Sub Terra: Investigation

You were the only one who made it out alive this time. You don’t know what happened to your friends, but you know what happened to you. The cave-ins, floods, entire chambers full of gas and the tremors that shook the whole earth were nothing compared to the monsters. Not that anybody believed you. Until now. Sub Terra: Investigation is a follow-on modular expansion for Sub Terra designed by Tim Pinder. This expansion takes place after the events of the first game where a mysterious corporation have got you to return to the caves in the hopes of helping you find your lost friends.

The Caves

For those reading this who have not played Sub Terra, here is a quick overview. Sub Terra is a co-operative game for 1-6 players that sees you laying tiles to create a network of caves. These caves are full of sheer drops, squeezes, slides, unstable tunnels, flooded pools, and gas filled chambers. Fortunately, you will each be playing an experienced cave explorer with a couple special abilities to help you and your team navigate these treacherous spaces.

However, you will not be alone as this cave system is home to the horrors, which will mercilessly hunt you and your friends. You will be forced to push your luck and take risks in the hopes of out running the monsters or hide away in a corner and simply hope they pass you by. Your only chance of escaping this nightmare is to press on and find the exit, especially as your torch battery power is running low and soon, you’ll be doing all of this in the dark.

What’s New

Sub Terra: Investigation has you going back into the cave system once more to find your friends. Thankfully, you will be aided in this next expedition with the help of a new character, The Agent. There are now 15 item cards added into the game. These items can be used by any character and provide new powerful and useful abilities. These items are found on the new cave tiles depicting the fallen adventurers from your previous expedition, if you can find them.

There are also new Doom hazards which multiply the danger of the hazard card drawn on the next turn.

The Items

The 15 items are a mixture of one-off abilities and passive abilities that last for the time the item is held by the caver. They can be found in the caves when entering the item tiles which are shuffled into the normal stack of cave tiles before then removing the top three tiles from the stack without being seen. This means that there is always the possibility that no item tiles will be revealed during play, they could also be found after the exit is already revealed as they are set up before the exit is placed in the stack. This makes it so that access to the items is not a guarantee. Scarcity can increase the excitement when one is revealed but also, I like to use the new components I get in an expansion and so it can be a bit disappointing if you put the items into the game and they do not get found.

Most items will be discarded once used, so you always need to be considering your options. Is this the right time to use your grenade or can you lure one more horror toward you? Do you use your scrawled map to discard the sheer drop in the hopes of getting something you can move through easier? That horror is awfully close.

Two of the items however provide constant passive abilities while your character holds them, those are the wetsuit, which allows for easier movement through water, and the lucky charm which adds 1 to any dice rolls.

One thing that appeals to me about the items is what it reveals about the caver that you take it from. I can imagine unhooking some still workable body armour from around their chest or prying a torch out of a cavers hand to get their spare battery, remembering they were probably one of the characters I got killed last time we played.

The Agent

The Agent is the new character that comes with Sub Terra: Investigation. She has two new abilities, Recover and Equipped. Recover allows the player to return an item that the agent has used into their hand which can be a powerful ability as many of the items are single use for other cavers, and so being able to provide an extra use can be a game changer. The Equipped ability is a little less clear in the rules and this is something I have had to make a choice among friends each time I play as to its effect. Equipped is a passive ability that only happens at the start of the game, and states the player draws the top 5 cards from the item deck and chooses 2 to put on the bottom of the item deck. I have found that players are unclear what to do with the remaining 3 cards and we have had to discuss whether the 3 remaining cards go on top of the item deck to be found in game or with the Agent. I always settle for equipping the Agent with the 3 remaining cards and I may be over-thinking it, but I would have preferred more clarity.

The Hazards

In Sub Terra, every turn a new hazard card is drawn which changes the environment of the cave system, flooding passages, filling chambers with gas and releasing horrors from their dens. Sub Terra: Investigation adds Doom to this collection of potential catastrophes.

Doom works as a ‘x2’ multiplier for the next hazard that will be drawn. Meaning that any event that happens on the next turn will happen twice. The cave-ins get a second opportunity to crush you, the tremors make you roll twice to see if you can keep your nerve and the Horrors are now racing through the caves to catch up. The ‘x2’ hazards exist in the base game as a difficulty modifier and these are not doubled by a Doom card, but the Doom feels different because it acts as a warning. You now know for certain that the next card will be a double damage card and that brings that sense of dread but at least the caves are not trying to kill you right now.

Final Thoughts

I like to think of Sub Terra as like playing through the potholing horror movie ‘The Descent’, and my expeditions are usually as successful. Sub Terra: Investigation makes me feel like playing the sequel, increasing the difficulty in an interesting way with the Doom cards, but adding some fun new elements with the item cards and the powerful Agent character to give you a fighting chance. It feels enjoyable to play and gives me a chance to feel almost overpowered for a couple minutes before the cave fights back and crushes me anyway.