This week the King's GameNight group played Sub Terra II on Tabletopia. A relatively quick subterranean exploration game for 3-6 players. I believe this game is an online working prototype for an upcoming Kickstarter project from Inside The Box Board Games. Game Overview Subterra II is a light to medium weight cooperative tile-laying adventure game. Players choose from 10 different unique characters. Each character offers an advantage on how to interact within the game. Though i have not played the first Sub Terra game, I believe it has similar mechanics with more of a horror theme. This article is only covering Sub Terra II as that is my only experience thus far. The basic goal is for explorers to enter a volcanic cavern, find an artifact in the inner sanctum and return it to the surface. Oh yeah... and try not to become downed (defeated) along the way. Players explore the caverns by drawing and placing tiles. Traps and other obstacles are revealed along the way. Also present are the guardians who attempt to keep the explorers from achieving their goal. Players work together, each with their characters' unique abilities, to make their way through the treacherous caverns to the inner sanctum. Each round the guardians move and attach (if present) and a tracker is moved. The tracker is essentially a timer indicating when the volcano will begin to erupt, releasing lava into the chambers. If at least one explorer can get the artifact back the the surface alive, then the group wins. The victory is even sweeter if many or all of the explorers make it out. There is a table used to grade the level of success based on the number of players that survived. Gameplay and Thoughts In our gameplay, the group selected characters and set off to try to beat the game. Our initial attempt fell short, ending with all four explorers being "downed" by the guardians. Since it didn't take long (about an hour), we decided to give it another try. In our second attempt we selected a couple of different characters to tweak our team's dynamics. One of the new characters was the Priest. We felt we needed an explorer with healing power to support the team in this next attempt. The second time we worked well together and moved rapidly through the caverns as we had just played and were already familiar. In this game we successfully got to the inner Sanctum took the artifact and returned it to the surface, thus winning the game with all but one explorer (me) making it out. I was left for dead to suffer a fiery death by lava. The addition of a character with healing power proved to be a real advantage. It may well have been the primary reason we were successful in the second game. This is a fun game for a group who enjoys playing cooperatively. The rules are easy to learn and the tile-laying makes the layout of the caverns different every time. It is not mentally challenging, however it does have many interesting decisions to be made: what orientation to place a tile... whether to heal yourself or another player, etc... The game is definitely challenging to win, at least at first. It can take several attempts before your first win. At least that was the case for me. As you get better, you can change the starting position of the tracker to make for a more difficult game. This is not usually the kind of game I gravitate toward, but was a fun diversion. It is easily played on Tabletopia and can get new players up-and-running very quickly. I would recommend to those looking for something a little lighter and without competitive play. Solid fun. If you would like to check Sub Terra II on Tabletopia, click here. Or use this link for the Board Game Geek page. Thank you for reading about this gaming experience on King's GameNight. To stay in touch with more King's GameNight information follow the Facebook page.
Game on!
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