Above and Below is an action selection, town-building game that I like a lot more than I should. It’s the rare combination of a true strategy game that is noticeably influenced by luck of the draw, and has few ways to control your outcomes. However, I think it’s fantastic.
And spoiler: I like the follow-up, Above and Below: Haunted even more.
The biggest selling point to either game is a storybook that you have access to, which offers a variety of underground encounters in the fantasy world of Arzium that can provide resources, unique actions or villagers, and opens up regions where you can then build additional village buildings.
It is the building of your village, and your associated reputation which ultimately determine the winner, with a substantial amount of points offered for the amount of various goodies you collect along the way.
Gameplay
Each round of the game, players will, in turn order, utilize some number of workers to accomplish actions around your town. They might hire new workers, build new structures, or work at structures you’ve already built to harvest crops or resources. Or they can go on adventures in groups of two or more.
And it’s on these adventures that Above and Below: Haunted really goes from being a fairly run-of-the-mill game to being a gaming experience like few others.
There are around 200 different stories to read through, each of which is wholly unique, and offers players choices of actions. You might find a ghost, or a monster, or a group of fish in a lake, or even a lost traveller. And you usually get a choice of how to approach them. Do you rob the traveller, or guide him back to your village? If your team is successful, they’re rewarded with resources, cards or new villagers, while if they fail, there is also some kind of consequence.
Differences with Haunted
So far, that probably sounds a lot like the original Above and Below. However, Above and Below: Haunted features a few things that are different.
The first is within the stories themselves. You start by choosing if you want “easy” or “difficult” stories. The difficult ones have higher requirements, and sometimes higher rewards, but also give you pearls, which you can use like wild resources.
Each story has tiered rewards. You can strive for higher success values with every choice, which may require exhausting or injuring your workers, but which always provides greater rewards.
I think the writers did a much better job in this iteration of offering details within the writing that tell the players what kinds of rewards they are likely to get. While in the original, you’d come across a nondescript peddler and success involved getting some fairly random combination of items, this time you’re walking up to him with a bit of a description of his stall, or what he has in his wagon that hints towards what you’ll get based on your choices.
The next major difference is the consequences. Good or bad, some situations within that storybook will unlock cards that function like rules changes to the remainder of the game, adding new actions, or defining new abilities shared by all players.
Of course, it being the Haunted edition of the game, there are ghosts. These ghosts will cause you to lose reputation at the end of the round, but offer a new action to villagers with the “feather” icon. They can now be banished to another player’s board, which transfers the negative reputation to them (unless they can get rid of the ghost themselves), and offers you a bonus based on where you choose to place them.
The ghosts have some element of “take that” to them, but generally speaking, you want to target locations based on their reward to you rather than punishing another player, which does minimize some of the conflict.
Finally, I think that Haunted made the decision to make the world of Arzium a bit more of a generous place. The fact that both of the worst turn actions have been combined from the first game to provide something more interesting is a boon. Stories have better, more varied, and more predictable rewards. You can earn boat tokens, which let you gain extra coins each round or manipulate die rolls. You get points more easily, including by being the person who is first to gain a resource. You get special powers when accomplishing a particularly noteworthy story.
Overall, I’d say that most of these changes are very positive.
The one negative I think does exist is that they did little to make the non-storybook parts of the game more compelling. Yes, the one action is slightly better, and the banishing of ghosts is new. But the buildings are largely the same, and remain the most uninspired part of play – they are fairly formulaic, and give small numbers of resources or slight boosts to income, or the number of villagers you can have. They’re not bad, per se, but you’ll feel like you’ve seen them all after only two plays.
There is an updated expansion kit for this game that upgrades the coins, potions and boat tokens, which you can see in the image above, which also adds a few new starting cards that can help to change up the first few turns.
Final Thoughts
If you love Above and Below, this feels like a fairly easy purchase...or is it?
This is a full-priced, stand-alone game, and for someone new to the Arzium universe, there is a lot of game in this box. That said, if you already own the original, this is going to feel a bit like an expansion that takes up substantial shelf space. There are enough changes here to justify this, but the question of value may be harder to answer – do you need both?
If I were coming at this as a new player, Haunted is the version of this game to get. Yes, it does have less content available than the classic Above and Below. But what’s here is just better.
Not everyone will enjoy this game. My experience has been that the original was a very polarizing game – pure strategy lovers didn’t like the random elements, while the thematic gamers loved the world-building and storytelling – but I am in the latter camp, and I think that personally, this is an improvement on an all-time favorite.
It may be a slight luck-fest occasionally. The winning player won’t always be the most strategic player. But once you open the storybook, you’ll find exactly why this is a game that has stayed relevant for as long as it has. It’s because that book is wonderful. And now it has greater rewards and more interesting consequences, which pushes this game into the upper echelon of story-telling board games.
