Tabletop Game / Underwater Cities

The Next Frontier.

Underwater Cities is a board game released in 2018 by Vladimír Suchý. In the game, up to four players represent the most powerful brains in the world, brains nominated due to the overpopulation of Earth to establish the best and most livable underwater areas possible.

The main principle of the game is card placement. Three coloured cards are placed along the edge of the main board into one of 15 slots (five of each colour), which are also coloured. Ideally, players can place cards into slots of the same colour, which activates whatever advantage is on the card. Then they can take both actions and advantages: the action depicted in the slot on the main board and also the advantage of the card. Actions and advantages can allow players to intake raw materials, to build new city domes, tunnels and production buildings such as farms, desalination devices and laboratories in their personal underwater area. Other actions allow players to move their marker on the initiative track (which is important for player order in the next turn), to activate the players' Action cards, and to collect additional cards, both Special ones and basic ones that allow for better decision possibilities during gameplay.

Each player is handed their own, double-sided board, representing the area they will be colonising. The goal of the game is to be the most successful manager, which is represented by the total amount of points at the end of the game - achieved by economic success, fulfilling main and side objectives, and also engaging with less... savoury elements for their help.

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Trope to be found between the domes of the Underwater Cities:

• 20 Bear Asses:
  • Certain cards, especially from the third era deck, offer instant points, as long as some specific requirements are met, usually if X of specific structures are built or upgraded.
  • Side-objective cards require specific sets of buildings to be built, like six tunnels or two cities with a full set of all three economic buildings. Whoever does that first gets the prize: points and free construction.
• Ace Pilot: Orange player's assistant. This is a game set underwater.
• All There in the Manual: The manual has a brief introduction to the fluff of the game: Earth is overpopulated, and space colonisation is a tall dream that will likely never be fulfilled. Your job is to find new habitable space, and provide for your incoming civilians.
• All Up to You: The final lines of the fluff blurb opening the manual.
  This is your task.
  This is your destiny.
  The world’s hopes lie in your underwater cities.
• Anti-Hoarding: Your hand can only contain three cards when you start your move. Anything above has to be discarded. You can theoretically have up to ten cards when your move starts, being forced to discard most of your hand before even taking any action.
• Awesome, but Impractical: The variety of cards that allow to play and/or refresh your action cards. Using them is very tricky and requires having both spare actions in general and, more importantly, action cards that are worth playing in the first place.
• Back Story: A very brief one takes up the first page of the manual. It's the future, and it kinda sucks, just not entirely: the land is overcrowded, the food is in short supply, and there is nowhere to go... except underwater. The players are tasked with making that happen and making room for more people.
• Black Market: Bunch of cards are about trading resources under the table, for a big pay-off.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • Any instant effect card that generates resources when played. There is no fancy effect to it, just free stuff - and often the one you need to use the field you've played.
  • The starting assistant, at least in the first era. It's just a free 1 credit/plasteel, both of which are in pretty short supply during the early game.
• Card Cycling: One of the fields on the board allows to discard the card played on it, in turn gaining 2 new cards and 2 credits. It's quite inefficient, but there are situations where this is still the best you can do.
• Cash Gate: Special cards have a price tag when played: 1 or even 2 credits for the regular ones, and 3 for the ones that are Score Multipliers.
• Changing Gameplay Priorities: You start the game with a handful of cards (and having to reduce your hand to just three), a weak action card already in your field, and a small handful of resources. The first era is all about building up as much as feasible (and thus gathering resources first), so when production happens, you will have resources on your own. From the second era onward, it's about fulfilling the objectives of your player board and making as much hay as possible in the process.
• Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: Buildings and resources they make are paired by their colours. Cards and matching tiles are also colour-coded, so you always know where to play them to get the card's bonus.
• Construct Additional Pylons: You must build additional domes to unlock more spots for your economic buildings. You also need to connect those domes with tunnels. It is further enforced by the game, as not having a second dome by the end of a first era will severely setback the player due to very low production gains.
• Cool, but Inefficient:
  • The vast majority of action cards offer underwhelming effects vs. the effort put into using them. You have to first play the card with the right colour on the right field (with no gain from the card itself), then play another card on a field with the ability to activate action cards (which another player might already take and/or is a weak field to play in the first place). The action itself is rarely worth the hassle of getting rid of the rather limited moves each player has during the game.
  • Depending on the situation, the Special cards affecting the final score might not be worth their price tag. This can also apply to the Special cards affecting the game directly: you have to use the Special card field, you have to pay for activation, and the options might be all terrible. Oh, and after getting a Special card, you now have four cards in your hand, so something will have to be discarded at the start of the new turn.
• Corrupt Bureaucrat: You! Every player represents a government employee who is doing their best to keep things going and expand the network, but this involves smuggling, emblezzling, smarmy deals and brown-nosing your higher-up. On top of that, outside... err, investors keep offering you various deals about trading off your resources to curry some favour, too.
• Crippling Overspecialization: Building more than two of any kind of building into a single dome is counterproductive, and in many cases, just building a pair without further upgrading them is just as detrimental.
• Deck Clogger: Special cards are very good but require credits to play them. If you can't afford to play them the very next round after drawing them, you have a severe handicap, as your hand is only three cards, and one of those is the Special card.
• Deckbuilding Game: Your default hand consists of three cards, and normally, you draw another from the current era deck at the end of your round (and play one of the three cards). This gets important in the third era, where it's all race to the end of the game and keeping the right cards for the right moment is far more important.
• Deserted Island: Two of the Special cards are small, uncharted islands that you can exploit for their resources, much cheaper than building anything underwater.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Getting the most from the Score Multiplier cards. They are expensive on their own, fulfilling their requirements is also costly and enforces specific gameplay, and some of them are universal enough to be good for all players, so everyone will want them, making it a race against other players to draw one of those and then play it to not end up with a Deck Clogger.
• Difficulty Levels: Player boards are double-sided, with two modes: basic and advanced. Advanced sides are highly asymmetric, adding additional costs (and benefits) from building structures and significantly complicate your job of even reaching the metropolises in the first place.
• Digital Tabletop Game Adaptation: It came out on Yucata soon after its premiere, thanks to the fact that Vladimír Suchý, the designer of the game, is a long-time player there.
• Diminishing Returns for Balance: Each era has some variant of "pay credit to activate another free field" and "field occupied by another player" cards. With each era, they get worse and worse (more expensive, specifying a colour of the tile, etc.) to keep up with how big your own network should be by the time they enter play.
• Disc-One Nuke:
  • There are a handful of Special cards (Climb two fields on the Federation track after building a city, a discount on a tunnel and desalination plant, a specific resource production card, and so on) that are very powerful when obtained not just in the first era but in the first two turns of the game.
  • Any instant result card that offers 2 of any given resource, or any card that trades 1 of something for 3 of other.
  • In the first era deck, there are three permanent effect cards, each very powerful: an extra credit when reaching 3rd position on the Federation track (making it 2 rather than regular 1), upgrade discount (so it's 2 science for 3 upgrades rather than 3 for 3) and a discount on playing Special cards (making many of them simply free of any cost).
• Discard and Draw: One of the fields offers the option to discard the played card and draw two new ones, along with gaining 2 credits.
• Domed Hometown: Literally. The titular cities are represented by either white or red domes on the player board - you always start with one and can build up to eight more.
• Drafting Mechanic: 
  • In each era, players draw from the same era deck together, picking the top-most cards at the end of their round.
  • There is a limited number of red domes to build, depending on the number of players in the game, as a common pool for everyone.
  • The Special cards are also a common deck for everyone: the six Score Multiplier cards and a deck of cards to draw Special cards from.
• Draw Extra Cards: A variety of cards and some fields on the board offer the option to draw extra cards at the end of the round.
• An Economy Is You: Each player has their own, separate network, where the entire economy depends on their own actions and the buildings they've constructed.
• Elaborate Equals Effective: White, milky domes don't do anything. The fancy (and limited) red domes generate two points each during the production phase. The basic structures offer just 1 of specific resource. Upgrade them, and they offer something extra (points, plasteel or biomass). Pair upgrades and they offer additional resources, well worth the specialisation.
• Euro Game: An economic board game. While it has a high RNG involved, it still allows you to reliably play your strategies, as card bonuses are secondary to the actual actions played by players. There is no elimination, and the game is resolved by a scroring system that accounts for a variety of things, thus making different strategies (and moves) viable.
• Expansion Pack: Underwater Cities: New Discoveries, which adds new cards, additional objectives related with ruins of not!Atlantis and, probably most importantly, new, improved player boards, which have slots to insert objects into, making everything more sturdy.
• Extra Turn: Sort of. As long as you have a card that allows you to play another tile, you have effectively multiplied your moves. In a game with only 30 player moves and just three per turn, it's a pretty big deal if you get even one more extra.
• The Famine: Your job is to prevent it (and solve the problems of the surface with food, too). If you don't have food and can't provide biomass as a substitute, you get a steep point penalty for each food that is missing. It is also implied that basic food shortages ravage the surface world, hence looking for alternatives underwater.
• The Federation: Well, the Federation of Nation for which you work, which is implied to be some governmental body.
• First-Player Advantage Mitigation: 2nd, 3rd and 4th players are ranked on the Federation track at the start of the game, respectively in 4th, 3rd and 2nd positions, gaining those field benefits. If nothing is done with the federation track by players during the first round, their order will be taken from the track, so the first player will be last. Each turn, the order of players is adjusted by their positions on the Federation track.
• Flavor Text: Each of the assistant cards has a quote on them.
• Flooded Future World: Implied with the setting of the game, Cosy Catastrophe style, with land being pretty sparse and while overpopulation is an issue, it's still manageable.
• Friend in the Black Market: In first era, you make deals with Venturous Smugglers. By the third era, their deals are far, far stronger, implying that they have had long-lasting and mutually beneficial deals going for a while.
• Future Food Is Artificial: The default food source is kelp. Emergency food is biomass, which is... something else.
• I Ate WHAT?!: If you don't have sufficient kelp from either production or amassing it beforehand at the end of each era, your population will eat biomass instead (if you have any, that is). It's an industrial-grade construction material.
• Infinity -1 Sword: The variety of 1 credit Special cards, as they offer potent bonuses (often for the whole game) and can be gained very early on. Especially if you happen to get the -1 credit discount card on playing Special cards (which comes in the first era deck), making most of them go free of any charge.
• Infinity +1 Sword: The Score Multiplier cards. They are pretty expensive and require dedicated moves to even get them (which is a pretty big issue in a game with just 30 actions to be made, "wasting" one of those on simply gaining a scoring card), while they do nothing on their own other than affecting the final score. But done right, they can win the game for you.
• Irony: Underwater Cities was created by Vladimír Suchý, a Czech game designer. Suchý means "dry" and the Czech Republic is a landlocked country.
• Luck-Based Mission: Each player is randomly given their own board (different resources to be gathered and, on the advanced side, prices to be paid for construction), their starting cards and the three metropolises (two bonuses and one Score Multiplier). If this wasn't enough, each era has a deck of cards in any order given (and you don't even have to reach the bottom of the deck) and the Special deck is also randomly assigned for draws. Oh, and the order of moves is randomly assigned (along with potential bonuses from the Federation track). From all of this, the players have to do the best they can. A particular outstanding example is the metropolis multiplier, which depends on upgrading as many structures as possible - it's tough on its own, but the first-era deck contains an upgrade discount card that can make this mission a breeze. All you have to do is draw that specific card and play it.
• Magikarp Power: The Federation track. In its default state, it's pretty meh, but with cards that affect the outcomes of it and grant extra resources/free climbs, the track offers a near-endless supply of credits, extra score points, and, of course, making you go first in the next turn.
• Money for Nothing: If one played particularly well in the second era, it is possible to start third with 15+ credits, which not only will fuel further expansion but also make a few additional objectives viable - and of course that same money will be generated once more at the end of the game, too.
• Money Grinding:
  • You need credits to do a whole lot of things, including the most important actions: building new domes and tunnels, while no field generates credits directly. It is the top-most priority to get credits.
  • The end-game scoring accounts for your credits. One of the Special cards is a very straightforward bonus: gain 13 points if you have 15 credits at the end of the game in your bank. And by the end of the game, all resources not used by scoring cards are transformed into credits (biomass counts as 2), and each 4 credits is 1 point.
• Money Multiplier: Two upgraded desalination plants generate extra resources. Their benefits can be further expanded with a few other cards.
• Money Sink: Special cards are expensive. Especially the six ones that affect your score.
• Not Completely Useless: Your starting action card, the assistant, is pretty weak, but that extra +1 plasteel/credit is still a handy bonus to have.
• Not the Intended Use:
  • By default, it doesn't matter what colour the card you've played is or what tile you placed. So if you don't care for the bonus of the card (or it's lousy), you can freely play mismatched cards and tile colours. Sure, it might not be as effective as a proper combo, but sometimes the bonus is so useless or situational that it doesn't really matter.
  • Each player can only have 4 action cards. Adding a 5th means one of the pre-existing 4 has to be discarded... but if it wasn't played in this era, it is automatically played. A potentially viable strategy is to keep playing in new action cards, without going for fields that actually play cards, thus gaining their effects anyway.
• Overpopulation Crisis: As the first page of the manual states, "the earth is overpopulated".
• Paying for Air: Paying for water. Desalination plants generate freshwater. Which, in gameplay terms, provide you with credits.
• Player-Generated Economy: You start the game with nothing built, lacking even the kelp farm needed to sustain your starting dome. It's your goal to build the entire economy of your network from scratch and also to get more resources for future expansion.
• Power at a Price: Well, a monetary price, but getting Special cards requires you to both pay up for them and, more importantly, they are temporary Deck Cloggers until played and force the player to discard one of their cards right off the bat.
• Power Copying: The "pay X credits to play a tile occupied by another player" cards.
• Random Number God: Do you have a metropoly bonus that provides points for upgrades? You will never draw the card that offers a discount on upgrades. Need an extra metropolis? The Special card generating 4th metropolis will be at the bottom of the deck. And so on and forth.
• Refining Resources: Certain cards (and some action cards) allow to turn one resource into another. While some of them are explicitly about trading (or smuggling), others directly state turning them into something else.
• Sapient Cetaceans: The Blue player's starting assistant is a talking dolphin, who also happens to be an Insufferable Genius.
• Score Multiplier: 
  • The metropolis each player is randomly assigned at the start of the game offers a specific scoring bonus if requirements are fulfilled and it's connected to the player's system. They aren't even fair - certain players will get up to 9 points, while others have their limit (but also requirements) set at 20 extra points, while being able to reliably score at least 12 of those.
  • Certain cards have a specific marker (a clock), affecting things at the end of the game. Each game starts with six Special cards on the board that offer a massive point multiplier when fulfilling their requirements. A handful of cards from the third-era deck add extra points in a similar fashion at the end of the game (they are, however, less effective, offering fewer points in the long run).
• Scoring Points: The game is won by the player with the most points at the end of it, and the sources involve: points generated during the game, Score Multiplier cards, how many and how well-built the cities are, certain upgraded buildings and also specific metropoly bonus (if connected and fulfilled) on the player board. This means there are dozens of ways to secure a good final score, which allows players to follow radically different strategies.
• Settling the Frontier: The game in general is about settling a suitable underwater area, but first era is explicitly about pioneering the site.
• Shout-Out: This is pretty much SeaQuest DSV : The Board Game, with countless nods to characters, events and backstories of the series.
• Take That!: The game pokes fun out of the concept of colonisation of Mars and general space exploration programmes.
  The colonization of Mars is always four decades away.
• The Team Benefactor: The Federation of Nations, which sends supplies and support to players depending on their actions and cards - either directly from cards played or from climbing up the Federation track.
• Tier System: There are three decks of cards, one for each era. Their effects get stronger and more complex with each era.
• Tunnel Network: Underwater tunnels connect your domed cities. For a city and its structures to generate their production (and the city's being accounted for feeding the population), you must hook them up to the network. Tunnels on their own produce credits, representing the growth of commerce, and once upgraded, they also provide extra points.
• Underwater City: Duh.  Haven't you checked the name of the game?
• United Nations Is a Superpower: The Federation of Nations is implied to be a UN-like body (or maybe its descendant).
• Unstable Equilibrium: There are a handful of very powerful cards in the first era, which can skew the rest of the game for that specific player that got any of them. There is also the matter of Special cards, where the top one might be something useless or inefficient, or a heavy discount or a potent permanent effect.
• Vanilla Unit: Each player starts with the same action card with exactly the same action (pick 1 plasteel or credit), that represents their bumbling Number Two: Blue has a talking dolphin, Orange has an Ace Pilot, Black has a Ditzy Secretary and Purple has a cleaning robot.
• Variable Player Goals: Other than your metropolis tile bonus (which might be unfeasible to fulfil in the first place), nothing is set in stone, so different strategies can be used to achieve the maximum number of points. In fact, the game can be decided by ignoring the pre-defined bonus and instead playing around with the cards you were dealt during the game and Special cards you've acquired.
• Venturous Smuggler: A handful of pretty profitable cards are about striking deals with those, trading one resource type for either a variety of other resources or a lot of single type.
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment: If you don't have sufficient kelp production or biomass as a replacement to feed your population, you lose points. After all, you were hired for the job of running the system specifically to feed the masses.
• We Will Spend Credits in the Future: The currency are ubiquitous credits.
• With This Herring: Each player starts with very modest resources and 3 cards. They have to score the highest score.
• You Require More Vespene Gas: Each and every structure comes with a pricetag, and upgrades also cost science. A stronger version of the cities costs additional resources and biomass. Your top priority throughout the game is to secure a sufficient amount of resources.

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