Under Falling Skies | Playthrough | With Mike

[Music] hey this is mike with the one-stop co-op shop here with a playthrough of under-falling skies this is a solo only game from czech games edition and it's a dice placement game where you have these alien ships coming down to bomb your base and you're rolling these dice and assigning them one per column to try to stop them now this game does feature a campaign mode but there's some spoilers in it so i'm just going to show you the full basic game you can play before digging into any of that content i'm gonna quickly run through the game setup and how to play but if you want to skip that and go right to the alien blasting just use the time stamps in the video quick disclaimer by the way this is a review copy and by the way before i go through setup you can see this is a very vertical game and it's not ideal for me to be filming the way i am right now but i want you to be able to see kind of the scope of my decisions and all the stuff you do down here is heavily influenced by where the ships are up here so it's really tough for me to film this without kind of showing the whole thing at once so hopefully the sideways numbers aren't too bothersome so first i'll slide it in you have this mother ship all the way at the top and you put these five purple kind of basic enemy ships on each of these spawn points right here but that's off the board and offer the camera can see they'll be popping in very soon then you're gonna build your kind of enemy space board it's made of four pieces and each of these can be flipped to a harder side and that's kind of based on how comfortable you are with the game i'm winning somewhat consistently on the easiest level so i'm going to flip one of these to its harder side and see how that does and they want you to do it randomly so i'll just roll a die and we'll go one two three four if i get a five or six i'll re-roll and there we go so we're going to flip the very first one to its nastier side now you just have some setup down here on your main baseboard first you pick which city you want to defend i'm defending new york but just to show you this is washington dc you've got to wear your little research token will start here some of them have a tougher additional research spot you have to fulfill or even more than one they'll have a special ability unless it's roswell new mexico which is kind of like the basic tutorial one and then they'll tell you which kind of base tiles you're going to use in this case with new york i've got one side of c and the other side of b so that's going to determine all of my action spaces they also tell me where to start my energy i have two i place my base health icon right here my research token at the bottom and my excavator on the indicated space besides that i just need to have my five dice at the ready some extra white ships that might attack me and these two blue robot dice if they come into play all right now i'm going to summarize the basics of play in the game so this is at its heart a dice placement game you're going to roll your five dice and then one at a time you're going to place them in available spaces now the only available spaces are the ones that are behind your excavator going towards the surface and once per round you can put a die in front of your excavator to move it further and kind of unlock more building spaces now the key sort of conceit of the dice placement that makes this game such a great puzzle is that whatever die you put down the higher the number generally the more effective the action will be on the space you put it but the value of the die you place also controls how far any ships in the matching column move down and whenever an enemy ship moves all the way to your city board your base's life goes down by one and if you go down to the skull you lose the other way you can lose is if the mother ship which is going to move once at the end of every turn gets all the way down here this skull space to win you need to use these green spaces research actions to advance this research marker all the way up to the final space so you're placing dice moving ships but there's a few other pieces that are important here whenever you place one of the white dice you have to reroll every other die in your pool so you're going to do that twice per round unless of course the second white die is the last die you place so the first phase of the game is placing all your dice and moving the matching ships the second phase of a round is resolving all your dice in any order and the third phase is the mother ship moving down one space and now you can see why i put it up there at the top you'll be able to see it pretty soon and resolving the icon to the right of its new space and that's mostly it except for the specifics of the action spaces so let's get into those first of all at the top you've got these anti-air guns and those don't do anything for you they also don't cost anything but what they do do is they decrease the value of the die you place there by one for the alien movement and the reason that's important is whenever the aliens land on one of these little spaces it's going to execute an effect so the blue arrow will send them one to the right the pink arrow will send them one to the left this little mothership icon will move the mothership down one although it won't activate the effect so sometimes you actually want to do that and probably the most important type of space if a ship ends its turn on one of these little blast spaces with a number that'll give you a chance to shoot them down with your aircraft spaces so we can jump to those if you have dice on aircraft spaces like if i put a six here that means i would attack every enemy aircraft on a space equal to or less than that die's value or in the case of a space like this i'd have to put two dice there but i would add up the values that would be every enemy on a space with a seven or less value which doesn't even exist so like if this guy was here and i was attacking i would blow him up which means he just goes back to the mothership and he'll be spawned on the next round now you'll see most of these action spaces have one or more of these little yellow energy symbols that means to activate a die there or to activate the entire kind of set of the room for two dice on one of those multi-rooms i have to spend that much power but it's always optional i can just pull off a die and do no effect with it and here as you might guess is a way to generate power so if i had for example 9 there i could take my power up although the max is eight and to clarify when a room is more than one space you must have a die in every space if i only did like that this would not get to activate at all i wouldn't gain any power the other basic and very important type of room is alien research if i put a die there let's say a three i can move this alien research token which remembers how we win the game onto and or through spaces whose total sum is equal to or less than the value put here so here with a three i can only go on to that two but let's say that i had done a five now i could do the two and the three because that adds up to five hey if i'd done a six i go all the way up to that one as well and a quick note you'll see some spaces have like a minus one or a plus one in a gray thing that means that that is a modifier for the value so like if i put a die here a six that minus one would make it only generate five another basic action which i mentioned earlier is you can move your excavator forward which is going to unlock better and better rooms to do that you have to place a die ahead of it you can only do that once per turn but the value of the die must be equal to or greater than the number of spaces the excavator has to move and that's going to cost one power as well you see it right on the little token there so like this is one two three four five spaces ahead and that's a six so that would be fine a five would have also been fine but a three would not have been enough and i couldn't place it the last room type which is only on some boards is this robot room and when you resolve a die there you get to place one of your blue dice normally you can have the two on the board but new york's power is that you can only have one robot but they're stronger and you get to place this die on any available empty room like i could do it uh here and you put it at an angle on the turn you place it because you can't use it but on future turns it basically becomes a die you can use freely now i still have to put a die in the same column and if i need to i can kick that to die out and just lose the robot but the robots let you do more stuff on your turn without moving the enemy ships like here i would generate 10 power and each time you use the robot you just tick them down one value so they will eventually break and then you can build another one and that's honestly about it it's a pretty straightforward game there are a few details with destroying enemy ships and them spawning and the white alien ships that can come out but we'll get to those as they come up so here we go let's see if we can defend new york every round's going to start with me rolling my five dice and before i even start placing my dice let's kind of plan out my turn if i want to shoot some enemies i need at least three power if i want to move the excavator i need another one so my two starting power is not going to cut it i probably want to put two of my dice here then if i also want to shoot some guys that'd be three of my dice which would mean if i wanted to move the excavator i could either go here with a like one or a little higher or with a five or six i can get them all the way down here and unlock this entire third row of buildings including power generation that doesn't require two dice that's great so i'm definitely looking towards using a five or six to move that which means i wouldn't get a robot the first turn and new york gives me a bonus my robots are stronger they have one more value when they do actions but so it goes look at the enemy ship in this column a five would get it on a mother ship move a six would get it there so i guess i want to do the six so i'm gonna take my single six and i'll move the excavator and besides that i'd love to get some power and then shoot some guys down so like those three spaces and then i guess the anti-aircraft is my only option but i'd love to get the enemies on attack spaces so i need a one on the anti-aircraft space to get this guy to go here but they won't be able to blow anybody up anyway so i guess i can just use a higher value and not worry about it here i need a 4 which i don't have yet here i need a 5 which i do have so i should probably go ahead and place that before i reroll anything and then this guy would need to move three to be on that but because the only option available is the anti-aircraft i really need a four for that so except for the five nothing's doing quite what i want at the moment i'm sorry i forgot to actually move that guy so yeah let's go ahead and put the five here that'll get me halfway to generating some power and this guy's coming down and uh i've got a risky move i'm gonna go and get my plane set up with the other five that brings this guy to that blue arrow and puts him over here that gives me a five attack now super low odds but after i place one of these white dice i'm gonna re-roll and if i get a four i would get both this guy and this guy in destroyable spaces it's probably not gonna happen but hey why not take the chance unfortunately i can't get that guy in destruction space at all so let's just uh do the two and have him only move a single space because the anti-aircraft i roll this if it's a four it's awesome no but it does mean they only move one more space both those guys are going to get picked up by the mother ship i'll show you how that goes when it happens all right now i resolve my stuff i'm gonna spend one power to move the excavator all the way up here and then i'll get six powers i'm up to seven now the question is do i really want to spend three power just to stop a single ship because i don't have to use this i think the answer is no that was just kind of a bad round for attacking now the mothership moves down because it reached these guys they get picked up it activates the effect which is gonna push my excavator back one space not too bad and then you take all the ships that are on the mother ship this is from being destroyed or being picked up like they just were and you fill in these little spawn spots first you want to fill columns that have no enemies so here it's just going to be like that now it gets a bit more complicated when you have more ships because then you're going to spawn where the other ship on that column is the furthest away if you have a white ship the purple ones go before the white ones there's a few kind of simple rules but we don't need them yet all right here we go and by the way i might want to get a ship to go on a mother ship move space this round because that is a two white ship spawn spot and that's a pretty terrible because white ships uh don't even exist unless you let them spawn alright so look at my actions vista and i definitely want to blow up things successfully this time i might want to start researching i probably don't need power to definitely get a robot going since new york gives me a bonus with them let's see right off the bat i could get an amazing robot and that would move this guy right to the mother ship avoiding that nasty spot i don't want to have for other guys if i use the three with a minus one for me on the aircraft i could get him to get blown up a three would get this guy to a nice space maybe i could research with it i'm sorry that's not actually there yet but let's see a three plus one would be a four which would only get me a single spot that's not really worth it i could go here and move the excavator up to that seems pretty good yeah let me do that and he's going to come right here if i did a six here i know i was thinking about using it over there but that would get this guy on destruction space and have the airplanes ready to blow him up so i could definitely get both those guys yeah let's try for that hopefully we can get a mothership move somewhere else and interesting if i put a one here for the anti-aircraft gun that guy wouldn't move at all which means he would also get blown up is that what i want to do yeah i kind of like that and then i mean if i got another six that'd be cool but i guess i might just have to deal with the two white ships i can do uh this to get me some more power after i spend a bunch and now let's see what i get a four would be fine because i could blow him up a one i could blow him up a six the mother ship would move any of those would be good a five that's none of those things although i will get a good robot out of it oh i guess i could i want the robots i need to start researching and the robot will be a good one for that so he skips past everything i wanted unfortunately all right let's go ahead and uh excavate first and the aircraft you must take off they don't do anything let's go ahead and blow everybody up that'll take three power so three of the five go back to the board to be spawned next time i get four power back because of the minus one and i'm going to spend one of it to get a robot with value four because of the minus one there i can put them anywhere i want i'm feeling pretty good about power right now so let's put him right here so that's going to be a five when i use him the first time because of the plus one and then new york's ability makes him a six so he'll uh bump me up three research spots uh next turn for free basically well except for the two power here's the nasty thing the mother ships coming down and that's putting out two white chips so now we can kind of see the full spawning rules uh first you're gonna fill spots that don't have anybody in that column and purples fill them first and then extra ships will go to columns with people but farther away first in this case it doesn't matter though because we just have people everywhere that means now for these columns we're going to double move which is not great okay here we go some lower values this time and when my robot rotates he's ready to research now i want to note real quick that i love love love killing white ships because once you blow them up they don't come back again until the mothership spawns them so very important to take care of them if they get down and attack your base they just go right back to the uh mother ship and spawn again you gotta blow him up when he can which is making me think a one would be great in this column maybe on the fighter jets and i could use the gray one because that would put both of these ships where i could shoot them and i honestly don't care too much if this guy gets down and does one damage if i can take out that other white ship what would that need a five i do have a five oh man but okay maybe i could use the gray one and the white five so we'll start some air attack here uh let's see that's a four so i need to get at least a three here to kind of finish it up these guys will move into the kill zone and then again i'll do a five here in a second although what do i want to do with it oh i guess i could also attack there wait so i don't need the one do i the five would take care of it i mean i still want to do the one but yeah okay what do i do with the one then i can still put it there this one oh no i can't even put it there i just realized that's not unlocked yet so that would give me zero power generation and that wouldn't move them enough maybe i'll just re-roll because even a two would be okay here is there anything else i definitely want to do i don't have a two for that guy i guess i was going to do power generation there i mean honestly i want to get this a 3. could do that that would get him in a danger zone yeah let's do that i'm sorry i moved them without actually doing anything so let's just go ahead and do that to make it legal all right now and i love my other options so let's go ahead and do our plan with this so this guy's one away from hitting us but that guy's right where we want him we're rolling these two and a three oh two would get him oh darn it didn't excavate it although i still could with a three couldn't i one two no no i need a four yeah by the way the blue doesn't stop you from putting something yourself to put a die in each column yeah so let's put the two here for no effect it'll get that guy down to being killed and i'll reroll this hopefully i'll get something high one two three four five darn i can't excavate i don't think i need to make another robot but if i would have the mothership move again which would skip moving my excavator back i'm not too worried about that yet so let's do this and have him slip over to that column instead alrighty so that one does nothing that one does nothing that one does nothing a lot of nothing this time but here we blow up everybody with a four for no energy cost and the white chips go away until they spawn again which is beautiful yeah so very nice we almost completely cleared the board there and then we're finally gonna research thank god because that is what you need to do for the game remember this one is plus one and then plus one from the robot so that's two power and two three one that adds up to six and he ticks down to three for next time and then this guy for another power just does another three so pretty decent advance there but now the mothership comes down and pushes our excavator back to again and if it had been pushed back to the robot or further i would have lost that die and then simple enough spawning here they just go to the open columns so definitely gonna take a damage here i can just put a six there not even worry about it but let's go and roll it gets more power and i want to get my excavator moving again one two three four five six i could go crazy with it one two three four five now one two three four would get me there so i could excavate to there with a four i like that i think and in that case i probably want to get some power with these and actually the two and the three i have would get both these guys on killzones if i put the six there sounds good to me so uh two for that one three for that boom boom i get the six here which will i'm only generating huh i'm actually gonna lose power this term but it's okay i'll blow up almost everybody after we roll this let's see what we get a i could get my robot stronger or i could make him move less yeah none of those matter i just need to get the excavator out here so i can get access to better places so this guy hits us we lose one he goes back to the mothership to spawn next time oh wait did i totally forget to move this guy six all right so we get five power but it's going to be gone in a second one to get the excavator all the way down here three to blow up a bunch of people you know but one of the ships left on the board um and then i will use my robot so that will be two power and it was a three plus one plus one that'll be five so nice we get two spots and then sure i'll spend a power to get a four value robot i can just pick this up um do you want to go here now i guess i get oh i could go i guess those are the same yeah let's go here for now it's got to generate some power faster this next turn okay the motor shift moves down and that is a damage to my base but i'm imagining the enemy ships pretty well so i'm feeling all right so far i need to keep getting my research going though all right so i really want to blow this guy up which means that three would be perfect and the funny thing is i could put it on the ship space and ah but it costs so much i'm gonna try to get like a four here and pay uh no wow no energy yeah that'd be great let's see if four would have that guy jumped to this commonwealth if i activate this column first it's not as big of a deal i wonder 3 would actually get the excavator over there i kind of love that so sure let's try no that's right i wanted to shoot no no i was gonna use a different chip face okay there oh wait if i do a six for this one i'll go down to a five and i'll blow up that guy too yes i'm not even going to look at any other options for that there we go so i'm set for a five attack i can get most of these guys yeah i mean the five would get that guy and i could put it on wait was that a one yeah i can put it on power generation which is exactly what i need right now so there beautiful and i could do one more and get that guy two yeah i mean i mean it doesn't really matter that much i guess but can't hurt yeah sure let's do it all right let's see what this last one comes up with a six lots of power and he won't uh do anything negative so yeah well do i need that much power i'm only spending three and i'm getting six i'll be at four so that would put me above the max but i guess what else am i going to do with it so sure let's go ahead in retrospect i kind of wish i had saved a bigger die there and i could have researched again how well all right so way too much power generation let's uh spend one to get my excavator there so very close to having all my actions unlocked the big one is this huge research one here it's going to help me jump up the track quickly um here we get a free five attack that literally blows up everybody except this one um we'll generate six power and then spend two of it to get six research this guy's down to a three and that perfectly gets us up there nice we are slightly more than halfway although you can see the values are very high at the end and then this guy gets us way above max power but that's okay and we do have a white ship coming so it's going to go in the same column as the guy that's already on the board there's no beautiful perfect shot here this guy would get shot on a one or a four this guy on a two but again the white ship bothers me more i might just let this one uh come down and attack us but two would have the mother ship go i don't really want that to happen so let's see i have a very good fighter jet space unlocked now i could use even a weak die there and still get a bunch of people like if i put a four here it would be a five attack and that guy would come down and get shot by it actually let's see if i put a four in this column he would come down to a shooting space this guy would jump over and then would i need another four to get him huh i think maybe like that kind of like this idea and then wait did i need the four for the shooting the other guy i did i did need the four darn it well the shot is more important i think let's go ahead and do a research so that guy goes there and this guy jumps over there okay now i want to place a white and hopefully get a four for that although they're all in four spaces so i guess a three would be enough i just want to move the guy where i want so where should i put this one i'm already going to attack i guess i could just do something like actually that would be fine right oh yeah that guy would actually get shot so that's a beautiful move oh and i did get a four so the question is i want to use a one or not so the four would definitely go there but should i use the one first do i want a one i'm gonna get a new robot okay so honestly i'll put the four here and to see what comes up i think got a four um all right i could put it here and does not have to pay to power and get a weaker robot either way he's not gonna get shot so sure i'll give myself the option all right so we'll pay one for the excavator it's almost to the bottom let's go and pay two to blow everybody with a five or less up which is my white that guy and that guy and that guy very nice and i'll use the robot before i decide which one i want to get a new robot with so that's two power and he's a five with the bonuses oh crud wait wait hold on hold on yeah i guess a five oh this is totally a waste i didn't realize yeah okay so let's not do that because there's a one in front of us and then a six i don't even pay attention to that so i'll just use this single power to get me there and then it's a waste otherwise i can still replace the robot this one would spend two power but get him to where he's actually strong enough to get over that six yeah let's have to get some more power next time so i'll just uh keep him where he is but oh wait i'll put him here it's clearly way better it's the exact same thing except for one less power now the excavator is about to go back one space but that won't cover him up so we're okay yeah and this one i won't use yeah so as i said here it comes that gets pushed back these guys are all hanging out there and i'm feeling pretty good here if i can just get my research going i need to unlock this space and there are no more auto excavator move back so like a three would get it there four would get it there other one is great for me oh some high high numbers that's a five that's safe that's also a five that's safe oh and that's a six that's safe what could i do with a six i could get the excavator down i could do a research and get past that six and not have to use the robot or also use him that seems pretty good yeah yeah i think i think i want to do that so there he goes let's see that's the plus one ship as long as i can get some power so if i put a five there oh no that's not the right column could put a five there but it's not strong enough to actually shoot that guy down let's see what if i i still think this is okay what if i do a five here oh wait i can wait until i do something with that column before i uh move him double let's do a five here to get me more power and this guy will be right there actually nothing else is appealing me too much so let's let's do a five of white so i get a re-roll this guy will jump over to there four and a five huh see the four would get that guy killed i don't know if i would use it for anything i could go one space i really want to get oh god i already cut myself off in the possibility of getting this as far as i want actually yeah this works out perfectly if i do a four here that guy will be there and then a five here that guy will be there i'll clear the entire board yes so for the four i don't know a robot i'm not going to use and for the five an excavator move why not oh wait oh wait i didn't actually do an attack did i where was he going to attack i know i did right here okay we're fine all right so first things first i didn't move this guy and remove that guy geez let's actually move the aliens mike yes i'm wiping out everybody except that person awesome um okay i'll generate four power gets me to a safe spot for the moment and we'll move the excavator for one not quite where i want him though i'll shoot for two clear them out and i'll have the robot it costs one power that'll be a research of five or no six with both bonuses so we get over the spot that'll be another six i'm gonna actually just save the power oh no no i can't save the power because i'm gonna lose a research spot in a second see i'll spend one to move i only stop there and then in a second it's gonna move me down one but it'll only be another three i have to spend and no point in doing this because it would be a three value anyway darn i'm low on power again okay mother ship moves i lose research those guys all queue up to attack again here we go almost to the end maybe i should have played on one difficulty level higher in retrospect okay okay okay six we get that guy right there and give me six power oh that seems too good to pass up wait do i want to place anything else though cuz that's a white and this guy's the furthest along a five would get him perfectly situated for a kill and there's a five coming up on the research if i reach it yeah so i think that's the right call there he goes anything else i want to do now that guy needs exactly a four i could get more research or get my robot back up to snuff now that's a six though i can actually have a six to attack that seems unlikely so maybe i shouldn't worry about that how about a two here though well that guy's got two values i probably need to worry about him yet this one would be a five to blow him up yeah you know i don't love any of the other values for now so let's get the sixth power move this guy down and re-roll fours and fives i definitely want to move this to free up that research spot then i kind of want to get my robot in there so i could do like a four here oh yeah and that gets him right where i want him so that works fine i need to actually shoot some people right he's on a six so i could put the five there and that would work out i mean i wouldn't hit the middle guy but that's okay yeah i don't really want a four for him so let's do that first to uh get the re-roll and of course i still get a four so he's going to move the mothership in extra space which means it'll do a research which whereas it wouldn't have done anything oh wait i could do yeah you know i think it's worth it i'm going to uh do the a gun and have him do nothing all right i liked that pretty well let's get my six power first because man i need it and then let's go ahead and shoot everybody down uh just these two guys are surviving um the excavator is all the way in its home it's never leaving so we have everything available i did not get a new robot yet okay so for one power i get to do a five which is just going to be a three both of them are going to be a little bit underused here because this guy's giving me five as well but also only for three and the motion moves down for nothing oh man this is definitely looking like a win and you get 5 1 and then 12 and i mean this by itself with like one of those should be pretty easy to do it i probably just go ham here if i roll big enough numbers and not even worry about the enemy ships i mean let's calculate so if i got like a four and a six here that'd be 13 i just need the power for it so that'll get me over the hump up there which means i just need like um i don't know a five on one of these and then a big die for a power there and actually a four would do it here right that's seven power so we need to get a five here i don't actually need a six because it's minus one huh maybe i hold off and see if i get more high numbers i don't think i'm attacking at all so let's do that and oh man okay that and have him move really far i'm kind of going all or nothing here okay big numbers big numbers okay that's sort of kind of it i need the 4 there that would get me the 5 and then i needed a 6 for the power wait what if i did the 4 here that would give me 5 power which i think is how much i needed and that guy would move the mother ship down that's fine and i think that i think is it did i get this right i guess we'll find out in a second and then uh my one i mean i know these really helpful so let's just have the guy not move all right if i calculated right i win here that's five power i'm up to seven um and then this research gets me over that hump oh and i didn't even need this one i thought i'd need enough power for the robot but that 13 i guess 10 plus three at four power uh gets me up there oh yeah so that was even easier than i thought so there you go underfalling skies we got a victory now again that's just the basic play of the game there's also a really cool campaign mode but i'll talk about my feelings on that front in my review i don't want to spoil anything but it's definitely really cool check out my thoughts by clicking on the link that just popped up good gaming everybody hope you had fun i'll see you at the next step

Channel: One Stop Co-op Shop

Views: 13,410

Keywords: board, game, one stop, co-op shop, under falling skies, CGE, solo, dice placement, playthrough

Id: Q0hAKC4HyI4

Length: 33min 15sec (1995 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 28 2020