I like mushrooms, but only in the context of the kitchen. Some tasty morels, lobsters, and oyster mushrooms will always get me excited. I do find mushrooms kind of fascinating, how fast they can grow, how different they can all be, but their poisonous nature has always made me rather just get my mushrooms from a store instead of trying to venture out and pick my own. The last thing I need is to get a hospital visit because I mis-identified the gills of a chanterelle or something.

Undergrove is designed by Elizabeth Hargrave and Mark Wootton, and published by AEG in 2024. In Undergrove, players are Douglas-fir trees, and are tasked with trading resources with the mushrooms that dot the forest floor. Your actions involve trading Carbon, Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium with the mushrooms, to get special benefits or to just get more resources than you’re generally putting out. The core of the game is to use the Carbon to activate the mushrooms, then absorb that carbon through your roots to grow a mighty evergreen.

The care and interest of the mycology science shouldn’t be a surprise. Elizabeth Hargrave is the president of her local hobbyist mushroom club, the Mycological Society of Washington, DC, and she and Mark Wootton had many conversations with entomologists and PhD students to discuss how the science works. Sure, Undergrove abstracts some concepts, and the giant mushroom tiles may indicate the outsized abundance of the mushrooms in a real forest, but hey. It’s a board game, it’s often more important to be fun than correct.

The mycology theme is wonderful, and the production is utterly gorgeous. I have the Kickstarter edition with all the wooden pieces, including the amazing painted wooden tiles. The screen printed wooden pieces are all beautiful, and there are snug little circles cut out of the corners for your player pieces to sit. The art on the tiles by Beth Sobel is fantastic, colourful, and beautiful. Building out a large tableau of mushrooms is a sight to behold! There are sturdy tuck boxes for every resource and for every player’s pieces, making the inside of the main box a tidy affair. AEG absolutely knocked this production out of the park.

So the science is good. The art is great, and the production is fantastic. How’s the gameplay? Well, here’s where my notes turn a bit sour. Undergrove is a tight resource management game. Activating most of the mushrooms on the board require you to at least spend 1 carbon, and often will have you flip a mushroom activation disc (so you can’t just juice the same tile over and over again). The only way to get carbon is to take the photosynthesis action, which provides you with 2 carbon as a base. Then, you may choose to throw away any nitrogen you’ve accumulated for more carbon. The economy is already tight, it feels punishing to be jettisoning your nitrogen in exchange for carbon that you’ll spend to get a surplus of nitrogen so you can do other actions.

Spending the carbon onto the mushrooms feeds really nicely into how you score points and win the game. The absorb action lets you take a carbon from a tile and move it onto your seedling. Once a seedling has absorbed 3 carbon, it blossoms into a full tree, unlocking the ability for that tree to score all four of its roots. But fret not, if the game comes to an end and some of your seedlings have one or two carbon on them, they can score one or two of their roots. Speaking of game end, there is a carbon track. Anytime a player absorbs any amount of carbon, they move one step up that track, collecting bonuses as they do so. Once someone has reached the end of that track, everyone gets one final action and the player with the most points, wins.

One of the challenges with that carbon track is that the pace of the game is solely controlled by the players. If no one is absorbing carbon, you’ll all just be having a merry time spreading your seeds and roots, building an impressive forest floor, and maximizing each one of their seedling investments, only to realize that the end of the game is still an hour away. Conversely, a player with a singular focus can rush the game to an end, rendering your efforts in building any semblance of an engine moot. I suppose it depends on what you want out of your mushroom game. Is the player who plays lean and fast the one to win, or can a player build strong enough to put up a fight?

A small anecdote. Bear, Otter, and I played this one together. Bear was having an absolute blast chaining actions together to squeeze out one more resource, hitting the public objectives where possible, and getting out nearly all of their seedlings and roots. But completely failed to absorb carbon, so when Otter and I completed the carbon track on the same turn, his score was half of ours, despite his far superior forest structure.

The other things you can do on your turn include spending carbon and phosphorus to throw your seeds to the wind and settle your seedlings elsewhere on the tableau. Similarly, you can spend a carbon and two potassium to sprout two roots on any of your seedlings. The roots play an important role for your trees (no duh), as the roots are what give you access to any of the abilities or actions the mushrooms provide.

I feel like Undergrove is supposed to be an engine building game. It has all the hallmarks for it. But in play, it’s really not. Many players will get excited at the chance to put down new mushrooms, to add to the board, but putting mushrooms down doesn’t get you anything. Sure, you can control the location of it, which may slightly benefit you more than others, but it’s not like putting down a mushroom gives you ownership or a strong benefit. You’re not really building and engine in Undergrove, you’re claiming slightly more efficient action spots, then choosing which one you want to use on your turn. Because of that, Undergrove’s gameplay arc feels flat. From about the 5th turn until the end of the game, not a whole lot really changes, robbing players a real sense of progression that other, perhaps bird themed games, have.

Undergrove left me in a curious state. I love its celebration of fungi and nature, the obvious reverence for real science, and the sheer beauty of its production. Sitting around a table filled with colourful mushrooms and tidy wooden trees is genuinely delightful. But once the novelty and aesthetic glow fade, the gameplay settles into a low, pleasant rhythm. Pleasant, but rarely stirring. Its tight economy and player-driven pacing create interesting decisions, yet the lack of meaningful progression makes those choices feel more iterative than transformative. If you’re looking for a contemplative, tactical puzzle wrapped in a stunning package, Undergrove is right up your alley, but if you’re hoping to build a powerful engine, then this isn’t the mushroom you’re looking for.