Under Falling Skies Playthrough Review

hey welcome to atlab games where our board game playthroughs are always unpaid and ad-free i'm your host anthony and i will be walking through under falling skies by myself today so francis will not be joining me because this is a solo game uh under falling skies is a game designed by thomas ulear and published by check games edition uh plays again one player uh 20 to 40 minutes uh and it is basically a dice management game where aliens are invading the earth so if you join me at the table i'll show you how it plays all right welcome to the table so we have under falling skies so set up for one player um basically what is under phone size so it's like i said it's a dice management game where we are rolling dice activating rooms in our underground base to destroy alien ships that are coming down to invade earth so if you think of independence day for example the movie and you've got alien ships coming down you've got you know the military forces trying to fight these aliens off um that's what this game basically is it's it's it's that whole aliens ship scene when they're coming down to earth and we're blowing them out of the sky it's a race game because we are trying to get to a certain technological level in order to find a way to repel them right and we have to do that before they destroy the city that we're protecting so if you take a look at the table show you the setup real quick and then we can start jumping right in and see how this plays out because uh this could always go either way but what you have is as i've set this up a little bit uh different than what you would normally do normally this base this is your base for example would go beneath the skies beneath the city because it's just one long vertical track but for the purposes of this video you would not be able to see what's going on it's just you're too far out and it's the only way for me to really get you in close enough to be able to see what i'm actually doing and look at some of the symbology on the board while i'm making decisions on how i'm placing my dice so like i said it's a race game to get this green track on the left so this is our our tech track to the very top before we well before this track our destruction uh track uh reaches the skull if that ever hits the skull we lose game over so that's that's the race here now the only other resource you've really got to manage is this yellow which is our power and that power is used to activate certain rooms within our base so this is our underground base think of the base sort of like if you've ever played xcom when you're digging and excavating in your base and building new rooms to try to bolster your you know your attacks against the aliens and create new research facilities like that's what this represents and you start with the excavator on this third row and he's heading down this way follows this road all the way down the rooms above or behind the excavator are the only rooms available for you to place dice and act and um and activate during your turn so the turns go like this you're going to get there's three phases there's a dice phase where we roll all five of our our action dice and we're going to be placing our dice in any one of these rooms that are like i said behind or above the excavator the one main rule you have to remember is that you can only have one die per column right uh so you have five dice you've got five columns there will be one die in every column when you're done activating all of your your dice the second really need to remember is that you've got three gray and two white every time you use a white die to take an action you must re-roll the remaining unused dice so it's very strategic when you use these white dice because it matters so that's really it and that's how you activate your rooms as long as you have enough power for rooms requiring power you can do it some rooms have a negative pip identifier so for example this orange fighter room is going to cost one power but it's going to be it has a one pip penalty so if i were to place a six in that room i would pay one power but this value would be a fighter of only five not six um this double room here both rooms need to be filled in order for me to generate power this is a generator the yellow rooms this one has a negative three pip count so if i have a six and a one for seven i can generate four power because minus three the top row of rooms are anti-air the only effect they have is they reduce the pip count by one when moving the ships down and that'll make sense when i start taking actions uh the orange rooms as i said those are fighter rooms and those are going to be used to shoot these alien ships out of the sky the green rooms are to generate research so think of them as research labs we are going to be pushing up this track now you have to have for each room you've got to have enough cumulative research points in order to push this up so for example you've got a three a one and a three that would require seven there's no room right now that will generate seven research points so i could never go up three steps on this track on my first turn at most i could go up to three and the one if i generated four technology if that makes sense and that's it after the dice phase we're gonna activate the rooms and do what all the rooms are supposed to do and then the mothership's going to come down a notch she's going to activate whatever symbols on the right side of the board here and then she's going to spawn more ships right and i'll go through all of that as we go along so with that i think i'm just going to go ahead roll the dice and we'll start this up okay so i will talk through everything we do a couple of things to note before we jump right in is that there are a whole host of symbols as you can see on the board here there's these explosions with number values beneath them if a ship alien ship is on that space and we have a room with a fighter on it that has a value that's higher greater than or equal to that value then we blow up and we kill that alien ship so that's what you're looking to do there's mother ship symbols so if we were to move one of these alien ships down to land on a mothership the mothership will advance one space you're probably asking why would you ever want to do that because if you move the mothership by using that symbol she does not activate the symbols on the right here some of them are quite bad some of them will move our excavator backspaces some of them will move our technology backspaces so you don't really want those to to affect your base at all so it's a good way to avoid that and there's also these arrow symbols either pointing left or point right so if a ship lands on the arrow it's just going to change columns that it's been advancing in that's pretty much it so let's reset this technology meter you start with two energy our excavator starts here we're ready to go so we start off with the dice phase and we will roll the dice all right wow that's a lot of sixes so that's pretty good i guess so what i like to start off by doing is okay so if i were to play a six on any one of these columns and the way this works is if i were to place the six say here on this technology room right which is not a bad play but what that would do is it would move up because it's in column number two and this is why you normally play with this board underneath because it lines up the columns but because i have to put on the side we've got to do a little bit of association here so column two right so that's going to be this column here so that's a six if i'm going to place the six in this room that's gonna advance column two ship six spaces and it's gonna drop the mother ship down because it's gonna land on that mothership space i don't necessarily want to do that right now because that is not a great use of the mother shift symbol at this point so that 6 is really not going to help me in that in that column and if you notice like six from the top right now is this whole column here and there are no real spaces that are going to benefit anything so i think what i'll probably do then is start the six over here in this fighter bay and that's this column so we know we're going to move this ship down six spaces nothing happens because that's an empty space but i could hopefully manipulate because i'm going to end up with a fighter with a value of five because remember this is minus one um to deal with any other ships and hopefully i can manipulate these ships to get on some of these other spaces this round right so we'll see if that happens one two three four five six so i could have put a die there but i didn't want to do that um and that's the reason i'm saying with this excavator the way you advance the excavator is you if i were to use a six die for example i would count ahead of it one two three four five six and that's where i would play that dice that die and then at the end of the round this excavator would move up to here and it costs one energy to move the excavator so all these sixes i don't really don't think i want um i do have a three so i could technically move him down to three but i have no room to to activate except for the um anti-air so that three is really not going to help me so what i'll do is instead of placing this gray i'm going to place this white six instead because i want to get a reroll because every time you play a white die you get a rule because all the six is wow i'm really rolling sixes but that's not too bad so what i will do next is play a four here what that four is gonna do is go one two three four now i got him on an explosion space so i know that this ship these fighters are gonna kill them um i will play a six next and i can play that six there and that'll bring him down six spaces which isn't great but it's something but i'm gonna generate a ton of power this turn at least i can kind of stockpile that one two three so if i put a three there that's kind of helpful one two three so i could place three here and that'll move this guy down one two three and i'm gonna have to reroll because it's a white die so if i put him it's the only place i can put him is up here so that's gonna be three minus one is two one two and that's to slide him over one that ends my dice placement not the best um did i want to do that though let's see one two because i could have gone no i can't i can't go three because that's i've already used that up yeah i probably should have used that three um to move my excavator instead of the but it's not the end of the world so we'll stick with that play we'll see how this pans out okay so now that we've finished our dice placement we're actually going to go to the rooms phase where we're actually going to activate our room so we know that the anti-air doesn't do anything the uh you can activate these in whatever order i want so i have two power available one two and i'm gonna activate the lab for the two power to generate three uh research points and that'll get us up one notch um i'm out of power so now i'll activate this room so we had a 10 pip count minus three is seven it maxes us out at seven power which is actually really good this fighter plane is going to use up one power but it'll be a minus one pip count so it's a five we only have one fighter on an explosion space so that kills that one it would kill every fighter on a space with a value of five or less so you wanna really set those combos up because they're nice so that ends that uh which wasn't really great but we're gonna now move the mothership up one and we activate this symbol so that's a clear ship so we add a clear ship to the um deployment zone which is up here and now we go to respawn so any ships up here so like when when you kill the purple ships they actually go up here to deployment zone when you kill a clear ship they go out of the game so we always spawn in a fighter bay that is in an empty column first and we always start with the purple ones and then we go to anyone left over and they will go to the next available open slot which happens to be here if there were no available slots uh empty slots uh columns then we go into one where the ships are the furthest down or the closest to the surface if you will so that's the end of the mother ship phase so the deployment then we go right back to our dice phase so that's pretty much what we're gonna do until we either die or we get enough research points to uh to defeat the alien scourge so let's see if we can sort of bring bring these guys one two three four five six now i wanna i wanna move him up three four i'm just trying to see what makes one two three the most sense based on positioning here i don't have any fours i don't have anything really great here six one two three four five six one two three four five six one two three four five six because i can get a lot of these guys down one two three four five one two three four five okay five that's not terrible that's what we'll do we'll start with an excavator uh upgrade one two three four five if i had a 4 that would have been even better um yeah not not ideal but we may be able to do something a little bit better next round um one two three four one two so we've got a two um but if i put a three here that'll move him up two spaces which is good two three one two three one two three okay um really trying to figure out what the best move is here folks and we don't have very good dice i'll be honest with you so one two three four five six yeah might as well put put a six here one two three four five six i'm not even gonna be able to fight these guys that might not be the best move bring that back i'm gonna need to reroll i have to i have to so i'll put a one here i'll put a one here and what that does is actually because that's minus one it doesn't move anybody anywhere and it gets me into my reroll yeah this is a really bad round for me so put a four here one two three four and we'll put another one here and that will move nobody so it's kind of a waste of dice placement but it saves me from from advancing the ships any further so these three are going to be worth nothing in the rooms phase we are going to pay one power to move our excavator down to here we're going to pay two more power to get four pips boom boom worth of research so that got us two spots up on the grain now you have to keep pushing the screen because it is brutal um ugh this is ugly so this is where you kind of want to think about manipulating the mother ship because now she's going to activate this minus two so she actually pulled my excavator back two spaces which is really costly any ships that were in the space as you saw go back onto the uh the mother ship and they'll get spawned right um at you know at the next moment we didn't have any free floating so we don't have to slot any these are already slot and prepared to come down uh so let us see that's it so we're gonna go into the next phase hopefully we'll get some better dice this time so let's move our excavator up too this time now i really need i really really need to blow up these shafts to be quite honest um that's gonna be tough so you know what that'll bring him down to here which isn't terrible but it gives me a re-roll i do want to play that before i place any of these other dice or do i want to place some of these other dice first um let's all roll so we've got a one i'll put that one here and that'll hold him off one two three four five six i guess we'll do that yeah six here one two three four five no no he was up here um we don't want to do that for sure no no no no one two three four five one two three four five yeah let's do that one two three four five we'll do two we'll put two here one two one two re-roll the six we get a one which is perfect because we'll put that here and that'll make him move nowhere so it's all about manipulating to get what you want um so let's go ahead and spend our power to move our excavator up to here um and we're gonna generate seven six five four more power so that'll bring us up to six so not great but not the end of the world either um we're gonna move our mothership down one and we're gonna spawn a clear ship which will then go into this fighter bay because he's the furthest down all right so we've gotta really um get some things going here so what i'm gonna do is play this one here for zero because i'm gonna hold him steady because i'm gonna kill him this round one two three four five so i need a five i don't have one so we've got one two three four five six don't have a six one two three four and one two three four or one two three four there one two three four that's a five yeah i need to reroll so i need two one okay four why don't i do that one two three four i'll put that here right because he's going around this way one two three four that brings him down and we will hopefully we get a six or a five oh yeah we got both sweet so we need i want to put some big numbers in here so we've got one two three four five six i'll put a six in the third column right there one two three four five six i'm just really trying to line these guys up one two three four that'll bring him there and then five one two three four oh this is perfect so if i put a four in here right that's going to move them one two three four one two three four and i put the five here that's one two three four five so this is where you really can do some combos right so that does nothing we're going to spend a power to go get my excavator out to there which is good spend another power to get three pips worth of research which only gets me up one notch which is not good but we'll keep pressing we have 11 combat power here huge for two power so that's gonna kill this three this three this four this six he goes off the board and this four so we've just cleared the skies and that's really how you want to combo that if you possibly can this guy's going to slide down there's no symbol to activate but we know we're going to fill every single slot here with ships ready to come out because we killed everybody but as you notice it's starting to get tight now because we're going to run out of space literally um because it's going to start bringing these guys much closer to the planet so we'll get ready for the next roll here we've got we've got a little bit more open base we can do a few more things now hopefully one two three four because we got to think about as they get lower you can take some hits but you don't want to take them early because you're going to get you're going to get pressed later like they're really going to start start hurting you so what i would like to do is is start building up four five six seven eight nine ten if i get ten worth of research this round one two three four ten ten worth of research this round i think four one two three four then i think i can push this you know push that chart up really high and that's that's really what i want so i've got this six i definitely want to slot that six here to get my ten one two three four five six one two three four five six that's kind of stinks that i missed the explosion so we'll have to try to work him a different way um i'm gonna need power because i need at least two power to generate that which i can put power here one two three four five six one two three four five one two three four five one two three yeah it's not gonna do it and i would get him up there but i do i do need to i do need that power so let's go with the five we'll go five power one two three four five i'm not going to be able to to kill these planes this round so we might as well get what we can so remember we're getting four five six seven eight nine ten and i get another one if i want because otherwise i need seven and i'm not going to get that so that would be kind of a waste i could put a four here to give this guy a one two three bring him down into a position to be killed at some point and then reroll the last die for a four and i mean i could put them here i could put them here and go one two three four one two three four which isn't terrible um but it's something all right so let's go ahead we're going to get rid of that we're going to spend two power which i have one two that's four go here for four we uh we have this to generate 5 power and we've got 10 research for 2 power so it's going to be 1 plus 3 is 4 5 6 7 so we're just shy so we're getting there but the values are starting to get pretty big so we're gonna need to do some really big so like i think six seven eight we need ten more to get up to here we're gonna have at least three more really big uh technology pushes right so he's gonna slide down mothership phase one of these guys is gonna come out load that chamber and that's it next round they're going to lower my my excavator which is never a good thing okay so one two three four if i can get him up oh one two three four no we don't want that five two three four five because there are some big um some really big rooms that would be beneficial to do to six i'm just looking at one two three four five six what's safe one two three four i've got some really bad rolls actually as you can probably see uh one two three six one two three so let's do power for three one two three that's a mother ship so it's gonna knock him down one uh but we're gonna re-roll because we need to get some better ice going here okay so we'll put the six here so we're gonna definitely one two three four five six we definitely want to blow these guys up one two three three yeah this is not this is not a really good i i'm getting i'm getting uh a little bit crowded down here now which is never never a good thing so i need to move one two three spaces and this isn't looking good because if i put him here i'm looking at one two three it's just not enough if i put him here i've got one two three and that's probably the best bet six yeah see this is really bad one two three four so i'm gonna put him here just to make sure i get that but that's gonna push him to the bottom and off but i'm gonna take a hit for that and then two we'll go here we'll build some power this round more power more than we actually need uh but that's the best we can do so we're gonna get three power here one two three we're gonna spend two power for a 12 powered attack which will kill him and him not great and then we're gonna build up another five power so that'll cap us this guy comes down he's actually going to push us back one on the research track and we're going to load up our base and then get to it again so i really need to get some research so i need six seven eight nine ten eleven so i need eight and eight would be the best way to fit that out one two three four five six one all right so i'm gonna i'm gonna try to set this up that's a two so that'll knock him minus one because of the any air so he's gonna go it's an arrow but he can't move so it's gonna stick him there i need to clear the skies folks so i'll put a four here one two three four uh one two i'm gonna re-roll two one two we have these two left so one two three four let's do that four for research not a great research number but it's something yeah that's all we can do eek at least to get a re-roll for this guy but that brings him down here one two three four one two three four five so we want to put him up here in the anti-air to give him one two three four so that's how we'll do it yeah see this is where we end up spending turns just killing so we have six it's gonna cost me two power but we have a power of six that's gonna kill this guy kill this guy kill this guy kill this guy and kill this guy so he killed almost everybody which is kind of a good start pay one power we're gonna have a power of three tech but it's only gonna give us one notch so we need a nine and a nine that'll bring us up two more notches oof so bring him down mother ship phase she's gonna load all bays because there's nobody left get ready for the next turn okay oh big roll all right so one two three four five six do we want to risk that one two three four five so this is row this is the sixth row right here so this would be where we want to play our sixes so would that be wise to hmm i could play a five there actually five here one two three four five for our excavator right and that would bring him up one two three four five okay we definitely want to continue to kill the aliens now he's going to knock me down another one of these unless i can get to trigger one of the mother ships he's gonna end up knocking back one of my researches which is not good if they keep doing that so i do have a three so do i need to use that six at all i don't think i do so i'll just use this three maybe here and go one two three what that'll do is that's gonna push him down one because it's a mother ship but i don't trigger that which is good um and i am going to re-roll because i had a lot of big numbers there you don't want big rolls this early um six one two three four fives now six is this row so that's actually perfect because i can put that six there that'll bring him there now do i want to use these before i place that yeah i probably want to place this three here right before i place this six so because i don't want to reroll yet i'll place a three here bring him down three and now i'll place the six here one two three four five six and then re-roll this three or i play that up here for two because i want to kill everybody again what i forfeit though is this power and i don't necessarily need it this round i just needed three power to get through what i need to get through so activating all the rooms that matter this guy costs one power he's gonna excavate up to there these guys cost two power for a power of nine it's going to kill him him him him that's a lot well the ship comes down one we've got u we're gonna fill all the ship bays with purple first and then clear fortunately we are not progressing on the technology track and i think we have to start doing that one two three four five so row three one two three four five one two three four five i'm gonna re-roll everybody okay so now six is bottom row so this is where it all six seven eight nine ten so i can put this six here and this guy's coming down here all right um we're gonna roll uh i need i can do more six seven eight nine ten and then i need i do need some power remember these rooms behind so if i put a four here it's actually a plus one that will give me five power and move him one two three actually if i can get a three in there that'd be even better that would be even better and i could put a four here yeah i'll put a four there and move him one two three four now i have a two which i can put here one two one two and this guy slides over actually which isn't bad and i get to reroll this guy i get a three here i can put three here to get three more power one two three that was actually perfect so let's let's um figure this out so we've got three power one two three and we've got two plus one is three more power one two three so we filled up on power we've gotta spend two power to kill anything with a four or less so that's four three four three sorry and three gone so that was actually really good and we've gotta spend two more power to get eleven so six seven eight nine ten so we've got nine and eleven left to go mothership drops no effect these guys are lining up at the gates all right we're getting close folks real close now remember six is gonna push us off the reservation which is really really not good so we need as many fives as we can get but i can do a six here and there's no ships and re-roll everything so keep that in mind so let's start using these fives so if i do five here because remember i need nine five one two three four five i need a four yeah i could put a five here one two three four five and i could put a six here one two three no five six that would kill me i need to reroll that six for sure uh i'll put that six here and then re-roll these guys that six is bad that is bad all right i'm gonna take i'm gonna take a shot so i gotta i've gotta do it here for the five six seven five six so if it is five ninety three four hmm this is really bad i'm gonna have to do it here and not do the research this time and reroll this so six he's actually gonna fly through and hit me boom so i had to take the shot that's one that's not what i wanted all right this is this is not turning out well at all um well shoot i'm not gonna have enough power to do everything i wanna do here so i'm gonna spend two power to get six research actually you know what i'll spend one power to get six research five six i'll spend one power to get five [Music] anti-air and i can't afford these researches so i need 14 research boom one more damage line the ships up and this could be the last round i have one power so i need power i need like four power uh let's see four could do it four so put a four so i need three four i could do i need 14 or three and 11. so i need 11 on here so if i put the 4 here i could put a five here five here that's gonna nail me there and that's going to take a hit i could put a 4 here he'll go there re-roll um oh man so i've got my three i need i need a six or i'm gonna lose i need a six so i need to do five power at least and i can do five research because the thing is you can't combine research rooms you cannot they have to be the same room i have power maybe i do just five power here maybe i do yeah i have to do that and i can do five here no not gonna work it's kind of a waste but if i go here that'll move him four and he won't hit me buys me another round and i needed a six but i can do this and they won't move at all so let's see what that did um those do nothing this gets me five power um this goes for nothing and this is going to get me one more notch there um this is gonna bring him back up and they're both gonna respawn so one will spawn here one will spawn here okay so this could be the very end of me i have the power though and i just need 11. [Music] okay so we'll do six here that'll hit me for one i'll do six here that'll hit me for two so these two came off the board and hurt me so one more hit and i'm dead so i have to reroll and if we can get lows oh my god i might just do this [Music] um i could do oh no i don't think i can do it so because if i put say if i do two here that brings him down to what brings him down one because of that i get re-roll so i need two ones i need two ones here and i didn't so i'd have to place them at best one and one and that would bring both of them down and kill me so we were literally like one turn away from from winning this um but i might have been able to squeak that out but unfortunately not so let's go talk about it all right there you have it under falling skies so close so close so um if you're asking yes i've beaten this before um it's it's definitely a puzzle and i've gotten punished just like this this is really close i've gotten beaten far worse than this and i've actually beat it far better than this without maybe taking one hit or no hits it depends it really it really depends on the dice really depends on the moves you make and if you kind of really see certain combinations that you can pull off it's quite helpful now this was keep in mind this was the plain vanilla version of this game it's straightforward it's just rolling dice and moving guys there's not a lot of extra things you can do however when you play the campaign like there is a campaign here and it's not a it's not like a legacy rip it up throw it away campaign it is a campaign where you're going to get a little bit of story from like a comic strip and then you're going to have to choose between two cities um to defend um you will defend the one city then you're going to choose randomly a sort of a hero character right like like will smith in independence day he's kind of like the the pilot or the general or somebody right you're gonna have somebody uh with a special ability that you can activate once per game uh and that will maybe turn like if i had i know for a fact if i had one or two of those abilities i would have been able to win this scenario no problem this generic scenario but keep in mind that there are um alien sort of objectives or um sort of scenario uh changers like that that are part of the storyline that add a different twist to the game and i'm not going to go into any of that because again this is all spoilers and i think that's half the the beauty of a game like this is that it's you know with with the mechanics it's quite simple but i think really puzzling and thinking and really rewarding when you kind of really pull off those combos but it also has uh replayability in the fact that there's all these other sort of extras that come into it like i said like the cities each city has sort of its own different special ability um and special abilities that change even further later on but i want to uh um talk about there are additional dice that come into play in additional rooms that come into play um and to give you an idea like so this is the this is the demo kit so everything's been grayed out or blurred out intentionally so like you can see there's multiple packs of content that are going to come with this game to sort of to keep it fresh right you're going to play through a campaign and you're going to track your campaign progress on a log right um what cities you defended whether you want to lost because when you lose it's not game over it actually affects the campaign and how things go um from that point forward so the game certainly you know adds on to that and there's a lot of different um flavor in in the chapter summary so when you when you open up that new pack it's going to give you an introduction to what's happening um it's an introduction to the cities that are being affected the the new characters that are going to be involved and any of the new mechanics and new components that are going to be added to that play right so from a replayability perspective i think this one definitely has a lot of leg i've played the campaign and i do say it's it's it's pretty heavy like there's a lot going on as as simple as this may seem it does get more complex with all of the other mechanics that you're adding to it but it gives you a little bit more attachment to the cities you're protecting and the heroes that you're bringing along with you and making these decisions as to when when you want to activate their special ability right so i think really really cool mechanic i love i love to see solo games that are built as solo games right so like this one is a one player game no bones about it it's not a co-op that you can play solo this is a solo game um francis and i have played it together and it's it's not really something like you're going to be like well there's going to be an alpha gamer of course there is it's a solo like i'm rolling dice i know what i want to do with those dice i'm puzzling it out in my head the two of you are going to have differences in where to play those dice but so instead you know i play it for me and then she plays it on her own for herself and she certainly enjoyed i i hope that she'd have time to get down and speak to it but unfortunately she um she's unavailable right now she's uh she's answering to the boss so um i thought for the sake of getting this video done on the playthrough filmed i would just do it solo because it is a solo game i think it showcases well as a solo game fortunately i couldn't set it up in such a way that you could see the top to bottom almost like space invaders but i think um it's definitely harder to play with the with the baseboard skewed off to the side but at the end of the day i'm hoping that you at least got a feel for the core mechanic of the game and the play and the style and um you know and definitely know that there is a ton more in the box um to to supplement your plays after you've beaten it you know the first time you're going to want to go back and continue to do it and kind of explore these scenario packs and all the different campaign chapters that the game had so i hope you enjoyed the solo playthrough i don't expect you to see many of these on the channel but when they do come up they you know we we certainly will uh make a point to to take advantage of showcasing it for you but i hope you enjoyed the play through we'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: The Board Game Nexus

Views: 6,325

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Id: m7EN0uY8f8c

Length: 51min 29sec (3089 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 05 2020