Solo survival in a tin

I love the concept of tin box games, the way you can fit a complete board game into them! 🤩 It’s so cool! The latest I had the pleasure of playing is 🛡️Buried Beneath🛡️. This is a solo only game. You play as a retired adventurer living in a peaceful town, where an ancient evil beneath is stirred from its rest, attracting all kinds of monsters. You have to dust off your old weapons and fight!

Buried Beneath is a tower defense game. You have a Hero and can move around, attack and use abilities - ☝️but there is a twist to this, as you can’t just do whatever you like. You have to use villager meeples and place them on locations in the village. Every location has stat icons depicted - icons either give you 1 point of that stat, or you can do that action by decreasing that stat by 1. The higher that stat, the stronger the action. It all becomes a thinky resource management worker placement game, especially as certain slots have extra stat costs.

Enemies are represented by dice. They spawn from their cards each round and walk towards the village center. They also attack, so you have to be careful of where you are, and where you place villagers, as losing them quickly leads to defeat. 🧐 Every monster type has its own movement and attack rules that keep things interesting.

Subsequent waves become more difficult as more enemies will spawn, but you also unlock additional villagers. After 4 waves the game culminates in a boss fight 😈 - defeat the boss and you are victorious! 🏆

You might see a bunch of dice in the pictures, however the game has no randomness aside from setup. You exactly know what the enemies will do, and what happens after your turn. This makes the game a real puzzle - and a really hard one at that! Ideal for solo play. 😉

During setup you do randomize the layout of the village, pick 1 of 4 bosses and 1 of 6 heroes, plus the order the monster will appear in also changes. So replayability is guaranteed! 😊 I am also a fan of the aesthetics, as it reminds me of old-school video games! I especially love the little blue dice that show the cooldown of your skills. 🤩