The post-apocalyptic game Terror Below came out in 2019, from Renegade Game Studios and designer Mike Elliott (Thunderstone Quest), and asks players to fight giant worms that are living below the planet’s surface, occasionally poking their giant, disgusting heads up to lay eggs and spread rubble across the board. If you like the way co-operative games like Pandemic or the Forbidden series make the board harder to play as the game progresses, but want to try that in a competitive game, Terror Below might be your cup of tea.
The board is a 6×6 grid that has five location tiles scattered on it and, at the start of the game, has at least four worm eggs, one in each color, and some rubble strewn across it. Players can move their pawns by playing vehicle cards, with action point values from 2 to 7, to one of the three worm cards currently on the board. You may use action points to move one space, clear one piece of rubble from an adjacent space, pick up all the eggs in a space (which ends your turn immediately), or deliver an egg to a location. Those egg deliveries can earn you bounties, of which there are always four public ones at the top of the board, for victory points.
Between each player’s turn, you check to see if any of the worms on the board have enough vehicle cards played to their spaces to meet the number on the card’s lower left, which would then trigger a worm attack. Each worm is tied to a target token, numbered 1, 2, and 3, that starts in a space indicated on the worm card but may move as players play vehicle cards or use other powers. When a worm attacks, you put an egg where its target token was, then spread rubble tokens in a defined pattern around that target token, with a maximum of two rubble tokens per space. (Players can’t move into a space with rubble on it unless they have a card that specifically allows them to do so.) Then you discard that worm card and draw a new one, placing that target token at the new card’s coordinates.
If your pawn gets caught in a worm attack, because rubble or an egg lands on the space where it is, you must defend yourself or die – although you can die three times, so it’s not that serious. You start the game with one weapon card and one item card, and you can gain new ones every time you collect three rubble tokens. Weapons are more valuable, since you need them to fight off worm attacks. If you can use your weapons to do enough damage to match the number in a heart on the worm card, you defeat it, and get either a matching bounty card or 1 victory point. Items do have their uses as well, but I would rather be caught without an item than without a weapon in this game. (Hats, permanent item cards that give you one small but useful additional power, are the exception. They’re valuable.)
Each player also gets three Leader cards, and uses one at a time to gain some small extra power – but they’re especially for tracking how often you die in a worm attack. If your Leader is killed, you flip it over and use the next one instead. If all three of your Leaders are killed, and you don’t deliver any eggs to the Hospital to get to resuscitate one of them, you are out of the game.
Play continues until one player has at least 20 victory points from bounty cards (worth 3-4), other worm kills (1 point each), and various other bonuses available throughout the game. Terror Below also has a solo mode that asks you to complete an objective (deliver eggs to 4 of the 5 location tiles, defeat at least 3 different worm types) before 15 worm attacks are resolved, while also increasing those attacks’ frequency. There’s a guaranteed attack every turn in solo mode, and on some turns you’ll have two attacks, as you add one extra vehicle card at random to one of the three worm cards on the board after each turn you take, so if any worm card hits its limit, it attacks too. There are three scenarios, but they’re each replayable, and two of them present a sufficient challenge.
The strength of Terror Below is the way it takes the Pandemic mechanic of raising the threat level – here, you’re spreading rubble, making more of the board impassable until someone clears it – and puts it into a competitive game. Where it loses me is the vehicle cards, which give too wide a range of action points for each turn, and the rule that says your turn ends when you pick up any egg, which I can understand (it forces you to think about efficient routes) but which ultimately plays as a nuisance. It’s a solid game, with a good theme, probably one that deserves a wider audience than it received, but I’m not sure it’ll stay in my collection for the long term.