Players: 1+
Age: 12+
Duration: +- 20-40 minutes
Distributor: Czech Games Edition
Under Falling Skies – Board Game Review
With a big portion of the world still being in lockdown, or at least in terms of social activities, it’s hard to connect with friends during a board game night. Many countries still enforce the rules of social distancing, except for work and public transport where hordes of people can basically sit on your lap. Nonetheless, the rules make it nearly impossible to get a large group of people together without the police busting down your door. It’s nice that companies such as Czech Games Edition then do a valiant effort at releasing single-player board games for those who want to fill in the gap that their usual board game evenings left them. Under Falling Skies puts you in the middle of an alien invasion, offering you different scenarios that you can play in order. While the game is somewhat designed for solo play, you can easily have a family member or friend join in on the fun, and debate on what course of action you should best take to send those pesky aliens back to their mothership into deep space.
Contents
- Standard game
- 5 purple ships
- 4 white ships
- 3 plastic tokens
- 7 wooden dice
- 1 excavator token
- 1 mothership tile
- 4 sky tiles
- 3 base tiles
- 3 city tiles
- 1 rulebook
- Campaign
- 1 campaign notebook
- 4 chapter comics sheets
- 14 more cities
- 12 upgradable characters
- 13 unique scenarios
- 9 additional base and sky tiles
- Cardboard scenario tokens
- 1 special orange ship
The contents of the box are nicely made, and the scenarios are packed separately so you can complete and play the story in order. There will be an introductory scenario available when opening the box, and you learn the ropes by playing that one. The components are made in hard cardboard and the extra pawns and such are made in plastic. This includes the small alien spaceships. The small excavator and the dice are of course made out of wood.
Mechanics
Under Falling Skies puts you at the frontline of an alien invasion. It is your job to keep your base safe, or save specific cities in the scenarios that come with the game. You’ll have to make sure you make the necessary preparations in time, or die trying. We have to be honest, while the aesthetics of the game look amazing, it was a bit of a daunting task to finally dive into the experience. While the game does not have that many special components or an excessive amount of rules, it was still a bit complex to finally grasp how the game completely works. If you’re a novice to board games, we recommend watching the tutorial, or even a playthrough of the introductory scenario to get the hang of things. While we’re sure you’ll manage on your own, this can make the first experience a bit easier and will allow you to dive into the scenarios of the story a lot quicker. Simply put, it’s about you reaching your research target in time, or be destroyed by attacks or the mothership coming too close.
While this may be oversimplifying things, Under Falling Skies is a dice game at heart, and a strategy game in the second place. The game will always start off with dice throws, you assigning said dice to rooms in your base, in turn generating energy, allowing you to gain certain effects, and then it is immediately followed by the mothership spawning small alien vessels that approach you, in order to attack you. After that, it always basically repeats itself until you either win, or are destroyed, all while trying first to expand your base with your assigned excavator. The game further expands on these mechanics by adding dice, adding more fighters, adding characters, new conditions, etc. This creates some replay value, as well as new strategies which then allow you to approach certain scenarios or maps differently.
Luck or Strategy?
Well, this is a fairly hard one. While strategy is certainly a part of the gameplay, especially when having to resolve your dice rolls, there’s an equal amount of luck that comes into play when playing through the base game and the campaign. Eventually a lot of things will depend on the numbers that come out of your dice rolls, but you can opt to resolve these throws in different orders or opt to place them on different spots of your base.
Placing the dice is actually the biggest strategic element of the game, as this also involves generating power, being able to shoot down enemy ships, but also how these ships approach you. The higher your roll is, the faster the vessel in said column will move towards your city. Sometimes it might be useful to take a risk in allowing an alien to approach your city, especially if you can make it land on a spot where you can destroy it, but at other times caution can also be rewarded.
Conclusion
Under Falling Skies does look a bit overwhelming at first, but after messing around with the game’s components, or even looking up some tutorials, you’ll find the game to become fairly clear rather quickly. The game offers a fun story to play through and offers a fair amount of replay value if you want to try a different approach for some scenarios. For a single-player game in the midst of a lockdown, we could do a lot worse. Another great game by Czech Games Edition. It’s rare to see a game that motivates you to press on by adding a proper campaign to the equation.
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