Board Gaming Review: Stranger Things: Upside Down

 

"November 6, 1983 - Hawkins, Indiana. After a long, 10-hour RPG session, young Will Byers disappears while riding his bike through the fields between Cornwallis and Kerley, or, as his group of friends call it, Mirkwood. This frightening event triggers a series of bizarre occurrences in their small town. The unexplainable suicide of Benny Hammond, weird phone calls and flickering lights in the Byers’ house, Barbara Holland allegedly running away, and the sudden appearance of Eleven, a girl with a shaved head and paranormal powers who is apparently connected to the suspicious Hawkins National Laboratory. Little by little, new pieces of this supernatural mystery begin to unfold, forever turning the lives of some of Hawkins’ residents upside down."

Greetings folks! So, IP games - are they good and worth the buck? Well, in the world of board gaming, that's a definitive YES. I own quite a few IP board games and all of them are great. From Legendary Encounters: Alien to Doom: The Board Game, Hellboy, Lord of the Rings and of course all the awesome Marvel games (Marvel Champions and Marvel United), it would seem that the world of meeples and dice rolling has all the right ingredients to ensure memorable tabletop experiences for IP games.

My family and I are huge fan of the Stranger Things series on Netflix (me even more as per this blog and all it's 80s pop culture references). The final season is currently filming and in production and, in preparation for it, my wife and I are doing a watch-through of all the seasons (we just finished binging S1 last night and man...I'm knackered! 🥱). Recently we've been doing a lot more family tabletop games I've been on the prowl for lightweight and preferably co-op board games that we can play or take along with us on a weekend getaway.

So, quite by chance, I happened across this board game. I was actually trying to source a copy of Horrified, another game on my must-play pull list and, like a Demogorgon bursting out from the upside down, managed to get my Niknaks-dusted paws on Stranger Things: Upside Down: The Board Game.

Overview:

Designed by Rob Daviau and published by CMON games, Stranger Things: Upside Down is a cooperative game for 2 to 4 players, where you step into the shoes of the series' protagonists. At the beginning, players select a Character and choose from 1 of 2 Seasons, each offering its own board, actions, and unique card sets. Characters use Action cards to navigate iconic Hawkins Locations, acquire Items, manage their Fear, and overcome token stack challenges to gather Allies, evade a secret government agency, assist Eleven and benefit from her Powers, and combat the terrors from the Upside Down. Players take turns performing actions until they achieve their ultimate objective: to stop the Upside Down forces and rescue Will... or go head to head with the dreaded Demogorgon!

Components:

Component-wise, the attention to detail is excellent. The minis are easily identifiable from the terrifying Demogorgon to Dustin's & Hopper's signature hats to Joyce holding on to the Christmas lights and Mike with his 2-way radio walkie-talkie. The card stock and quality is great and the board and artwork in this game is gorgeous to behold. It's great that the character & card artwork has all been drawn and inked for the game and not just the cookie-cutter stills from the film. 

Setup & Gameplay:

We played through the first Season and the setup is relatively simple and straightforward. Essentially you're shuffling around a bunch of random numbered tokens and placing them face-down into numbered stacks around the board. When placed into stacks, these tokens, each with a number from from zero to five, simulate the randomness of dice-rolling within the game. Each player is assigned or chooses a character and a respective character board and receives a starting hand of 5 action cards as well as red action cube to track your fear level on your character card. The Eleven character is not playable but is placed in the "Act" track on the board and is used as a timing-mechanism to track the overall game progress. If Eleven ever moves onto the 3rd "Act" space of the track and the action deck discard pile gets reshuffled, the players have run out of time and essentially lose the game. You also lose the game if any one player's fear value ever reaches the end of their track - they then become terrified and the game is lost. So, managing your fear as well as your act tracks and action cards is overall critical to the game's success and adds a heightened sense of tension to the game, making it all the more challenging.

Your characters will be moving around the board, performing actions and tasks to meet the objective (Rescue Will Byers) and essentially trying to beat the stacked tokens by playing action cards from your hand that exceed the value of the stack. Yes, it's a win-by-numbers type game but it is so, so much fun. Once your stacks are all set up, both in the town of Hawkins as well as the dreaded upside down, you draw 2 ally cards from the ally card pool and add these to the board as well. Lastly, you place all the foes in the starting locations and then place your characters in their respective starting locations and gameplay commences, usually with the player who most recently rode a bicycle going first.

Gameplay involves making some actions and these range from performing both contested and uncontested actions. Uncontested actions include movement around the town, collecting items that will assist you in beating objectives or taking time to 'calm-down' and reduce your fear track or heading over to the Hawkin's police station to 'gather information' and flip up the topmost token of any face-down token stack. All uncontested actions require you to play at least 1 action card from your hand and adding the value of that action card to the value of the uncontested action. For example, if player playing Dustin was in Main Street and wanted to perform a "Get Item" action and plays an action card from his hand with a value of 2, he would get 2 +2 =4 items since the Main Street location has an additional +2 to get item. So Dustin gets 4 items, selects 1 and the rest gets shuffled back into the Item deck. Certain locations ramp up your actions like Main Street for items, the Scrap Yard for calming down etc.

Then there are contested actions where you characters will be playing to "beat the stack" at a particular location. These range from recruiting an ally to investigating the Hawkins lab to helping unlock Eleven's powerful abilities and eventually also rescuing Will Byers. Once all of the "Rescue Will" stacks have been cleared, the players win the game. But beware! It is much easier than it sounds because in-between all of this, you will still be dealing with the dreaded Demogorgon, the Patrol Cars and generally bad events off the event deck that you draw from at the end of every player's turn. You also need to carefully manage your action cards your play each turn as you don't want to cycle through the action deck and have to progress the act track too quickly. If you do, then you will be drawing more event cards at the end of every player's turn, ramping up the hardness even more. Also, your choice of which action cards to play is key. Some cards are pretty generic and only contain a numeric value. Others contain a walkie-talkie symbol which adds a +1 to your numeric stat if you in a location with another player. And then there are action cards that contain an alert symbol which, when played, forces you to draw an additional event card from the event deck at the end of your turn. You can mitigate these somewhat by investigating and clearing out the lab but in the end, it all comes down to balance and timing.

Lastly, the "Help Eleven" actions are once-off events and probably the most powerful resources for players and knowing when to use them is key. 

Closing Thoughts:

This game really ramps up the tension particularly around time management which creates a sense of urgency to the gameplay to the unique abilities each character has and how best to operate as a team. That said, having played the first season with my girls, the game is brutally hard and challenging - We played a total of 4 games and only beat it on the last try! Still, the tension adds to the overall theme. And this game oozes theme much like the 80s nostalgia and pop-culture references in the series. From having to manage your action card resource pool while picking up useful items and recruiting allies to travelling between memorable locations from the series and fighting the Demogorgon with a spiked baseball bat, it's all there. Then, in true series fashion, using Eleven's Psionic Blast to remove a patrol van from the board made us genuinely immersed in the overall gameplay. It's a great, fun, hard game and definitely one for a family game nights. So, don't be a mouth breather and run to Pappa when the Demogorgon comes creeping up your way!

Components: 8
Setup: 9
Gameplay: 8
Replayability: 7
Theme: 9
Overall: 8.2