taking the Train action will let you recruit new villagers to your player board so that you can take more turns each round assigning tasks to them. Lastly, taking the Labor action allows you to generate coins for each villager using it, and you’ll need those coins for building. We love this game; it has enough random elements to it that each game is unique and different. The artwork is quite attractive and a finished game looks great on the table, all your buildings lined up beside your player board have a nice flow and look like a completed fantasy world village. A tiny con, if anything the game is often times too short, having only 7 rounds it can sometimes be over before you get a good card engine built and you’ll wish it went on for a few more rounds. With setup being so easy though we can quickly reset and just play again in that case. I love this game at 2 players, and think it also plays wonderful at 3. I haven’t tried it yet at 4 but see no problem with that player count as each turn a player takes is usually pretty quick and in the case of the Explore action everyone gets involved in listening to the story and options. Fabulous game overall, one I think you are sure to enjoy.

Just a great game, don't bother with any of the derivatives as this original has it all. Perhaps an extension, although we're still exploring the basic game stories. Get the extension pack later. The game is, strictly speaking, competitive (rather than collaborative) and you can hinder other players from achieving their goals, but it's not nasty.

Above & Below is a beautiful game focused around story-telling and village-building. There are really 2 parts to it. The "Above" - building your village up, training villagers and assigning tasks to them. And the "Below" - exploring caves, reading paragraph length stories to each other and making choices about what to do. The play is pretty non-competitive and gentle and I have yet to see anything dying or being killed (your villagers are just tired even if they fail their tasks) so this is perfect for playing with children. However there are also plenty of choices to make and lots of nice systems in place to make this enjoyable for adult players as well. Systems are reasonably straightforward and make sense once you get used to them and there are a few videos online to help out if you get confused at all. The only downside for me is that you only discover who has won at the end when you total up the points and the game ends after a certain number of turns, which can make it feel a little bit like you've not completed the story yet. Games do last an hour or so, which is plenty of time though. I bought this to play with my 6 year old son, who doesn't normally deal with losing too well, but he has been absolutely fine with this as the game itself is so enjoyable. Winning or losing feels almost incidental. It's really fun to train people up and then send them out to work (and there are some special villagers which you can only get from "below" which make things a bit more varied) but the undoubted star is the exploration and the "choose your own adventure" stories. I would recommend this game for all ages really. It's well-designed, beautiful to look at and really fun to play.

Es increíble para los que están un poco más experimentados en los juegos de mesa. Tiene varias dinámicas que hacen al juego súper entretenido. Súper, súper recomendable para quienes quieren un juego competitivo con mecánicas diversas, pero aún así fácil de entender. Además el arte del juego es precioso

Compré este juego de mesa porque estaba buscando uno tipo Dungeons and Dragons. Quería que fuera algo extraordinario que permitiera usar la imaginación y me recordara al Señor de los Anillos o Game of Thrones. Este juego es perfecto. Es un poco complejo pero encontramos un video en línea que enseña paso a paso cómo jugar. Con eso sólo nos tomó un par de horas entenderlo. Lo que más nos gusta es explorar y leer del Book of Encounters. Las aventuras son distintas cada vez porque hay más de 200 y siempre puedes tomar una decisión distinta si te topas con el mismo escenario - casi no nos ha pasado. Near and Far puede ser muy entretenido si usas la imaginación e inventas historias que vayan con tus personajes y decisiones. Nos gusta poner RPG música de fondo y hacer voces y sonidos. Si no te interesan este tipo de juegos, puede jugarse como Monopoly y ser muy aburrido. El único problema es que si no hablas inglés avanzado, va a ser imposible disfrutarlo.