Undergrove is a modern board game by Elizabeth Hargrave and Mark Wootton. Elizabeth Hargrave also designed Wingspan, a wildly popular game, so I had high expectations for Undergrove. After a single play with everyone at the table playing it for the first time, I saw that it has the potential to be a very good game. I definitely like it more than Mariposas, another Hargrave game that came out in 2020, shortly after Wingspan was released.
Undergrove had only one meaningful flaw I’ll describe before describing the game: The instruction manual does not just say outright that you score points from mushroom tiles. The picture below shows the scoring rules:
As you can see, this is sort of backward. The rule should be written so that you score mushroom tiles, and then it could describe how you know which tiles to score. When I read the rules to the group, the first part about scoring roots stuck in their heads, and the rest was lost. At the end of the game, scoring was confusing because of this. This was partly my fault for skimming through the instructions quickly, but it’s still something a writer could help with by making the first line of the scoring rule all about where the points come from, not how to get to them. Notice in the picture that there are event numbers related to the number of roots, and those, for a first-time player, are not clearly counters – they look like points! A quick edit to move the last paragraph to before the bullet points and the problem would be solved.
Another interesting point is that there appear to be actions on the Mushroom tiles. But that’s not exactly true. The only actions available are on the player board, but one of them, “Activate,” is for doing an action-like thing on a Mushroom tile. The confusion comes from the action spaces on the player board looking like the Mushroom tiles – the corners of the spaces have round insets just like the tiles, and the costs and benefits are laid out the same way – so “Activate” is essentially a way to take an action shown on a Mushroom tile. I understand that this ends up meaning all Mushroom tiles actually have actions on them. It’s a little weird that the rules didn’t just say this, freeing up space on the player boards for other things like setup hints or to just cut off to make the boards smaller.
The rules can be found here (unless they are moved by someone else): https://www.alderac.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Undergrove_BaseGame_En_1P_Rulebook.pdf
Gameplay
The game is simple in structure. Some actions are listed on the player boards, and others are shown on Mushroom tiles. You can take any action on your player board and you can take any action on a Mushroom tile that also has one of your roots on it. The price to take an action varies but usually consists of paying carbon and other resources and sometimes flipping over a colored disc on your player board. The resources are carbon, Potassium, Nitrogen, and Phosphorus.
Actions on player boards let you place seedlings and their roots and optionally place mushroom tiles. You can also absorb carbon from Mushrooms into (onto) your seedlings and eventually grow them into trees. Photosynthesis can be done to convert Nitrogen to Carbon, which is important since almost every Mushroom tile action requires that Carbon be placed on the tile to perform the action, along with any other resources required.
The whole point of the game is to gain and convert resources so you can plant seedlings and grow trees to then later score points “from them.” I say “from them because, as I said before, points are not scored for seedlings, trees, or roots; they are scored from Mushroom tiles that have your roots on those tiles. The roots simply tell you where you can score points, and they are not themselves worth points.
As I said, the game is simple in structure. The complexity comes from the ever-increasing number of Mushroom tiles and their available actions, not all of which are always available to all players, and from the “math” needed for figuring out optimal actions to get the most significant benefit from every action.
A Typical Sequence of Actions
The game starts with the “forest,” which contains five Mushroom tiles. A single T-shaped tile is placed on the table to start the game so the beginning tiles are always the same. Players also start with a few of every resource and a sampling and root placed on a corner of the center Mushroom tile.
With this in mind, here are some turns a player might take in a game:
- Take an action to Reproduce. Placing a Mushroom tile is optional, so that happens first, and then a seedling is placed on the corner of the new Mushroom tile and a root up against that seedling on top of the new Mushroom tile. This will allow the new Mushroom tile to be scored for that root as long as there is a carbon on the seedling (or a tree) to allow that root to score.
- Take an action from a Mushroom tile by paying a carbon onto the tile while paying some other resources to the bank as required. Get some new resources or do conversions as allowed by the Mushroom tile.
- Absord carbon from a Mushroom tile (placed there when someone took an action on that tile) onto a seedling. If there are three carbons on the seedling, change them into a tree! Trees are good since they let you score up to 4 roots off that tree.
- Take photosynthesis action to gain some new carbon and convert nitrogen into carbon. This is the only way to get the carbon needed to pay for actions.
There are other actions, but this subset should show how the game works.
Final Thoughts
I like the game. The only similar game that immediately comes to mind is Earth and I didn’t much like Earth. But Undergrove seems to have more straightforward rules, something that is definitely required in a game where the complexity of the game board grows as the game progresses. I liked playing Undergrove, and I’ll definitely play it again.