The year is the slightly distant past. The location is a forbidden ancient volcano. The dramatis personae, a crew of proto-Indiana Jones type characters. Their purpose? To plunder retrieve a priceless artifact for a shady benevolent aristocrat. What horrors adventures shall await?
As the “II” my have given away, this is the sequel to the original Sub Terra. It is a standalone version, not an expansion. Briefly, Sub Terra is a tile laying, cooperative, horror/survival game. You and up to five fellow spelunkers need to escape an underground cave before you fall unconscious or are hunted by the horrors in the deep dark. Essentially, it is the plot of the movie The Descent.
Sub Terra II is also a tile laying, cooperative, horror/survival game. However, this time you play as a band of adventurers in Victorian-ish England who have been hired by an aristocrat to collect an ancient artifact from a volcanic temple. It plays one to six players and should take around 60 minutes. Though it is important to note that this game isn’t out yet. The Kickstarter went live in October 2019, has since wrapped up, and they are now taking preorders. This preview is based on a demo copy available at GenCon in 2019, so changes may have occurred during the campaign.
Your goal in this game is to locate the legendary artifact, unlock it with three keys from different parts of the temple, and then carry it back to the entrance during your great escape. Each player takes two actions on their turn, with the option of a third action with consequences. These actions include moving between tiles, exploring new tiles, and using certain tile actions. Players can also be resurrected from unconsciousness by another player. At the end of each player’s turn, a hazard die is rolled – activating guardians, cave-ins, or flooding, just to name a few things. The game continues until all players are either unconscious or have reached the cave entrance.
Due to the new theme, rather than having a chance to fall unconscious when the tile deck runs out, the volcano instead erupts and starts filling the board with lava (which will incapacitate a player). Also, instead of horrors, the players will face off against guardian constructs that the players can choose to fight, though you can no longer hide from them. And finally, instead of finding the goal tile in the last five tiles, the final tile will be place in the row furthest from the entrance once all of the other tiles have been played.
Other notable changes were made to exertion consequences, hazard generation, and how unconsciousness is handled. As in the original game, players may conduct a third action by exerting themselves on their turn; however, now it always causes them to lose one health. To offset this, most characters have more health. For hazards, instead of drawing a hazard card at the end of the round, each player will roll a hazard die at the end of their turn. Previously, when a player fell unconscious, they were useless. Now, they are able to crawl one space on their turn.
You may ask, how is the gameplay different from the original? Since the players know how the goal tile will be placed, they can strategically explore to manipulate where the final tile will spawn. Also, now that players can still move a small amount after falling unconscious, no one feels completely shut out of the game when they do so far from their teammates. This in turn makes it easier to split up the party and explore the map. Since the guardians can be fought off, they provide a minor, though active, deterrent at the beginning of the game but not necessarily a major barrier to progress. The end game change (all of the lava) means that players can plan around where the lava will encroach and make decisions around that.
The majority of these changes are strict improvements on the game. The core tension in Sub Terra is risk management. How far do I explore away from the group? How frequently do I exert myself? Do I stay on this tile and risk its bad effects happening or do I advance blindly and deal with THAT tile’s consequences? This is much the same in the sequel. They have reduced the amount of luck involved since you no longer roll a die to take a third action or roll a die after the timer runs out. However, I am concerned that the new mechanic of rolling for hazards rather than drawing from a preset deck with a few removed cards will change the perception of being able to measure the probability of particular hazards into a fear of the potential cascade of unmitigatable failures.
These updates look to mostly be improvements over the original. Important things to keep an eye out for once production is done will be how many tiles of each hazard exist, methods of play, and if there is some other mitigation function that isn’t included in the demo. All that said, this is still a game that I’m going to keep an eye on. The original is a moderately challenging game, even if luck can swing it extreme in one direction or the other.
About Author
