Up and Beyond

The Core Gameplay Loop: Managing the Dual-Economy

To understand the meta of this tabletop experience, you have to look at how the action economy flows. You start with a meager band of villagers. Every round, you must assign these workers to perform specific tasks. Once they act, they become exhausted and must be rested before they can be used again. This creates a tight worker placement puzzle where timing is everything.

What is above and below Red Raven games?

For those completely new to the title, it is a mashup of town-building and storytelling where you and up to three friends compete to build the best village above and below ground. In the game, you send your villagers to perform jobs like exploring the cave, harvesting resources, and constructing houses. It stands out in the tabletop community because it effectively bridges the gap between heavy strategy fans and casual narrative lovers. The player who leverages their villagers' unique skills to curate the most well-developed, high-scoring village by the end of the game wins.

How to Play: Surface Engine vs. Cavern Exploration

The core gameplay is driven by action-selection, worker placement (sliding villagers on your player board), and narrative-driven dice rolling.

Core Controls and Mechanics

Whether you are playing the physical board game or navigating the Above and Below board game Arena interface online, the mechanics remain the same:

• Building: Assign a villager with the build icon to construct houses. Surface houses provide passive bonuses, income, or beds for resting, while outpost cards require you to first explore the caverns.
• Harvesting: Claim resources like fruit, fish, mushrooms, and rare ores. Slotting these into your advancement track is vital for increasing your baseline income and scoring endgame victory points.
• Exploring: The meat of the game. Send a team of villagers underground. You draw an exploration card, roll a die, and another player reads a corresponding passage from the massive paragraph book. You are presented with narrative choices, each requiring a certain number of "successes" (lanterns) rolled on the dice to pass.
• Recruiting: Spend coins at the surface to hire new, specialized villagers to expand your available action pool.

Gameplay Objectives and Win Conditions

Your ultimate goal is simple: amass the most victory points. Points are tallied from the buildings you've constructed, the position of your resources on the advancement track, your reputation score (gained or lost through narrative choices), and specific end-game bonuses on advanced buildings. Balancing the slow-burn income of surface harvesting with the explosive, unpredictable rewards of the underground is the key to victory.

Advanced Strategy & Skill Mastery

While casual players are easily drawn in by the storytelling, there is a serious skill ceiling here. A massive content gap in the community centers around the mechanical differences between the surface buildings and the narrative-heavy underground exploration. Specifically, how you manage the "sacrifice" or "exertion" mechanic determines whether you win or lose.

When you explore the caverns, your dice rolls determine your successes. If you fall short of the required lanterns to pass an encounter, you aren't immediately forced to fail. You can push your villagers past their limits—injuring them—to gain automatic successes. Knowing when to safely exhaust a villager versus when to push them into the medical ward is the most crucial decision in the game. If you play too conservatively, you will fail encounters and waste your turn. If you push too hard, you'll spend subsequent rounds desperately trying to heal your workforce instead of building your engine.

The optimal meta involves rushing high-capacity beds early. If you can heal 3-4 villagers per round, you can afford to aggressively tank narrative encounters in the caverns, reaping massive rewards without crippling your mid-game economy.

Above and Below Pro Tips

• Prioritize Beds Immediately: Your starting villagers can only do so much. The moment you expand your roster, you need beds to refresh them. A large workforce without beds is just dead weight.
• Mitigate RNG with Exertion: Don't rely purely on dice rolling. Always bring at least one "cannon fodder" villager on an expedition whom you fully intend to exert for a guaranteed success.
• Stack the Advancement Track: Pushing different types of resources up your advancement track increases your passive income. An early income engine allows you to buy the most powerful villagers and buildings before your opponents.
• Watch Your Reputation: It is incredibly easy to tank your reputation for a quick payout in the cavern encounters. However, negative reputation severely penalizes your endgame score. Don't be too greedy.
• Claim the Cider Early: Potions and cider allow you to heal and refresh villagers outside of the normal bed mechanics. Snagging buildings that generate these can drastically boost your action economy.

Key Game Features & Villager Roles

To optimize your strategy, you need to understand the distribution of skills among the villagers. The high replayability stems heavily from random book encounters, but managing your roster's specific skills is entirely in your control.

One of the noted cons is that the extensive use of text makes the game language-dependent, meaning every player needs to comfortably read the narrative passages to fully enjoy the mechanics.

Playing Online: Board Game Arena & Digital Compatibility

If you cannot get a physical group together, you can play Above and Below online via Board Game Arena (BGA). The browser game implementation is officially supported and handles all the housekeeping perfectly. BGA takes care of the dice rolling, the paragraph book lookups, and the resource math automatically. Since it requires no download and runs in a standard Chrome browser, it operates flawlessly as an "unblocked" experience for remote play, provided the host site isn't restricted on your network.

Is the Game Safe for Kids?

The official requirements list the game for ages 13+. While the artwork is incredibly charming and features a whimsical, high-quality presentation, the complexity rating sits at a respectable 2.52/5. This means younger children might struggle with the multi-step resource management and economic strategy. The narrative violence is minimal—mostly text-based descriptions of fleeing from cave creatures or negotiating with strange underground denizens—but the heavy reading requirements and strategic depth make it best suited for teenagers and adults.

The Kickstarter Legacy and Editions

Red Raven Games originally funded this project through a massively successful Kickstarter campaign. Dedicated fans looking for the complete experience should be aware of the Above and Below: Expanded Edition Exclusives. The retail version misses out on some of the original Kickstarter content, most notably the highly sought-after Wooden Goods tokens which replace the standard cardboard punch-outs, adding a premium tactile feel to the harvesting mechanics.

Ultimately, this title remains a staple on the shelf for anyone looking for a rich, thematic adventure layered over a satisfying economic puzzle. Whether you are chaining combos on the surface or risking it all in the dark depths, the replayability ensures no two villages will ever look—or read—the same.

Frequently Asked Questions