Undermined! Pairadice City review: Seek your fortune in the Wild West
Yee, and furthermore, haw. Welcome to Pairadice City where the mines run deep and the gold is pretty.
In Devilfly Games's 2–6 player tabletop game you play a prospector in the ye olde Wild West mining for treasure. Your race to secure 12 Victory Points will have you running into cave-ins, earthquakes and too much moonshine as not only does peril follow treasure but your rivals seek to sabotage your underground expeditions.
Get your pickaxe ready, saddle up your TNT and don't forget your hard helmet, it's time to dig deep into Undermined! Pairadice City.
What's in the box?
Setting up the game
How to play Undermined!
Ramp up the difficulty
Final thoughts on Undermined!
What's in the box?
The packed box holds 228 cards (4 different decks and 8 'Player Aids') across two compartments while a narrow strip next to them will hold tightly jammed bags of 20 cardboard tokens and 12 six-sided dice. A single folded sheet sits on top as the rules.
It's impressive how much the box holds and, having spoken to Devilfly Games at the 2024 UK Games Expo, the smaller box was chosen to keep the cost of the game under £25.
Setting up the game
In the dusty dawn, the first order of business is to shuffle the four decks. You'll then need to arrange them on the table in two rows (set-up is made simple with the large Undermined! game mat that we can include with all copies of the game thanks to Devilfly).
On the top row will be the Shop deck. In a line next to the deck, put the top five Shop cards face-up while leaving space to the left of the deck for a discard pile. In a row under the Shop deck, put the Rock, Treasures & Perils and Events decks, again spacing them out so they'll all have room for a discard to their left.
Back to the Shop, pick out the Starting Items of Iron Pickaxe, Standard Safety Gear and TNT from the deck and give these to each player. Remove any surplus Starting Items from the deck before play begins. Also deal out two Events cards face-down and two $1 coins to each player. Set aside the rest of the coin tokens next to the 'board'.
With the Rock deck, you'll see some cards that have gold borders on the front (unlike the rest with white); take these out of the game until you've played through a few times.
Now, get your hard hat on, the mining is about to start.
How to play Undermined!
Each player has four steps to perform on their turn. First comes Respite. You get the top card from the Events deck and are paid $2 from the bank.
With that extra loot, time to go Shopping. On this step, you can sell any Treasure cards you've got by discarding them for coin tokens — their value is shown in the bottom right. Otherwise, you can buy any face-up Shop cards with your $s, their cost also shown in the bottom right. Without a mine cart, you can only handle four items (your starting items count towards this) at a time so if you buy more than that, discard back to four immediately. Your Shop cards stay face-up near you.
Next, you must prepare to mine. Look at the Rock deck and on the back of the top card, you'll see a number — this is what you have to beat to successfully mine the rock. To mine, you'll be rolling two six-sided dice to meet or beat that card number.
But what if the Rock number is 18; how are you supposed to roll 18 on a six-sided dice? Stop panicking, you have a Preparation Step. From your personal Shop cards, you can pick one card to help you mine. Their helpful effects are listed at the bottom but look out for their 'Uses' number in the bottom left. If it's not infinite, then you'll need to keep track of the number of times you use the card and get rid of it once 'Uses' reach zero (there are tokens with '1' and '2' on them which help you track the durability of your equipment).
Want to fast-track the mining? Grab your Explosives. These high reward items can burst through multiple Rocks in one go but Explosives are only single use. And running around with TNT gives people pause so you can't get help with your underground ventures. Indeed, if you're using a less destructive tool than explosives, you can ask multiple other players to help you. They roll a dice and that score is added to your own. Help doesn't come for free of course, but it's up to you to negotiate a deal, upkeep it or renege on it. Your fair weather friends will avoid any Perils you may face as a result of your expeditions unless they roll a Nat 1 at which point, they too must face your Perils.
If all of that doesn't fill you with enough confidence, you can always pay $2 to put the top Rock card to the bottom of the deck, maybe giving you an easier number next. Or maybe your luck's not that good.
So, with a platinum pickaxe and a favour from a friend, you beat that 18 Rock card. Flip it over and resolve its effects before putting it on the Rock discard. Most effects will tell you to grab the top card from the Treasures & Perils deck. Do so and flip the blue card to reveal your fate. You may have struck gems or gold whose Victory Points are shown in the top left (remember, only 12 VP to victory). These Treasure cards are kept near you face-up to track your progress. Or you may be facing Perils in which case you must immediately resolve your misfortune. Some of these Perils will demand your wealth and if you can't pay, you'll have to use the value of your Treasure (in bottom right) for payment.
Your trip to the mines is done and the next player gets their chance to dig.
Wait! The final deck to touch on is Events. With no maximum hand size, these cards are always hidden from others as they let you shake things up. Their effects, along with when they can be played, are written at the bottom. There's a wealth of actions the Events cards enable including halving the price of Shop items on your turn, preventing another player from using their equipment when mining and hire help such as a Minor Miner.
Ramp up the difficulty
Once you're an experienced miner, you may want to increase the difficulty by aiming for more Victory Points, giving more opportunity for strategic shenanigans.
Remember those gold-bordered Rock cards that you removed from your first game? Shuffle them back in to the Rock deck for a higher hardness level and better rewards. With an increased difficulty, you'll also encourage more bargaining between players as help is more likely to be needed for the expeditions.
Final thoughts on Undermined!
Undermined! is a fun game based on strategy, luck and undermining (ha!) other players' efforts. It only takes a couple of turns to get into the swing of preparation and expedition. It helps too that the card text is clear and all of the key elements are very obvious and consistent in their design as arranged by Feride Seferaj. The artwork by Patrice Rameau is perfectly in-theme to evoke the ye olde Wild West with the box illustration in particular being very eye-catching. Even after a few plays, it feels like there are so many other strategies to discover and more cards to plunder through as you likely won't have seen all of them after one or two games. Replayability is a rock solid part of Undermined! Pairadice City. Finally, the title is simply genius (yes, the designers do know the song and had considered some other truly excellent puns) and a hint to the humour of the game continued throughout the cards.