Stranger Things deserves a great board game adaptation. The 2022 game Attack of the Mind Flayer was definitely not it. Fortunately, designer Rob Daviau is here to save Hawkins and the series’ good name with the cooperative game Stranger Things: Upside Down, which is both true to the story and characters of the original and also is fun to play.
The players in Stranger Things: Upside Down play as characters from the show, choosing among Mike, Lucas, Dustin, Nancy, Joyce, or Det. Hopper, moving around the board’s map of Hawkins and the Upside Down to try to either rescue Will (season 1) or rescue Will and close the gate (season 2) before any of the players become Terrified or the third ‘act’ ends. Players may have to fight the Demogorgon or its Demo-dogs, or battle the patrol vehicle, and can gain items and allies or even solicit the help of Eleven.
The game follows a familiar pattern in the co-op game universe, pioneered by Pandemic, where one player moves and takes actions, after which the players flip cards from a master deck of bad events. Each player has a Fear track with a marker that begins the game at zero; if their marker reaches the end of the track, they become Terrified and the players all lose the game. Players can gain fear from those event cards (the Scene deck) or from losing any sort of fight or challenge within the game. The board itself has stacks of face-down tokens at most locations, and to achieve the goal at any location the player will have to play action cards sufficient to match or exceed the total value of the tokens in that stack.
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.