Inside The Box | Sub Terra II: Inferno's Edge | Board Game | Ages 14+ | 1-6 Players | 60 Minutes Playing Time

Posted the day after ordering but took a week to arrive. This was still within the given timescales when ordered. Arrived safely and intact and as described.

My wife and I acquire board games over the year to be played during my extended Christmas break. Having thoroughly baked our brains with Lord of the Rings: The Card Game – Revised Core Set we decided on a little light relief before tackling the behemoth that is Vantage. Sub Terra II fits the bill. The box contains the usual tokens to punch-out, a refreshingly lightweight rulebook, ten character/Explorer cards, some plasticky meeples (the purple meanie Guardians are irritatingly difficult to stand upright), a bunch of tiles and a volcano round-counter tracking path. During the first playthrough the rulebook makes more sense, but it was a bit confusing on the initial read-through. A quick You-Tube browse showed few how-to-play English language offerings (the one by the publisher is dreadful) but we found a play-through by ‘Meeple Overboard’ which helped. The aim of the game is to explore a temple, inconveniently inside a mostly dormant volcano, find some keys, take them to the sanctum, acquire an artefact then leg it to the exit before the volcano becomes active, all the while avoiding the Guardians. Sounds simple? No, not really. With two players, each player choses two Explorers. Each Explorer has a couple of special abilities, a health total and a meeple matching the card banner colour. The thirty regular temple tiles are randomly jumbled in a cloth bag. The lovely embroidered velvet bag supplied with the game is far too small so we raided the Carcassonne box for a bigger one. The turn structure is simple. After the starting tiles are laid, the Explorer meeples are placed at the entrance. Working clockwise, each Explorer has two actions to use such as move, reveal & place a tile, heal an Explorer, attack a Guardian, dig-out a collapse etc. Many of the tiles have special characteristics; ruins that have collapsed, traps, lava surges & Guardian spawning sites and there are three Key tiles. The tiles have two faces (normal temple and lava flow) and are initially placed temple side up. After an Explorer has completed their two actions, a nasty Hazard die is rolled; this can trigger traps or lava surges, activate Guardians, spawn new ones etc. At the end of each turn the gameplay then proceeds with the next Explorer in a clockwise direction. At the end of the round the volcano tracker advances and the Guardians have their two actions; they can, for example, move closer to or attack an Explorer, whereupon the Explorer loses one health. An Explorer with no health is considered ‘downed’ and can only perform a single crawl move action to a connected tile. Explorers are not killed by ‘normal’ damage. If all Explorers are downed then it’s game over. Annoyingly, Guardians are not harmed by traps & lava. Tiles have to be laid adjacent and connected to the current Explorer’s tile to form a network of connected paths through the temple. When all the tiles have been placed, the Sanctum is revealed at the furthest possible linear point from the entrance. The explorers have to visit the Key tiles to obtain the keys then take them to the Sanctum to acquire the Artefact. Everyone then legs it for the entrance, the primary aim being for the Explorer with the Artefact to reach the entrance, but getting everyone out is the best outcome. If the volcano tracker reaches zero and the Artefact is still in the Sanctum, game over, but if the Artefact is in an Explorer’s possession, the volcano becomes active and now everything gets a lot worse. The Sanctum tile is flipped to the lava flow side. Every time the lava surge is rolled on the hazard dice (yep, two dice now) two connected tiles, starting from the Sanctum, are flipped to the lava flow side. The lava thereby rapidly cascades through the temple destroying everything in its path. To get the hang of the mechanics we played the first game without the Guardians, just to make it a bit(lot) easier. We got everyone out before the volcano erupted, but only just and it took lots of co-operation, some careful planning & luck to keep Explorers healthy and to create a clear route from the likely location of the Sanctum back to the entrance. Our second game, with the Guardians, looked like it was going to be far too easy. However, we used precious time keeping on top of the Guardians so the volcano erupted and caught us while we were dashing towards the entrance. Man! That lava moves fast. To summarise, this is a fun game. Highly co-operative & fast paced with simple rules, not at all easy to win and highly replay-able thanks to the randomness of tile reveals & dice and the permutations of available Explorers. The fixed turn order is annoying so, currently, we have house-ruled it so that each player plays their two Explorers in whichever order appears best for the current round. Think of the game as a bit like a combination of Carcassonne and Forbidden Island on steroids. For such a seemingly simple game, there is a surprising amount of strategic planning but Spirit Island is not. The game is let down slightly by the initially confusing & slightly omission prone rulebook, irritating purple meanie meeples and the tile bag but don’t let that put you off. It’s fun! EDIT: Having got enjoyably lost in Vantage for weeks we have returned to Sub Terra II for a change of scenery. We hadn’t noticed last time that the tile count is wrong. We have the requisite number but the mix of tile types does match the rulebook – we are missing all thee spike traps, one normal ‘T’ tile and have two extra lava traps and two extra ruin ‘X’ tiles. Oops – bit of a printing problem. I have had to accordingly downgrade my review score and the component quality value. The game is, however, still perfectly playable. Rulebook: 7/10 Complexity: 4/10 Component quality: 4/10 Replay-ability: 9/10 Gameplay pace: 10/10