First Impressions of Sub Terra

Crawling through caves is what you love, it’s what you’re meant to do and, by God, that’s what you’re an expert in! But then the grounds drops away, pulling you and your team into a deeper warren of unexplored caves. You aren’t getting out the way you came in, you’ll have to search for an exit. But out there in the dark you can hear movement – and it isn’t any of your friends.

Sub Terra takes you into the dark corners of the Earth, exemplified by films like Descent or The Cave. It’s horror fodder at its best, and while a board game can’t quite capture that feeling of claustrophobia being trapped in a cave should create, it’s certainly more than tense enough!

Your objective is purely to escape with as many living team mates as possible. To do that you’ll “simply” have to find the exit tile. But the cave is full of unstable regions set to collapse, water tiles that will flood at a moments notice, pockets of noxious gas and foul smelling (I presume…), very hungry creatures. Each round, something bad will come out of the event deck and typically one type of tile will trigger. You don’t want to be on those tiles when it does! Trust me!

Yet you need to keep pressing forward, making this a constant game of push your luck. You have two actions, and generally you can spend them either peeking ahead at new tiles and moving, or leaping boldly into the tile blind (that’s called exploring, I’ll have you know). Obviously that’s riskier, but move too cautiously and you’ll inevitably run out of time, clawing for the exit as your torches… go… out…

It’s relentless and unforgiving. You’ll take damage, it’s inevitable. You can heal yourself, but it costs both your actions that turn. You can exert yourself to do more, but that risks hurting yourself. Then there are the creatures. When one of their cards drops out of the deck, one of them drops into their lair, awake and looking for a snack. They will chase down the closest character and should they catch them that’s it, gone! If you weren’t exploring hard before, you will be now!

Player elimination is a part of Sub Terra, but it doesn’t have to be permanent. Other players can come to your aid and heal you. But there’s a big stack of tiles to get through. You are certainly encouraged to split up to explore as much of the cave network as possible, which leads to another problem for you to overcome: there’s only one exit. If you’re on the other side of the map when it’s found, you’re pretty much screwed! How to avoid falling into this trap is part of the challenge of this game, and when I played, we totally failed it!

But rather than feeling like a failure this had quite a brilliant effect. All I cared about was that my side of the map had the exit, so at least I might escape! The game made me care about my character. It gave me a story I’m not going to forget any time soon. Sub Terra has a strong degree of randomness and it’s not full of clever Euro game mechanisms. But it gives you the tools to face that randomness and, most importantly, tells a story. Give this one a look if you’re up for giving yourself over to the theme!

 

Sub Terra is up on Kickstarter right now, so go check it out if you like the look of it!