Above and Below: Haunted
Gameplay Overview
Above and Below: Haunted plays like a choose-your-own-adventure book collided with a modern worker-placement board game. Each turn, players volley back and forth taking single actions with their pool of villagers. You can hire new specialists, build structures to establish your village, gather resources, or do the most critical action: go on subterranean adventures. When adventuring, another player reads a micro-story and gives you a choice. You roll dice to meet or overachieve the challenge, risking your villagers for veiled, lucrative rewards.
The unique twist in this Haunted edition is that your village is progressively beset by ghosts. You must dispatch workers to banish them, removing all but one final ghost, which you tactically place onto an opponent's building. While this spicy mechanic docks their endgame points slightly, its primary impact is gathering resources. With an achievement track to climb, resource-stacking puzzles, and distinct tableau-building paths, it is a rich, highly thematic journey.!!
Published
2025
Status
owned
Players
2 - 4 Players
Review
As with most Red Raven titles, we absolutely loved this. We played it at two players and found it light, delightful, and still strategic enough to satisfy our brains, though we are curious if a 3-4 player count would inject more velocity into refreshing the villager and card markets. Who you play with is practically a mechanic itself here—it truly shines when people lean into the choose-your-own-adventure vibe.
Our main critique as a household is that we are total suckers for action chaining, and Above and Below: Haunted is strictly a "one worker, one action" game. Because you can't tee up massive, cascading combos, you don't quite get that mechanical "flow state." On the plus side, this completely prevents a runaway leader and allows you to always claw your way back into the game, but it does mean we might reach for it a little less frequently than our favorite chainers.
Try this if you like...
The journey as much as the destination
The actual process of playing and storytelling is just as rich and delightful as finding out who won at the end.
Controlled push-your-luck
You love taking risks, but you want to know the scope of your danger beforehand rather than blindly gambling.
Immersive, world-building artwork
The game boasts an incredible table presence; putting on a thematic soundtrack makes you feel completely pulled into the marshland.
Flexible gaming styles
It caters beautifully to different mentalities—one player can approach it as a strict min-max optimization puzzle while another plays purely for the lore and roleplay.
Asymmetric reward dynamics
The scoring matrix means the exact same reward can be highly valuable to you but completely useless to your opponent depending on your unique player boards.
