Review Summary: Independence Day (the movie) plus Space Invaders (the arcade game) plus dice slinging is a killer combination!

Blurb from the publisher: 'As the mothership descends to complete her conquest of Earth, enemy ships fill the skies. In your underground research bunker, you are Earth's last hope.

Under Falling Skies is a solo game with a multi-mission campaign. In each mission, you take charge of defending a besieged city. Your actions are powered by an innovative dice-placement mechanic. When you choose an action, you are also choosing which enemy ships will descend. Bigger numbers give better effects, but they also cause ships to descend faster.

Expand your underground base to gain access to more powerful actions, allowing you to shoot down enemy ships or deploy robots to increase your workforce, but don't forget to work on your research and watch your energy supply.

The mothership draws closer every round, ratcheting up the tension.

Can you complete your mission before your base is destroyed? Defend your base both in the standard game, or save the world in the campaign!'

What you get: Your EUR 32 or equivalent will buy you Under Falling Skies, the dice-rolling dedicated solo game which lasts around 30 minutes. One year after its publication, the game sits comfortably on BGG's top-250, having won already two nominations as well as an actual price, for the best solo game of its year.

In addition to the 16-page A5 English rulebook which can also be downloaded from the publisher's website free of charge, the game includes the following: 5 purple Ships, 4 white Ships, 3 plastic tokens 7 wooden dice, one Excavator token, one Mothership tile, 4 Sky tiles, 3 Base tiles, 3 City tiles, one Campaign Notebook, 4 Chapter Comics Sheets, 12 upgradable Characters, 13 unique Scenarios, 9 additional Base and Sky tiles, cardboard scenario tokens, and one orange Ship.

Gameplay: Don't allow your base to take too much damage! Don't allow the alien mothership to descend too low above your city! Reach the top of your research track in order to defeat the aliens! But how does all this work?

The board is a vertical one, depicting a mothership that slowly descends upon a hapless city. Depending on the city that you will use to defend, you will receive an additional bonus. As an example, Roswell (the introductory city) does not confer advantages on one of its sides, while on its even easier side it allows you to advance your research the first time your city gets hit. Washington DC on the other hand allows you to set a white die to 6 without rolling it turn after turn, while its even easier side allows you to set any die to 6. The threat level can be further adjusted by choosing either side of each sky tile. One is easier (with lower research thresholds and less enemy ship effects) while the other is much harder.

Below the city lies a bunker constructed on a 5 by 6 grid. The bunker is only minimally developed. At the beginning of a game, the player has access only to five AA gun rooms (which slow down attacking ships), as well as a limited number of other rooms. belonging to four different types: tunnels (they do nothing), energy rooms (they generate energy to power research and jet fighter rooms), jet fighter rooms (they allow you to shoot down enemy ships), research rooms (they make your research track advance, which is what will ultimately win you the game), and robot rooms (they create robots which work for you with diminishing efficiency). Above the city, the alien threat is deploying fast; at the beginning of a game each attacking ship has 16 spaces before it hits the city.

The game is played in a series of rounds, each of which has three phases.

In the Dice phase the player rolls his five dice. The two white dice are different than the three grey dice in that when a white die is placed on the board, all remaining dice need to be rerolled. Thus, and depending on the order in which you place your dice, you will reroll at least one die once, or more dice more than once. The dice can be placed on your bunker, but only inside rooms that you have already excavated. There is one prerequisite only: that only one die can be placed in a column. After a die is placed, the enemy ship or ships that are on that column are going to move with the speed indicated on the die. In other words, high numbers will make these ships come down to your city kamikaze-style, while low numbers will force them to descend gently. Depending on the place that a ship finds itself after it completes its movement, it might be forced to change column, make the mothership descend towards the city, or become a potential target for your jet fighters.

In the Rooms phase the player resolves his dice in the order he chooses. There is some balance to be kept since stored energy can only be that much, while some rooms can be quite demanding energy-wise. Rooms are not born identical, even when they belong to the same type. As an example, there are rooms which require no energy expenditure, others which provide a bonus to the output of the die that was placed there, and others still that reduce that output. There are single rooms as well as interconnected rooms (which need to be powered in their entirety in order to produce the desired result). Jet fighters are straightforward: if enemy ships are currently in locations where the jets can target them, all the ships in those locations will be destroyed provided that your die gives an adjusted output equal to or higher than the one indicated on each space. Similarly, research increases incrementally. The output of a single room will allow you to progress by the sum depicted; if that means completing more than one research steps in one go, even better. Robot rooms provide results in the next round, yet the robots they create do not need to abide to placement restrictions. Robots keep working until they hit a value of 0, or until you decide to replace them with new robots. You can also invest a die into expanding your bunker by an appropriate number of rooms, which will give you more options in the future. You have no control over their type; that is already pre-printed on each board. You do however know the number and type of rooms you will be getting depending on how much you invested in your excavation exercise.

In the Mothership phase the mothership descends one row closer to the city. It is also going to spawn more ships, so that each column has at least one, if not more. Certain rows make this descent even more impactful, by reducing your research, destroying rooms in your bunker, or spawning additional ships for you to fight against.

The game can also be played in campaign more, with each scenario having its own intricacies. Expect a campaign to last around ten games. Campaigns are fully replayable. In fact, even without playing them, a player can choose to take some of their scenario elements for an otherwise standard one-off game. These include satellites (increase your research when enemy ships descend through particular spaces), fighting against a bigger number of ships, evacuating civilians, and many more. Scenarios introduce upgradeable characters which provide additional powers (e.g. increasing the output of your dice) and asymmetry. The rulebook dedicates half a page on how to combine different elements from different modules, in order to play scenarios at the desired difficulty level.

The strong points: Space Invaders keeps on giving, at least on the conceptual level. We never examined Z-Man Games' The Battle at Kemble's Cascade together, we did however visit the also solo 'Fire!'. Under Falling Skies is very different to both aforementioned games, yet I am surely not the only one appreciating the strong disaster movie influences combined with a mitigated dice rolling mechanism.

Once you understand what is going on (and the ruleboook could have been better presented; keep on reading about that), it is an extremely easy game to set up and play. It is fast-paced, and lasts just as much as it needs to; not a minute longer. It will easily please not only a hardened gamer, but it can also serve as an introductory experience towards puzzly games for preadolescents. It cannot be played by more than one person, yet playing a solo game without lighting up a screen is a reward of its own. The reason this game is so good (and as addictive) is multifold.

First come the mechanics. The game is an ode to calculated risk management; it leaves and dies on that premise. Luck plays a part, yet it is heavily mitigated, be it due to the characters, the special effects, or the white dice that force you to reroll. The last part is brilliant; I don't recall having seen such a mechanism elsewhere. Simply put, it gives you some control over what to keep and what not, and forces you to act with at least a minor part of initial roll. The end-result of using the mitigation mechanisms efficiently is that, when it comes to the luck aspect, one cannot judge the game after one or two plays. Besides, the numbers only matter that much if you don't know what to do with them. There are some rather obvious strategies in that you might want to expand your bunker on the first few rounds, potentially at the expense of taking a hit or three. You might want to purposefully move some alien fighters left and right, forcing the mothership to drop and otherwise sparing you from an effect which, had it taken place at the Mothership phase, it would have caused you more grief than you would be prepared to take. The important thing is not to lost the game; this doesn't mean however that you should avoid getting damage, if such an action will give you an advantage for in the future.

Then comes the feeling. Clearly, this is not a simulation, and the game tries to be thematic only up to a certain extent. Yet, when you see the alien fighters whizzing every time you achieve a major breakthrough in one area or another, it feels real. It is as if the aliens try harder because you are doing so well. Taking the 'earth's defence' premise into account, there is always a sense of urgency. One game might feel as if the aliens are getting closer and closer, and that you are surviving on borrowed time. The other might be a dominating performance, with the situation being always under control. Most plays will fall in-between these two extremes, with ebbs and flows depending on your rolls. Sometimes a single roll will determine everything; ah, the adrenaline!

Then comes the customization. I like modular games, the combinations that are on offer here however are mind-blowing. With that many cities, characters, choices between easier and harder skies not only in numbers but also in quality (in games of equal difficulty, do you want to beef up the higher or the lower part of the sky?), the game literally offers a lifetime of customization. I don't know if Czech Games Edition plans to publish an expansion, even if it never does so however the game is as complete as it can ever be. It's a surprising little box too; nobody expects it to be that heavy. Even when you throw all the redundant packaging cardboard aside, the components barely fit in.

The artwork is very well done. I really like the shapes of the alien space ships and the cool throwback to the 1980s. The campaign sheets and some cardboard pieces with rules also include a cartoon which revolves around the game's theme. Nice, and especially for the cheesy the moment the plot jumps the shark; it is not the aliens that are evil, it is the AI that they built to assist them that enslaved them and made them attack the humans. Hah!

The weak points: Under Falling Skies is very honest in that it addresses itself to one player only. It doesn't work well as a coop, no matter your good intentions to engage with a coplayer. There is nothing wrong with that of course, I am however registering it for those wondering whether they can use it as a collective exercise.

Setting the thematic puzzle aspect and the luck factor aside, the experience can come out as repetitive and partially fiddly. I take that for granted; in Space Invaders you are literally trying to shoot down slowly descending pixels. If you are not into puzzles, or into games that can be potentially decided on a roll of a single die, you might not get as much fun out of it.

The campaign is nice, yet I do not recommend running it straight in one session. It gets tedious even for the most dedicated player. Second, you are likely to make mistakes, and keep using rules that are no longer valid while ignoring rules that are. The game is modular for a reason; take advantage of it.

The game is easy once you learn it, yet the rulebook is poorly organized. I must have played half a dozen one-off games before getting into the campaign and I kept making mistakes. That was also a result of the aforementioned fiddliness. The rulebook is not long, yet the logical progression is far from optimal. The same is valid about the campaign-related material which is presented in loose sheets. Good gimmick, yet it limits usability.

This must be one of the very few times that I am left wanting with this publisher's ziplock bags policy. The components can be divided either by type or by campaign, and some players might prefer one over the other. Unfortunately, the small number of bags, not to mention their small size, is rather suboptimal. No serious harm is done, this does however increase setup times.

Conclusion: Under Falling Skies is one of the most dedicated solo games I have played in my life. I find it unbelievable that it achieves so much with such few mechanics. It is not hard to understand, it never overstays its time, and it offers a myriad possibilities when it comes to setup and customization. It is partially repetitive, but that would be similar to accusing Independence Day for not being avant-garde or Space Invaders for shooting silly pixels slowly coming at you. At its current position in the top-250 of BGG, I feel that the game is effectively underrated.

To find out more about Under Falling Skies and Czech Games Edition take a look at https://czechgames.com.

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