Designers: Peter Lee, Rodney Thompson, Andrew Veen
You lead a mighty house of the Drow, dark elves that spend their time being all gothy, cutting yourself and shopping at Hot Topic. You’ll be trying to spread your influence throughout the breadth of the Underdark, competing against other players to claim the key locations of the game, all of which look like someone swallowed and vomited a couple Scrabble hands.
Tyrants of the Underdark marries the deckbuilding engine of Dominion with a territorial control game. You build a deck on the fly, and use the cards you play to send out spies, assassinate enemy troops, martial your own troops and summon reinforcements from the market.
Interesting Mechanic: Spies. Like most games, your troops can only be placed, fight or perform actions in places where you have influence — places that are adjacent to locations your troops control. However, Tyrants of the Underdark expands that by allowing you to place spies, and use those as beachheads of influence you can use to launch bigger invasions. Doing so is difficult and takes more time and effort, but the ability to blindside without worrying about adjacency really opens up new tactical avenues in the game.
Bonus Interesting Mechanic: Mix & Match Market Decks. A lot of deckbuilders suffer a certain sense of fatigue – you’re not seeing a ton that’s new in the market deck you purchase from once you’ve played the game a few times. Tyrants solves this an interesting way. At the start of each game, you choose 2 out of the four market decks in the box, each of which represents a creature faction (Elementals, Dragons, Drow and Demons) – two additional are available in a small, cheap expansion, for a total of 15 possible combinations. Each faction leans into a different kind of mechanic, and they tend to combine and contrast with each other in interesting ways. Overall, this provides a deckbuilder that has a lot more replayability than you’d first expect.
Tyrants of the Underdark is a solid game with a lot of replayability. It does have a certain blandness to it’s visual appearance, but is overall solid, fun and relatively quick. It does compete for playtime with Clank! though, which hits upon a lot of the same themes.
(Photo Credit: Board Game Quest)
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