Tyrants Of The Underdark Review – A Banger In A Budget Box

Despite hearing so much praise for Tyrants of the Underdark, I wasn’t sold. Board games based on popular franchises are always a warning sign for me. I’ve been burnt too many times by sub-par games cashing in on an existing fan base.

With Tyrants, my cash-grab alarm bells were twice as loud. People are almost cultish in their love for Dungeons & Dragons, so you never know if players and reviewers liked the game or just the property it’s based on.

Well, I’m here to tell you to put your cash-grab alarms away and bring out your banger alerts. Because Tyrants in the Underdark kicks butt, and that’s not at all because of the theme.

How to play

If one can’t defend themselves, then they deserve the cruelty put upon them.

This is the belief of the Drow. A race of elves inhabiting the caves, caverns, and catacombs under Faerun who thrive on cruelty, mistrust, and power.

That’s you.

At least in Tyrants of the Underdark, as you lead one of the great houses vying for control of all Drow within the Underdark.

If you’ve ever played a deck-building game you already know the next steps, as few games capture the feel of classic deck-building greater than Tyrants of the Underdark.

On your turn, you’ll draw five cards and play them for their abilities and resources. Performing as many actions as your cards and resources allow. Once you’re done, move all your cards to the discard pile, and draw another five.

While most cards offer some ability, others give influence, letting you buy cards from a randomly shuffled market. Bought cards go straight to your discard pile, ready to be used once you’ve emptied your deck.

With this deck of cards you’re building, you’re trying to gain control of the Underdark. A series of interconnected areas, known as sites, joined via routes.

Before you take over a site, you must control the route leading to it. Then, if you have the majority of troops at the site, then its victory points are yours. At least, until someone else takes control.

Additionally, you gain Total Control by filling all the troop spaces on a site. Giving you even more victory points and, at some sites, extra resources.

If you’re thinking this is a stock-standard deck-building game combined with a stock-standard area control game, then you’re right. But there are a couple more interesting systems at play.

One I enjoy is that all cards have two victory point values.

You gain the first value on the card if it’s still in your deck at the end of the game. The second value, you only get if you promote the card. This requires you to remove the card from your deck for the rest of the game. Leaving you to weigh up if you want the ability of the card or the points it offers.

Another great little mechanism are Spies.

As mentioned, to play a troop to a site you must control a route leading to it. However, Spies can be planted without this restriction. Further, you can play troops to any site with your Spies. So you can quickly flip a stronghold, or attack an unconnected, with some conniving spy-play.

Once one player has deployed all their troops, or the market deck is empty, you finish the round and move on to scoring. Count all victory points from cards, conquered units, and controlled sites to find the winner.

A masterpiece of board game design

Tyrants of the Underdark smooshes together two distinct genres. Efficiency-based deck-building, and politically-infused area control. Diametrically opposed genres that shouldn’t be seen in the same room together.

But throw your conventional wisdom out the window, it’s not needed in the realm of Dungeons & Dragons. Not only does this combination work with Tyrants, but it showcases what makes both of these genres so great.

As a deck-building game, it doesn’t deviate far from the blueprint created by Dominion. Whereby you’re trying to build an economy to buy cards while ensuring the cards you get will lead to victory points.

You can absolutely get into the weeds with this. Because everything can be extrapolated into a cost, you go in-depth comparing one card with another.

You also have the larger strategy of your deck to consider.

Of course, you can play a heavier deck-building-focused game where you gain and promote cards with healthy amounts of victory points. Or you can focus on different Spy combinations, which are powerful but harder to pull off. Or on troop deployment. Or assassinations and other abilities.

The point is that there are so many ways to build your deck.

With a randomised market, you’re forced into making interesting decisions almost every round. As a pure deck-building game Tyrants of the Underdark is sublime.

Meanwhile, the area-control aspect felt exactly like a game of Small World. You don’t have to worry about building or producing an army. You get given an army and can add them to the map where you see fit.

I enjoy these types of area-control games because there’s no sting of losing troops. You don’t have to spend resources or time producing a replacement army. After a loss, you only have to wait until your next turn to redeploy.

Yet that doesn’t reduce the strategy and political maneuvering required of these games.

Within Tyrants, I tried a couple of approaches. In one game I looked to deploy as many troops as possible, spreading them out like peanut butter on a well-toasted piece of bread. In the next game, I tried focusing on specific sites of power around the map.

Both approaches had merit, but I lost both times due to the political game.

I became an easy target for multiple houses. No matter the area-control game, when that happens, you’re all but guaranteed a loss.

Still, both games were an absolute blast.

Because even though I was beaten bloody on the board, I could focus on the deck-building and still look for ways to get points.

If you’re looking for why people get so excited about Tyrants of the Underdark: this is it. It’s two near-perfect board games combined. If you don’t like one of the games or are getting beaten in it, you can instead play the other one. It’s a masterpiece of board game design.

I didn’t even know what a drow was!

Although deck-building and area control fans will spend most of their time playing grinning from ear to ear, Dungeons & Dragons fans might be left in the cold. Outside of the artwork, which I think is ripped straight from the source books, and the occasional flavour text, the theme is wafer-thin.

At no point, did I feel like a Drow. There was no revelling in cruelty or the misery of others. It felt like a war game. A very clever, very sharp war game, but theme-wise you could replace the Drow with any other warring factions and you wouldn’t have to change any of the game’s mechanics.

However, what’s more damning is that before writing this review, I didn’t even know what a Drow was! Nowhere in the rulebook or cards is a description of the race, or where they live.

The game assumes you already have this knowledge. But if I hadn’t finished playing Baldur’s Gate 3 recently, I would have been completely lost.

So if you’re hoping to roleplay as one of the more evil citizens of the D&D universe. This isn’t that game.

Something else to be wary of is the components. This was a big concern in the first edition and hasn’t fully been fixed in the newer edition.

The cards, with their black borders, are already chipped after a couple of plays, while the tokens, at least my tokens, were printed off-centre and felt cheap. Now, I’m not asking for every game to match Fireball Island or Mechs vs Minions in terms of components. But in this market, publishers need to be doing better. As I harbour concerns over the longevity of my copy.

While talking components, the one thing that put a big toothy smile on my face was that the two expansion decks (Aberrations and Undead) and the original four are now included in the base box.

Provided each game you play only requires two of these decks, there’s a lot of potential to mix and match. With each deck revolving around a specific mechanic or ability, you won’t run out of interesting combinations anytime soon.

So, despite its subpar production, I could not be happier with Tyrants of the Underdark.

Every game I played was fantastic and left me counting the days until I could play again. The deck-building completely engaged me, while at the same time managing the table politics and fighting the other players at the table was equally fun. A brilliant board game!