Often, it’s the look of a game that draws you in. Some games have massive miniatures or 3D elements that grab the eye, but most of the time it’s the artwork that hooks you. So it is with Unearth, but does it have the substance to go with its style? In Unearth, 2-4 players will take on the role of tribes of Delvers exploring the ruins of a mythical world. Long ago, your ancestors built wondrous cities and monuments — now, it’s up to you to claim these ruins and build new places of power along the way. The game will end when all the ruins from the deck have been claimed, and whoever has the most points wins.
On your turn, you’ll select one of your Delvers and a ruin that you want that Delver to explore. The twist is that they’re represented by dice — three d6s, one d4 and one d8 (the numbers denote the number of sides each die has). To claim ruins, you want high numbers which means the d8 (which is able to roll results of 7 and 8) is potentially your most powerful agent.
Sometimes you might want low numbers, though, and then the d4 is your best bet. This is an interesting decision to make at the beginning of each of your turns, with more riding on it than is initially apparent. Ultimately, though, these are dice — so all your best laid plans can fall apart in an instant. Mitigation is possible, so you’ll never be completely at the mercy of random chance, but you’ve got to be thinking about probabilities all the time.
So how can you mitigate your dice rolling? That’s where the Delver cards come in, which offer ways to manipulate the game — for example, you can ensure that the next die you roll gets a +1 or a -1, or you can reroll a die that’s already been placed on a ruin, or you can choose which ruin to explore after rolling a die and seeing the result. These cards are great, and offer players just enough agency to feel like they’re in control; but the trick is that they must be played before the main part of your phase. Once again, it comes back to contingency planning and hedging your bets.
It’s not a case of ‘who rolls the highest wins’ either, because lower numbers mean that you get to collect stones — which are coloured remnants that are placed randomly on each ruin. Apart from the ruin-exploring, you’re also trying to arrange these stones in circular patterns that allow you to construct wonders. Any six stones in a circle will give you a lesser wonder, but six stones of the same colour will result in a greater wonder which is worth more points. Each game also has a set of unique wonders that provide endgame scoring opportunities or special powers, and each have their own special requirements to build.
As has already been mentioned, Unearth is a beautiful game. The wonderful tarot-sized Ruins cards are reminiscent of the lovely mobile game Monument Valley, which is high praise indeed if you’re familiar with that game. The unique wonders also manage to pack in a surprising amount of detail with not much to work with. Scoring is a matter of collecting sets of various types of cards or building multiple wonders, and is straightforward enough to make Unearth a game that can be played with just about anybody. It showcases the good parts of a dice game - enough randomness to provide dramatic twists of fate and punch-the-air moments, but not enough to make players feel like they’ve got no say in whether they win or lose. It’s a solid game that could find a home in any collection.