Stranger Things: Upside Down Is the Board Game the Show Deserves

Players’ cards come from the Action deck, which has cards numbered 1 to 3, some of which have warning signs and/or telephone symbols. A player may deploy an action card to increase their movement, which is just one space for most characters. The player may then choose one action based on their location, some of which are uncontested—gain an item, “calm down” (move their fear marker down), or reveal the top tokens of multiple stacks—while others are contested. For those, the player first chooses how many cards to play, after which all tokens in the stack are revealed. If the total value of the player’s cards is equal to or higher than the total of the stack, the action succeeds. If not, it fails, and the player gains fear equal to the deficit.

The exception here is the Rescue Will action, which the players must do at three separate locations. Those stacks also include tokens with the Demogorgon’s maw on them, and their value can run from 0 to 8, based on how many token stacks are in the Demogorgon section on the board. There are four such stacks to start the game, with four tokens apiece. Players can try to clear those with actions, while Scene cards can add more stacks to the section, so as the game progresses it will get harder to rescue Will, making it important to try to keep the number of Demogorgon stacks as low as possible.

Stranger Things: Upside Down is simple to play and reasonably hard to beat, providing enough of a challenge that you will probably lose a few times but still want to play again. There aren’t that many rules and only a few icons to learn. Player turns are quick, and the game’s listed playing time of an hour probably only applies if you win or come close to doing so. The game borrows the broadest template of cooperative games and adds to it with the token stacks, which give the game some randomness you can work to mitigate through actions and the permanent benefits from items you gain. It has the right balance between dealing with short-term crises (keeping the Demogorgon stacks from growing) and working on the long-term goal. It also uses the likenesses of the actors from the show along with other art and images from it, along with high-quality miniatures so the theme is pervasive in game play from the mechanics to the visuals. If you enjoy Pandemic or any of the Forbidden cooperative board games, and also like Stranger Things, you’ll probably love this game. It’s the board game Stranger Things deserves.

Keith Law is the author of The Inside Game and Smart Baseball and a senior baseball writer for The Athletic. You can find his personal blog the dish, covering games, literature, and more, at meadowparty.com/blog.