How to play Under Falling Skies & Review (Spoiler Free)

Under Falling Skies is a solo only game about an alien invsion.

Title: Under Falling Skies

Year Published: 2020

Designer: Tomáš Uhlíř

Publisher: Czech Games Edition

Players: 1

Game Time: ~40 minutes

Set-up Time: ~3 minutes

Ages: 12+

Theme: Alien Invasion

Mechanisms: Dice Placement

How to win: Complete the mission before the base is destroyed

Game Description

Aliens have arrived to conquer Earth. Enemy ships fill the skies. Humanity retreats to underground bunkers located below cities across the globe. Stand against the common threat! Fight the invaders, city by city. Build a team from around the globe to save your planet and defeat the aliens!

How to play Under Falling Skies

This is a tutorial for the full game including all of the rules. I do not go into the campaign or show any of the content from the campaign of the game.

Theme

An alien invasion!

I like the streamlined focus on just the Mothership and the smaller Alien ships. Protect the city and do what you can, no muss, no fuss.

No idea why activating rooms in a column causes aliens in that column to move but, whatever.

Setup & Rulebook

Setup is easy, it’s all there on the city tile you choose. The basic game playing with Roswell covers the basics and the full standalone game with the other cities doesn’t actually change much.

It adds a robot room yes, but nothing major to make the rules any more difficult.

The rulebook does a good job of covering everything.

Components & Artwork

The ships are nice, the tiles are thick and the little bits are decent.

I always complain about using standard dice instead of nice thematic custom ones, but I understand it’s a pointless large increase in cost. Still, would be nice wouldn’t it?

The artwork is good enough.

Under Falling Skies Summary

This is a good game to play whenever. Being a solo game, it helps that I don’t have to wait for other people to want to play it too. My fave game to play solo is Samurai Spirit which is a card game where you’re defending your town from human invaders.

Defending from aliens is a fun and familiar theme. Your aim is to get the research track to the top so you can go ahead and do that. But each time these ships are coming at you and the mothership is slowly descending so the pressure is on.

You have to balance acceptable losses such as base damage and maybe forcing the mothership closer to get to that target. But do it too much or spend too much time shooting down the smaller ships and you run out of time.

Under Falling Skies Round-Up

 A very fun solo experience.

Rating

I give it 7/10