Find out what lies beneath in Sub Terra – Review

sub terra the map

When I was young, we went spelunking in New Zealand. I don’t remember it that well, but what I do remember is unending darkness and the claustrophobic feeling of wet walls closing in. Sub Terra taps into these feelings and adds a new horror. What if within all that darkness something malevolent waits for you?

Sub Terra is a cooperative tile-laying game where each player takes the role of a cave diving specialist. Starting at the cave entrance, you must draw and place tiles until you find the exit. Along the way, you need to avoid gas leaks, rock falls and floods if you’re hoping to survive.

On your turn, you’ll take two actions that include:

  • Revealing the top tile from the stack and adding next to your current tile.
  • Moving your explorer one tile.
  • Exploring the next tile, by drawing a tile from the stack, placing it, and moving your explorer on it. A risky maneuver but two actions for the price of one!
  • Running with your explorer by moving them three spaces – costs two actions.
  • Healing lets you (or someone else on your tile) regain one health – costs two actions.

Additionally, in Sub Terra, you also have the option to exert yourself. Taking an extra action at the cost of rolling a die, where on a three or lower you take damage.

Despite all the hazards we’ve talked about so far, the worst is the Horror nests. Found throughout the cave system, these nests spawn monsters whose only concern is making this cave your grave. Once per round they’ll pick the closest explorer and move one space towards them. If they ever catch an explorer, then no matter their health, they’re knocked out.

After the Horrors move, you then draw a card from the hazard deck. This might cause cave-ins, parts of the tunnel to flood, or earthquakes. Finding yourself on a tile matching the drawn hazard card means you’re in big trouble. Earthquakes can be equally damaging as they have a chance to affect all cavers.

If you can avoid the Horrors, the hazards, and make it to the exit in time then you’ve survived and won the game! Otherwise, you’re lost in the darkness forever, or at least until the Horrors pick up your scent.

All of the game's tiles stacked in a large pile.
That’s a lot of tiles

I don’t like being hunted

One of my favourite aspects of Sub Terra is its Jaws-like approach to the Horrors. Nowhere in the rule book, box, or any of the tiles do they show what the Horrors look like. Leaving your imagination to fill in the blanks.

This is terrifying as Sub Terra, and its Horrors, put you in the shoes of a teenager running through the woods, with these creatures on your heels. A real sense of dread comes from this unrelenting wooden disc following you from tile to tile. It’s something I’ve never experienced from another board game, and it’s the cornerstone of why Sub Terra is so talked about in the community.

Everything else in the game, be it floods, gas leaks, or the action economy, is there to make these chase sequences more intense. Often forcing you to take risks and actions you otherwise wouldn’t.

In our plays, the game usually started slow. We would spend both actions to reveal first, and then move. We would continue to pace ourselves until a Horror awoke. At that point, all hell breaks loose. Our strategy changed to favour the explore action and we exerted ourselves more than a squirrel running from a starving eagle.

Another example of Sub Terra’s design funnelling in on this chase is the slide and ledge tiles. While slides are great fun at kids’ parties, here they create points of no return. Costing one action to go down, but two actions and a dice roll to get back up. Ledges on the other hand can’t be traversed unless someone places a rope token on the tile.

In any other game, some of these mechanics (like spending your entire turn to climb a cliff) would be boring. But in Sub Terra, the amount of urgency you feel trying to escape amplifies these mechanics. Making it feel like you’re in that horror movie, banging on that locked door about to escape.

Will you make it out? Or is your fate sealed?

To cement this horror movie feeling, when your character is unconscious you must sit out until someone heals you. This gives real-life consequences for being KO’d, and adds to the flavour and fear Sub Terra creates.

Tokens in Sub Terra include: plastic water and rock tokens, meeples for explorers, and fat flat wooden cyclinders for monsters.
The tokens!!

Sub Terra could have used another coat of polish

When you’re being chased by the Horrors, Sub Terra becomes the perfect game. Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen as often as it should because there aren’t enough of them. Especially since those that do chase you are often easily handled by the Bodyguard and Scout roles.

Without the Horrors and the urgency they bring, Sub Terra loses almost everything it has going for it. Like a slasher film without a villain, it becomes a boring movie about teenagers going camping in the woods.

Part of the reason for the drop-off in excitement is that you only get two actions per turn. This works in Arkham Horror 3rd Edition only because you get so much story with each action spent. Sub Terra, on the other hand, is more gameplay-focused like Pandemic. The latter has four actions per turn, and that feels right. With Sub Terra‘s two actions, every turn feels like an incomplete thought.

This feeling of inadequacy, or not doing enough during your turn, only increases when you take a wider lens on the game. In wanting to escape the cave, you always want to be flipping tiles and exploring. Yet going your own way is a surefire method of getting knocked out. So it’s better to travel in pairs. Unfortunately, this means one player gets all the fun of exploring while the other rides their coattails.

On another note, the components while good, could use some work. Some of the tiles are too dark to see the entrances and exits of a tile at a glance. Meanwhile, none of the information cards tells players about the Exerting mechanic. It’s a key part of the game, that’s easy to forget about without a reminder.

Otherwise, Sub Terra hooked me from my first play. The unrelenting horrors had me chewing fingernails all game. Add in the naturally occurring hazards and thematic presentation and it felt like I was in the cave beside my character.

However, the more I played, the better I got at avoiding the horrors. So the whole reason I was hooked on the game disappeared. Without them, the game goes from a fantastic cooperative board game to being just OK. Still, I think it’s worth playing if you can find yourself a copy.

Designer: Tim Pinder

Publisher: Inside the Box Games

See how Sub Terra compares to all of the other board games I’ve reviewed.

Sub Terra Cover 1
Sub Terra
Terror has a new name! This board game filled me with a sense of dread like none other. The claustrophic feel of the cave, the monsters chasing you unrelentlessly, it’s all so exciting. But like a good horror movie, the more you watch it, the less scary it becomes.
Chester the Corgi lying next to the game box for scale.
Chester is afraid of dark caves

4 thoughts on “Find out what lies beneath in Sub Terra – Review

  1. I’ve only ever played it once and I remember thinking, ‘Damn this could have been such a great game if only they would have tweaked it slightly’. I still had fun, but I think that might have been the novelty. Nice balanced review!

    1. Yeah, that was my feeling after a few plays. I think it’s somewhat common with the Kickstarter gold rush that’s happening at the moment. A lot of unestablished designers are getting their chance to put out games that wouldn’t be picked up by traditional publishers. They have some brilliant ideas, but fall short of pulling together a full package. This is a good thing though, and I hope designers in this position learn from their experience, and bring a better game for us greedy consumers next time. 😛

      1. My friend was one of the Kickstarter funders for Cthulhu Wars. He spent an insane amount of money on what is essentially some huge paper weights. The game itself is probably the worst board game I’ve ever played( I’ve tried really hard to find some sort of redeeming gameplay feature in it) It’s made me super weary of Kickstarter board games.

      2. Oof that sucks. I was about to say I swore off all Kickstarters but then I just dumped a load of money on Batman. >.>

        I generally jump on Kickstarters only if it looks like I’ll like the game, and the creator has previous work that I’ve played. Which is quite rare these days.

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