UNEARTH (2017)

PLAYERS	TIME	DESIGNER	PUBLISHER
2-4	30-60 mins	Jason Harner Matthew Ransom	Brotherwise Games

In UNEARTH, you use Delvers (dice) to uncover ruins buried deep beneath the surface.

This is accomplished by rolling and placing dice on Ruins cards until the combined total of all dice meets or exceeds the cards total. Then it’s a case of highest number takes the card.

I love the art style of this game. It’s all geometric, a kind of softer and more dreamy Minecraft. The box cover alone is what drew me to it.

Something I really enjoy are the ways it rewards bad luck.

While you commit your dice to Ruins cards in the hope of getting the highest result, if you lose the card to an opponent, you get extra Delver cards which have abilities to mitigate future dice rolls.

And, if you roll low while going after a ruin (between 1-3), you gain a coloured stone, which is used to build Wonders in a little point scoring mini game.

It’s this way around just the main part of the game that takes away the negativity of bad dice rolls, something that can put players off.

And the dice themselves offer a little amount of tactics. While players have three D6’s that’ll do most of the digging, you have a single D4 when you really want a stone off of a card, and a single D8 for when you need to beat someone else’s 6.

The game without these extras feels like a deluxe version of ROLL FOR IT but with a bunch of really nice extras.

Although I’ve not played the solo mode yet, the game plays well at the 2-4 player counts, although we have found at lower counts, where Ruins cards are removed, it can cause set collection to be difficult.

In our last 2-player game, I had the only card from one of the five colours in my starting hand. This meant that my opponent had zero chance of getting the full set points.

Overall, UNEARTH is a beautiful game to have on the table, where luck is present but not in control, and it has more than one road to victory.