Board Game: Sub-Terra

So we're going down into a cave, eh? Making a descent, you might say? Eh? Eh?

The Game: Sub-Terra
The Publisher: Inside the Box Games
Time: An hour or so
Players: Me, Michelle, Megan, Travis

Game Play: A buddy of mine recommended this game to me, and it's hella hard to find - it's out of print and the only copy we found was in the UK (so shipping was a bear, but fortunately this was before shipping from overseas really got ridiculous). Anyway, it's quite obviously inspired by The Descent - you're a group of cavers who've gotten lost doing some spelunking, and now you need to find the exit before you fucking die. 

Travis choosing a doomed caver

The game itself plays a little like Betrayal at House on the Hill. The cave is made of tiles, which include some harmless hallways, some gas pockets, some places that cave in, some water tiles, and some horrors. Each round, every player gets to take a couple of actions. Single actions include moving, revealing a tile, or exploring (in which you reveal an immediately move onto a tile, which is fast but risky). There are various hazards that come up, and circumventing them is largely something that eats both actions. 

The punch-out phase of board gaming

Once everyone takes their actions, you move any horrors on the board and flip a hazard card, which "activates" various things in the cave. A horror card spawns horrors, flood cards flood water spaces, and so forth. Dealing with those hazards is largely a time sink as much as anything - swimming through a flooded tile eats both actions, f'rex. If you're on a tile when something bad happens, you generally take damage, but if you run out of health you're unconscious until someone can come heal you. 

Beginning of the expedition

Every caver has a role and a special ability, too. I played the Diver, who doesn't take damage if he's on a water tile when it floods and can move right through them, but can also submerge in a water tile and resurface in any other one, which is pretty dope. 

The exit tile is one of the last six in the stack, but you only have X rounds (depending on the number of players and your difficulty of play) until you are Out Of Time. When you hit that card, each player has to roll a d6 every round or get devoured by horrors. 

Our journey nearing its conclusion

Opinions: I quite like this game! Dungeon-building games like this are very much my jam anyway, and the game is a good blend of random chaos, strategy, and atmosphere. The artwork is nicely simple and the rules are easy to follow, and all of the weird contingencies we ran into were addressed in the book. 

Megan and I survived, but Travis and Michelle...well, that's them in the bone pit

Keep? Sure