Land Above Sea Below (LASB) is a hex-tile isometric strategy game. It answers the question "What if you added pressure to Dorfromantik (2022)?"
I haven't reviewed Dorfromantik (DR) this year because this was mainly games that had sat in my pile of shame, not a game that I bought the day it was released. It's a very chill little hex-tile strategy city-builder.
LASB was released almost 18 months after DR, and the influence is obvious, right down to the identical gameplay controls.
However, where LASB veers away from DR is in going upwards. In DR, you have several different types of items that can appear on a tile; houses, forests, fields, grasslands, rivers, and railways.
Each hex tile in your pile can have any combination of these items on any edge. Match an edge, score points, match more edges, score more points.
In LASB, while it has rivers, the cards instead have themes. And instead of just spreading out into nothingness like DR, in LASB, you're building islands surrounded by water, which is part of the "pressure" that LASB adds.
LASB has game rounds called "seasons". Each season lasts seven "days", with icons at the top of the screen showing you what the tiles you're going to get are.
At the end of the season, the water level rises. Your island is centred around "the fall tree" and if the fall tree gets flooded, it's game over.
However, when you're placing your tiles, if you connect them on three sides to three other tiles with the same theme, all of the tiles connected (of the same theme) are raised higher, with many potentially above the water level rise.
If you connect a tile on four or more sides, you get extra days (and extra tiles) in that season.
River tiles behave differently; they neither get flooded, or raised.
It becomes a balancing act of trying to decide whether you can lift enough tiles, above the water level rise, or if you want to try and extend the season; being that there's no guarantee that the tiles you'll get for the extra day(s) will match the theme - which may result in more land being flooded.
It's an interesting alternative to DR, but it doesn't have quite the same chilled-out feeling.
With that said, LASB feels slightly rougher around the edges. Dorfromantik feels polished, cleanly adapting to my ultrawide monitor, where I had to fiddle with LASB's settings just to get it to run letterboxed at 2560x1440.
LASB also adds a slight blur at the edge of the screen which I find more annoying than "cute tilt-shift".
Although clearly derivative, Land Above Sea Below presents an interesting twist on Dorfromantik's gameplay, which is quite: