What Lies Beneath Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review What Lies Beneath, a choose your own adventure style game and book published by Fervent Workshop. This is a solo dungeon crawler with minimal components needed.

I’m probably not alone in growing up with those Choose Your Own Adventure books. You know the ones, white cover, fun illustration at the bottom. Names like The Cave of Time or By Balloon to the Sahara. You’d read the book, make some choices, end up dead, go back a few choices via your cheaty-torn paper bookmarks, and just enjoy the story.

While some board games have attempted to replicate the feel of these Choose Your Own Adventure books, (Choose Your Own Adventure: House of Danger is one) with middling success, today we are going to look at the first one I’ve seen to take the book format and turn it into more of a gaming experience.

What Lies Beneath is a solo dungeon crawler, choose your own adventure-style book published by Fervent Workshop. Designed by Chris Scaffidi and with art by the talented Jason Glover, this one seeks to set up where others have failed.

The main product here is the What Lies Beneath book, which is a 200(ish) page novel. All you need to supply are six, 6-sided dice, and a pencil. The back of the book has a character sheet to use, or if you are like me, you’ll print one off from the Fervent Games website.

The gameplay is actually fairly simple. After you create your character (six options here), you’ll get a set of stats represented by a number: Hit, Dex, Wit, and Vigor. Most are pretty straightforward, with Hit being your main strength-based attack and your vigor your health.

And then off on the adventure you go. Like most Choose Your Own Adventure Books, you’ll be making choices such as “take the left or the right path”, “hide or fight”, and “search or smash”. What sets this book apart is that many times you’ll need to make tests. That’s where the dice come in.

There are 3 main types of tests:

Hit: Roll a number of dice equal to your hit score and try to get equal to or