First Look at On The Underground

I write this crammed into the corner of a sweltering Central line carriage after a long day at work, a few days after playing On The Underground at the UK Games Expo. Surely no sane London commuter can take any joy at the thought of a game about the Tube, a scene of barely endured torture day in, day out? Would I not recoil in terror at those all too familiar station names, those cramped lines, jostling up against the other players as we squeeze points out of the board like the air from my lungs… At least the game board doesn’t smell of armpits.*

*prototype components only

Imagine Ticket To Ride, but with the blocking dialled up to 11. You are still laying bits of track on a network of predefined routes, and the rules are, in some ways, even simpler. There is no coloured set collection with hands aching from holding so many cards. Here, each turn you just have 4 actions in which to lay track. Just put it on the board. There’s a wrinkle, in that each track must go at one of the ends of its line, forcing you to plan out carefully as your line snakes out across the board. But you will also have multiple lines you can found. That pivot from one line to two to maybe even three is an important part of the game as you can’t defend multiple fronts in this tunnel war.

There are two motivators for what you’re doing. There are points on the board for connecting to various features, train station hubs, terminals, parks etc. But the real meat is in providing for… the passenger.

This determined tourist has a perverse fetish for Underground stations and will be visiting every station on the board over the course of the game. You are there to ease their journey! You’ll earn a point every time they use one of your lines. The movement rules for the tourist are not terribly complicated: they will take the shortest route from A to B, with each line and each space walked counting as 1 unit of distance, but parsing the shortest route each round might take some getting used to and you might make a mistake or two. This will be the biggest hurdle for new players as your success in the game depends on being able to correctly parse that movement and design your lines to exploit it.

This is what drives the substantial interaction of On the Underground. You are all desperately competing for the tourist’s attention, trying to be the line that makes their life that little bit easier. So that you’re the line that gets the points. The tourist moves every turn, letting you earn points on your opponents turns, and encouraging them to do what they can to snaffle those points from underneath you – as entertaining and as in your face as passive aggressive mechanics can allow. It’s despicably good.

It puts you in wonderful positions gameplay wise too: the short term reward of getting the tourist this turn vs the longer term aim of building a reliably used network vs the specific building goals on the board itself vs the race to avoid being blocked out of entire regions of the board as key routes are locked down. It does everything Ticket to Ride does with its route building, on a tighter map and with more challenging goals to optimise for.

There are a couple of potential causes for concern I have. One, the tourist will visit every station by game end. This adds something of a memory element to proceedings that I don’t like the sound of, and it could take a while to fully play through (we ended the demo at about the halfway point). The need to resolve, discard, replace and mark on the board the tourist’s next destinations every turn is also kind of fiddly, but there is not much that can be done about that.

I really enjoyed my demo of On the Underground. Apparently the God-like perspective and an engaging puzzle were enough for my emotional baggage to fall away. Or maybe it’s the thought of there just being one person down here? Even in prototype form it is a lovely production, and fans of its original 2006 release will be excited to hear of the all new Berlin map on the reverse of the board. As for me, writing this article has helped the journey fly by! So now I can step out into the fresh air – *cough!* *hack* *cough* oh, yeah, still London.

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This first look at On The Underground is based on a demo at the UKGE 2019. On the Underground is on Kickstarter until the 14th July.