Undergrove

Category: Area Influence / Action retrieval

Designer: Elizabeth Hargrave & Mark Wootton

Publisher: AEG

Year Published: 2024

Players: 1-4

Playing Time: 60-75 minutes

To Play or Not To Play: Don't Play

One of the first reviews I published on this site was for Wingspan. Designer Elizabeth Hargrave's card-based engine-builder featuring North American birds was an immense hit that has become one of my favorite games. I've been enjoying the continental expansions that release every couple years or so, but I've also been keeping my eyes open to see what new ideas she comes up with. And sure enough, a few years ago I saw that she had a new game about mushrooms coming to Kickstarter. I'm not a huge fan of mushrooms, but I'm also not a huge fan of birds, so I figured I'd give it a shot.

Fast-forward a year, and now I have my very own copy of Undergrove! Thematically, this game's focus is on the nutrient distribution networks facilitated by mushrooms and other fungi within forest environments. Each player represents a different species of tree, and your goal is to utilize the nearby mushrooms by sprouting roots to absorb carbon and make your trees grow big and strong.

Four players sit down for a game of Undergrove.

Undergrove is one of those games that's really hard to explain because all of its systems are tightly interwoven. On your turn, you'll take one of five actions. The game ends once one player has reached the end of the carbon track, and then everyone scores points based on the how tall their saplings have grown and which mushrooms their trees are connected to via their roots.

The starting player setup for Undergrove ensures you have enough resources to take a few actions at the start, but if you're not careful you'll run out quickly!

At the start of the game, you'll have one sapling token on the board nestled into one of the corners of the starting tile. You'll also have a root token extending from that sapling to one of the fungi it's adjacent to. At the start of the game, that is the only mushroom you can use for any actions. What are those actions? Let's look at those real quick. I'm going to go out of order from how they're depicted on the player board because I think it'll make more sense.

First is the Partner action. As with all actions, the cost is displayed along the left-hand border of the action description. In this case, one carbon and two potassium. The effect is you gain two root tokens which you can place adjacent to any of your saplings. This gives you access to more mushrooms. Neat!

Next is the Reproduce action. For one carbon and two phosphorous, you get to place a new sapling token somewhere else on the board, and immediately place a root token adjacent to it. These two actions are the core of how you spread across the board.

Both of these actions also have an optional bonus action. By paying one square resource token (phosphorous, potassium, or nitrogen), you can play a fungus tile from your hand. It must be adjacent to at least one other tile already on the board. At the end of your turn, if you have fewer than three tiles in your hand, you draw back up to three.

So what do you do with these mushroom tiles? The most straightforward is the Activate action. You can only activate mushrooms that have one of your root tokens on them, which immediately limits your options. Then you look at the left-side of the tile's effect box (just next to the art) for the action cost. Nearly all mushrooms will require you to flip over an action disc that matches the mushroom's type. Once you have flipped that token over to its blank side, you cannot activate another mushroom of that type until find a way to flip your token back over to the active side.

Most mushrooms will also cost carbon to activate. Unlike the square elemental resources, carbon that you spend gets placed on the mushroom token itself. Then you get whatever effect is described in the rest of the box. The starting mushrooms grant some resource tokens and allow you to refresh one of other action discs. Intriguing. Activating mushrooms essentially allows you to convert carbon into other resources, which you can use for partnering and reproducing.

Which brings us to the Absorb action. Absorb allows saplings with roots on mushrooms that have carbon tokens to absorb that carbon and grow larger. You can only absorb a single carbon when you take the absorb action, regardless of how much carbon is currently on that tile. Also, you can pay additional resources to pull carbon from more distant mushrooms to the tile where your sapling has a root so that you can absorb it. When a sapling absorbs a carbon, you place that token on top of the seedling token. Once a sapling has absorbed three carbon, you replace the sapling with a full tree. The amount of carbon that a sapling has absorbed is mostly only important for end-game score. The more carbon a sapling has, the more of its roots are scored. 1 carbon = 1 root, 2 carbon = 2 roots, and trees score all their roots. So if your seedling only has one root, then it only needs to absorb one carbon to maximize the points it scores.

Absorbing is really important in this game, so there are a couple other things to note. First, there are some mushrooms in the game with the effect "absorb two carbon." These are expensive to activate, but incredibly powerful because they can push your saplings into trees really quickly.

The carbon track is the primary timer in this game. Surrounding it are end-game objectives, which are chosen randomly each game.

Also, any turn where one of your seedlings absorbs a carbon (whether it's one or two), you get to move up the Carbon track. This is the primary timer in the game. As you move up the track, you'll come to bonus tile spaces where you get to look at all the options and pick one. This is a big incentive to get there first, though the rewards aren't spectacular. They are usually just a bonus resource or a bonus victory point. The first player to reach the end of the track triggers the end of the game, and they get one of the bonus effects displayed there. This game is generous about the end of the game: players finish the round in which the end was triggered, and then everyone plays one additional full round!

The last action is Photosynthesize, which is the "rest" action in this game. This is how you replenish the carbon supply on your player board so that you can activate more mushrooms (2 carbon for the action, plus an additional carbon for each nitrogen you spend). This is also how you can refresh all of your action discs so that you can activate mushrooms again. Finally, if you don't like your mushroom tiles, you can discard any number and draw back up. Like most games that have a mechanism like this, timing your Photosynthesis rounds is crucial. If you use this action too frequently, you'll fall behind, but if you avoid using it, you'll be too limited in which actions you can take when you need them.

After several turns, beige and brown have managed to upgrades their starting saplings into trees, which is why they are further along on the carbon track.

And that's really the entire game. It's not terribly complicated once you understand the five core actions. What makes the game tricky is trying to figure out how to accomplish your goals. You want to absorb carbon into your saplings. That means you need to activate mushrooms to place carbon on them, but you don't want to feed carbon to your opponents. So maybe you'll reproduce to place a new mushroom tile and a new sapling away from your opponents. But now you need resources to produce that sapling, so you'll need to activate a mushroom. But that mushroom type might be exhausted, so you need to photosynthesize to refresh it . . . it's tricky to parse your way through the action sequence you need to follow to get where you're trying to get to. Meanwhile, the game is actually quite short. That hour flies by real fast as players pop up that carbon track way faster than you expect.

This game has a really odd tension between cooperation and competition. Yes, you're competing with the other players for victory points. However, you will need to place more mushroom tiles down to get more victory points and access more powerful effects. And as soon as you put down a new mushroom, all the other players can use it too! All they have to do is reproduce to plop a new sapling down next to it. Or if you placed it near one of their existing saplings, then they can just partner to add a root, and now they can also use that mushroom. Pretty much by definition, every thing you do to help yourself can potentially help any or all of the others players too. The only exception is the Absorb action, that's the only one that exclusively helps your own position. So, uh, I guess you want to prioritize that action when you can, huh?

Essentially, you're racing the other players to get your trees faster than the others. Not because trees are particularly powerful, but because trees can score all of their roots, so they're naturally going to be worth more points at the end than saplings with only 1 or 2 carbon. Accomplishing that is easier said than done. And this is further complicated by the public objectives. The players are also competing for those three public goals, and if you ignore them to race up the carbon track, you may still lose to a player who does a good job focusing on those. You need a more balanced attack . . . I think? I haven't had a chance to play this game enough to know for sure.

Now, I do want to take a moment here to call out this game's excellent production values. All my photos are of the Kickstarter Deluxe edition, which has fancier resource tokens (the base game uses wooden cubes) and fancy tiles (thick wooden ones instead of cardboard).

Artistically showcasing this game's table presence! Look at how gorgeous it is!

Even without those cosmetic components, though, this game is gorgeous. The mushrooms and player boards are all beautifully rendered by the always-outstanding Beth Sobel. She is the artistic mastermind behind Wingspan, and so the Hargrave/Sobel collaboration immediately got my attention during the initial Kickstarter announcement. I may have no interest whatsoever in mushrooms, but her artwork draws me in every time.

This game looks fantastic but regrettably doesn't play as well. This game is a puzzle: how to create a multi-turn chain of mushroom activations and absorptions with carefully timed photosynthesizes to accomplish your goals. I don't find that puzzle very interesting or very fun. I do not know enough about the mushrooms to comprehend how scientifically accurate their powers are, so I don't find joy in connecting the mushroom's power to its real-world behavior like I can with some birds in Wingspan. In the end, the game is just a question of how to most efficiently get the carbon tokens off my board and onto mushrooms so that I can then get those tokens onto my saplings.

To be fair, Wingspan doesn't sound great if you boil it down the same way: play cards to help you draw more cards and get more resources to play more cards and score points? Yet I've played Wingspan 62 times in six years, while I've only played Undergrove twice in one year. Wingspan's underlying puzzle is fun and interesting to me, while Undergrove's is dull and tedious.

Undergrove isn't a bad game. It doesn't feel broken or imbalanced, and there are interesting decisions to make and strategies to pursue. I just don't find those strategies or decisions fun. I think if this game had come out 15 or 20 years ago, it would be a marvel of design and something people would play over and over again. Now, there are plenty of other games that are more worth your time. If you really like mushrooms, or if you have a friend that does, maybe give this game a shot. But if you're just looking for a fun strategy game to sink your teeth into for an evening, I'd say you should find something else. I do not recommend that you play this game.

Whoa! I did a review on a recently released game for once! What a concept! Thank you for reading. Join me next week for another new review. It's been a while since I've been able to release these on a timely schedule. I wonder how long I can keep this up? As always, please follow me on Instagram @toplayornot or on Mastodon @chris.kizer@kind.social to see what board game stuff I'm up to.