Sub Terra: Annihilation

Sub Terra: Annihilation – Now we get bombs!

Sub Terra: Annihilation is a follow-on modular expansion for Sub Terra designed by Tim Pinder. This expansion has you returning to the caves you barely escaped last time and searching for the three weak spots that will collapse the tunnel network below. Hopefully you can escape before that happens.

The Caves

A quick overview of Sub Terra for those uninitiated. Sub Terra is a co-operative game for 1-6 players that has players create a network of caves through laying tiles like an underground Carcassone. You each play as an experienced cave explorer with a couple of special abilities to help you and your team navigate the tunnel system.

You will face the dangers of the caves, unstable passages, flash floods and thick choking gas. Every turn, drawing a hazard card to see which part of the environment wants to kill you this round or to introduce the horrors whose home you have invaded. You will be forced to push your luck and take risks in the hopes of outrunning the monsters who pursue you relentlessly unless you can hide or were lucky enough to bring someone with a gun. Your only chance of truly escaping this nightmare is to press on and find the exit, especially as your torch battery power is running low and trust me, you won’t survive the darkness.

Going Back

The setup is changed, Sub Terra: Annihilation places the exit tile at the far edge of the map and treats everything behind it as an impassable wall. This means you will now be only able to build out the cave network in one direction and always need to be aware of your escape route. This is important to factor in as you build the cave, as you will now be playing with the intention of going into the cave and back out again to win. The stack of cave tiles is shrunken down by 18 tiles to make it a smaller map and hopefully give time to explore and then navigate back to the exit. However, in my experience it is still a very fine line and can lull you into a false sense of security as you burn quicker through the tiles so every wasted turn failing to place a rope or backtracking through a dead-end section will cost you. Not to mention the 2 new cave-in tiles which come with more exits but with 3 possible dice rolls to collapse them, making them a likely spot for wasted digging time. Twice in my playthrough I got unlucky and dug one out, only for it to collapse right behind or on top of me, on my next turn.

Bombs!

As I said above, now we get bombs!

Sub Terra: Annihilation comes with 3 bomb item cards that can be given to any character at the start of the game. They provide them with the single use action of placing a bomb on one of the new bombable cave tiles scattered through the stack. Using the bombs is treated as a new objective, replacing the old objective of simply surviving, and are the cause of the new rules and setup. Now you must locate the 3 weak spot tiles, place your bombs on them and escape the way you came in before the time runs out and you are left lost in the darkness.

This addition to the game changes the strategy and how you think about creating your cave system as you must think of your return journey. I really enjoyed this new way of viewing the cave and felt like I was more aware of how I could move through the cave in different ways and was even more wary of drawing tiles that would create issues in the future.

The other aspect that requires some strategizing are the bombs themselves as they are single use. This means that it is important to be able to move each bomb carrying character to the correct space when it is revealed, requiring that you stay as a group as much as possible and risk not exploring the cave quick enough or split the group up and risk a caver finding a bomb tile while they are not carrying a bomb. This made the exploration feel tense and I treated drawing cave tiles to explore like ripping off a plaster, quickly flipping them off the top of the stack hoping the speedy reveal is less painful.

The Exterminator

The Exterminator is the new character that comes with Sub Terra: Annihilation. The Exterminator has two unique abilities, they can ignore the effects of gas as they are permanently equipped with a gas mask, and they can neutralise a horror den meaning that horrors can no longer spawn there. Striding through the caves, actively hoping that you can wander into the den of a horror gives a different feel playing this character that I quite enjoy. As with all the characters added with the expansions, I found myself feeling very powerful playing this character. That was until a caver revealed a horror’s den which I didn’t reach in time and horrors started to spill out into the tunnels. I then realised that I have no way to actually fight them one-on-one so it was back to running and hiding again. I liked the feeling of being on top of the situation and knowing that slipping up has consequences.

Final Thoughts

Sub Terra: Annihilation is a great expansion for Sub Terra. It feels like a proper sequel to the original game, changing things around by having you enter through the exit, and I really enjoy the new objective with finding the bomb tiles and trying to escape. The new character feels unique and like all the other characters, you have a particular niche or skill that provides value to the team. I have found combining the Sub Terra: Investigation, Sub Terra: Extraction and this expansion turns Sub Terra into a cave exploring sandbox that brings to mind all my favourite creature feature movies and adds a lot of new content to a game I already enjoy.