Sometimes you see a game and you want to play it just because it has really cool pieces and attractive colors. Sometimes you play it and become disenchanted but sometimes you also find a real keeper. Undermining from Z-Man Games is one of those that as soon as I saw the first images on boardgamegeek.com I knew I had to give it a shot.

Those awesome little pawns are the first thing I saw along with some resources and I knew my hopes were going to be high for this game. It finally arrived this last January and I wasn’t disappointed. It’s a lot simpler than many games I’ve played lately, but that is a welcome relief. It’s a game that I got to teach two newbies to non-Monopoly board games and they took to it swimmingly. It’s simple but with enough meat that I want to play it many more times and try out quite a few different strategies.

To start, each player is a miner on an alien planet equipped with an Under Mining Vehicle (the colored UMVs pictured above). You all start on the surface of the planet next to a refinery where you will bring back your resources. On this board, the refinery is the large square on the right of the planets surface (looks like a cave with fire in it)

When you set up the game, you place a layer of solid rock tiles on the surface layer of the planet. Then each player grabs a handful of random resource tiles and places them in the empty sub-level squares without really paying attention to patterns or placement (6). This makes for a different game every time. As a miner your job is to bring back resources to fill contracts from the company for Victory Points. The contracts are chosen from a deck of randomized cards (4). The deck is shuffled and placed face up, with 3 cards dealt to the 3 contract spaces. The top card of the deck just lets the players know what contract will be coming up next.

You can fill any of the three active contracts. If you deliver two green gems to the refinery for that contract, you will take the 8 point victory token (gold diamond) from the top of the stack. Each victory token drops in value as you go through the stacks. For example, in a 4 player game the value of the 5 tokens in each stack will be 8, 7, 5, 4 and 3. This seems a little counter-intuitive to me, as the race to fill the contracts in the early game keeps you from upgrading your vehicle until the late game. I’d think you’d want to build up your vehicles first then have a race for the contracts. We’ll continue to play it this way for now, but I’m very tempted to try and reverse the order of the Victory points stacks and see how that goes.

Each player gets 3 actions to use per turn and they can do any of the following in any order and each as many times as they want:

1) Drill - You can drill a rock or resource tile. Solid rock will take one drill action to turn in to rubble, and rubble will take 1 drill action to clear from the board. Drilling a resource will move it from the board to one of your empty cargo bays. When you drill a pile of rubble or a resource away you will move your UMV in to that spot. You can only drill a resource or alien tech token if you have empty cargo bays to hold it.

2) Drive - Using one drive action will move your vehicle 2 empty spaces. You can not move diagonally.

3) Unload - While you are in the refinery you can move resources from your UMV’s cargo bays in to your personal warehouse. Alien Tech tiles are immediately traded in for special cards (more on those later).

4) Build - While in the refinery you can take a build action to spend resources from your warehouse to upgrade your UMV (more on that later)

5) Contract - While in the refinery you can fill contracts as I described above with resources from your warehouse and earn the victory tokens.

6) Charge - You can can take charge cubes and add them to your battery slot on your vehicle. Charge cubes can be spent to take extra actions (2 cubes = 1 action) or to move through a space occupied by another UMV (2 cubes = moving to an empty spot past an occupied spot).

7) Portal - There is one portal on the surface, but it is unusable until portals are opened up below. As portals are opened you can take portal actions. If your UMV is on a Portal space it can take a portal action to teleport to any other open portal on the board. This makes for quicker transportation to and from the surface as the game digs deeper.

Each player gets their own player board representing their UMV.

This one shows a vehicle with two resources in its two cargo holds, two drill bit upgrades, 3 empty upgrade slots and two battery cubes. The warehouse storage is off to the left; there is no limit to how many resource you can hold there. Your UMV comes equipped with 2 cargo holds to start with and a number of battery cubes depending on the starting player order. 1st player will get one cube, 2nd will get two, third will get three and so forth.

As I said before you can upgrade your vehicles with improvements that will maximize your actions.

For two green gems you can upgrade with a reactor which allows you to take an extra action. For two carbon rocks you can add an additional cargo hold to hold more resources, making for less trips. For one purple crystal you can add a rocket booster which will ad 1 space to your move action (nomally you move 2 spaces, now you will move 3 with one booster). One diamond will get you a new drill bit which will allow you to drill an additional time per drill action.

Along the way you will dig up Alien Tech tokens. When you bring tone back to the refinery to unload at your warehouse, you will trade it in for an Alien Tech card. These can be played at any time for a usually powerful effect.

There are two sides to the board to play on, the other side is supposed to be a little more advanced, but I don’t see by how much more. The randomized placement of resources and shuffling of the contracts makes for lots of re-playability. Like I said before, the high scoring contracts being available in the early game seem to take away from wanting to build up a powerful UMV and then race through the ever growing contracts. Also, if someone grabs two 8 point contracts early it can be difficult to catch up. We’ll try it in reverse order after a few more plays, there may be a reason it is this way. As it is, it’s still very enjoyable and I’m ready to get it back on the table every chance I get.