Verdict
A cozy town-builder with light strategy and sharp narrative flavor, made more interactive by ghosts and a cleaner, more refined feel than the original.
What It Is
Above and Below: Haunted is a standalone sequel in the Arzium world where you build a stilt-house village in marshlands, recruit villagers, construct buildings, and dive into watery caves for short, choice-driven story encounters. It’s designed for 2–4 players, targets roughly a 90-minute session, and keeps the core identity of the series intact, village management above ground plus story exploration below.
If you’ve played the original Above and Below, Haunted feels cleaner and more refined. Actions flow more efficiently, and the reward curve from story encounters tends to feel better balanced, which makes it a strong standalone entry or a meaningful upgrade.
How It Plays
Each round is essentially worker placement with a personal village engine. You assign villagers to jobs to gather resources, build structures, and set up income. At key moments, you send an expedition below ground, draw a cave, read a short passage, choose an approach, and then resolve it with a dice check that can be influenced by preparation and bonuses. Haunted adds a clear layer of tension through ghosts. Buildings can become haunted, which pressures your reputation, and you can spend actions to banish ghosts from your own village, then push that problem outward by sending a ghost to haunt someone else.
Two additions matter a lot in practice. Boats give you small but meaningful control, including a way to stabilize exploration outcomes when you really need a result. Pearls and more demanding cave opportunities also create a risk-reward ladder, so you can choose safer, steady progress or gamble for higher payoffs. If you use Forteller narration, it replaces most of the page-flipping with voice-acted reading, which makes the exploration loop flow more smoothly for many tables.
Who It’s For (and Who It’s Not)
This is for players who want a “real board game” structure but still enjoy story beats and table atmosphere. If you like worker placement that stays approachable, plus short narrative choices that feel different each session, this is a strong fit. It also suits groups who want interaction, but not constant aggression, because the tension here is more about timing, contested opportunities, and the ghost layer than direct take-that.
It’s not for players who want a pure strategy euro with minimal randomness. Exploration still lives and dies on uncertain outcomes, and the ghost system introduces a nudge of meanness because the cleanest way to deal with your problem is often to relocate it to someone else. If your group is sensitive to that, you should know it up front.
Why It Works
The game’s best quality is balance. Village-building gives you structure and a sense of control, while the storybook gives you surprise without turning the whole session into pure chaos. Haunted’s ghost layer adds a simple, readable pressure that forces decisions instead of letting everyone turtle in their own engine. The result is a session that feels like you played a strategy game, but you also got a handful of memorable moments along the way.
One Thing to Know Before You Buy
The exploration loop is still a swing factor. You can prepare, you can mitigate, and you can make smarter choices, but the moment you tie story outcomes to dice, you are accepting that some expeditions will spike and some will whiff. If your table hates that feeling, this won’t convert them. If your table enjoys “a plan, then a story, then a roll,” it lands exactly where it should. Boats help, but they don’t remove variance; they just give you a safety valve when you need one.
If this sounds like the right fit for your table, you can check availability here:
👉 See details on Amazon
If you enjoyed this micro review format, you can jump to our Wondrous Creatures Board Game Micro Review for a more combo-driven, cozy strategy experience.
If you want exploration taken to a higher-risk, more open-ended extreme, read Vantage Board Game Micro Review: A High-Risk Open-World Exploration Experience.
And if you’d rather stay in euro territory with tighter planning pressure, our Rats of Wistar Board Game Micro Review is the cleanest next step.
