Underwater Cities Board Game First Impressions

In Underwater Cities, you’re building Underwater Cities.

Can you survive on a diet of Kelp?

Players represent the most powerful brains in the world, brains nominated due to the overpopulation of Earth to establish the best and most livable underwater areas possible.

Underwater Cities Game Play

This is a brief, far from a comprehensive overview.

This is basically an action selection game where each turn you’ll play an action tile onto an empty action, and play a card from your hand.

The action spaces around the board are in 3 different colours, as are the cards available to you. If the action space matches the card colour, you can take the action shown on the card.

Then the card is either discarded or placed in front of you depending on the card. Then you draw a card, discard down to 3 and your turn ends, this is how the game is played.

The actions on the cards are VERY varied so I won’t go into them here but there are 15 action spaces on the board and they do several things:

• Play certain cards from hand or activate cards in your play area
• Gain resources in the form of Credits, Kelp, Steeplast, Science or Biomatter
• Move up on the Turn Order Track
• Build Cities, Buildings or Tunnels onto your player board

Cites are those dome things, Buildings are the coloured disks and Tunnels are the cardboard strips. In the corner of the board are a few Metropolis hex tiles for cities on land. If you connect to them you get a reward.

The one in the top left of your board furthest away from your starting City gives you a decent end-game bonus but you need to build a network to it and build two tunnels to connect to it.

Round End

Once all players have played 3 actions the round ends.

Every Tunnel and Building next to a City on your player board will produce Resources and Points. You also get bonuses for some cards you have in play and from Metropolis hex tiles.

Players then need to pay 1 Kelp per city to feed it or lose 3 points per unfed city.

Game End

Score points for Metropolis Tiles, Cards, Cities and Buildings and leftover resources, most points win.

Theme

I mean, yeah sure. It’s not that great but you can use your imagination.

Setup

It’s a Euro so there are a lot of pieces. With good organisation, the game can be set up pretty quickly.

Components & Artwork

The components are really nice. But I mean, do the Domes need to be plastic? I would have been happy with cardboard tokens as the Tunnels look so low quality next to the Plastic Domes and shiny Building tokens.

However, the graphic design is very clear and I do like the artwork across the game.

Ease of Teaching & Accessibility

Teaching is fairly straightforward I think. There are a lot of actions to explain with a fair few ways to gain points/bonuses that need to be made clear before the game begins.

Accessibility is… really dependent on the player? Cards in hand are secret but it doesn’t matter if other players know what you have too much so a player can get help with them.

Strategy and knowing what to do and why might be a struggle. It would be easy for a new player to take action and do things, but do things well and with purpose? Maybe not.

Also, this is one of the worse ‘help’ sheets I’ve seen. I still can’t figure it out.

Underwater Cities Summary

I’m not going to start by looking at comparative worker placement or action selection games, there is a tonne of those. I’m going to bring up Aquasphere as a game set underwater that I like. I think it’s a better game and is better looking.

But, this game is OK I guess. You’re just gathering stuff to do things. The spaces are tight but you always have something to do if your perfect turn is not available to you.

This is where the cards are good. You might be able to pair up an average action space with good card activation for a pretty decent turn. So the feeling of progress every action is there and is important.

There is replayability here too. That Metropolis I mentioned earlier gave me a bonus for building tunnels I won’t have next time. So next time, maybe fewer tunnels, meaning fewer connected cities meaning a different game.

I can’t guarantee there will be a next time, but if there is I’m confident it’ll feel different, which is good.

Jesta ThaRogue