Wouter & Ymke 
There’s quite a lot happening underneath a forest that we normally never see. Mycelia spread through the soil, mushrooms appear above ground, and different species compete for the same space. Underwood takes that idea and turns it into a game where everyone is building their own fungal network across a shared forest floor. It’s one of dlp games’ upcoming releases for Spiel ’26 in Essen, and we received an early copy to play before its release.
At first, everyone has plenty of room. Your colony can spread without bothering anyone too much, mushrooms start appearing across the forest, and you can happily concentrate on your own little corner. That changes once the networks begin to meet. Every mushroom becomes a permanent position and the same patches of forest suddenly interest several players. Apparently even mushrooms eventually have problems with their neighbours.
👥 2-4 players, ages 14+
⌛ Playing time: 20 minutes
📝 Designers: Remo Conzadori & Andrea Mainini
🎨 Artwork: Claus Stephan & Antje Stephan
🏢 Publisher: dlp games (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
The playing area is made from several irregular forest floor tiles, each divided into hexagonal spaces. The number of tiles depends on the player count, and you decide how to connect them during setup, so the forest can take on different shapes. Each player starts by placing four mycelia on the board, with opposing starting tiles kept at least one empty space apart. The rest of your tiles stay in your personal supply.
On your turn, you flip exactly one of your mycelia already on the board to its mushroom side. This mushroom is then used to grow your colony. You choose either the forest floor tile containing the mushroom or one directly adjacent to it, and you can only grow into that one forest floor tile during the turn.
Once you’ve chosen the tile, you place new mycelia on every eligible space of that tile directly next to your mushroom. This isn’t optional. If there are three eligible spaces, you need to fill all three. If you don’t have enough mycelia in your supply to do that, you can’t choose that forest tile. You also need to place at least one new mycelium, so you can’t simply turn something into a mushroom without growing from it.
An eligible space is either empty or contains another player’s exposed mycelium. You can’t cover your own mycelia, and mushrooms can’t be covered at all. If you grow over another player’s mycelium, their tile stays underneath yours but no longer counts. For every opposing mycelium you cover, you also give that player one of your own mycelium tiles from your supply as compensation. They keep those tiles until the end of the game.
The main goal is to control the individual forest floor tiles. At the end of the game, you first compare the number of mushrooms on each one. Whoever has the sole majority wins that forest floor tile. If there are no mushrooms or the mushroom count is tied, mycelia decide the majority between the players involved. If that’s tied as well, nobody gets the tile.
The game ends immediately when a player can no longer take a turn, either because they have no mycelia of their own left in their supply or because they can’t legally expand. Every space on a forest floor tile you’ve won is worth one point. You also count all mycelia left in your supply, including tiles received from opponents, and score one point for every pair. Most points wins, with collected opposing tiles used as the first tiebreaker.
Artwork & Components
Underwood is a colourful game, especially once the whole forest has been assembled. The forest floor tiles are filled with leaves, moss, flowers, nuts and other small details, mostly using reds, oranges, browns and greens. Because the tiles have irregular shapes rather than forming a standard rectangular board, the finished forest looks different depending on how you’ve put it together.
Most of what you handle during the game are the double-sided mushroom and mycelium tiles. The mycelium sides use the four player colours with branching fungal patterns, while the other sides show different mushroom species on white backgrounds. Once mushrooms start appearing between all those coloured mycelia, the board becomes quite busy, but we never had much trouble seeing who belonged where.
I particularly like what happens visually when players start covering each other. You don’t remove the old mycelium. Instead, the new one sits directly on top of it, so some parts of the forest gradually develop little stacks of competing colonies. You can look at those stacks afterwards and see exactly where everyone has been fighting for space. It also makes the forest look increasingly overgrown as the game continues, which seems appropriate.
There are also four chunky green wooden trees and two separate ant-trail tiles used for the variants. The trees are easily the most noticeable components in the box, even though they aren’t actually part of the standard game. It’s mostly a cardboard production rather than something extravagant, but I don’t think it needs much more. Once four colonies are spread across the forest, there’s already plenty happening on the table.
Our Experience
Our first game started with everyone being far too polite. We spread into our own parts of the forest and mostly looked for empty spaces, leaving each other alone whenever possible. The larger forest tiles immediately attracted us because they were worth more points, so we started putting quite a few pieces into them. That seemed perfectly sensible until scoring, when one of us had built a rather impressive colony in an area that was already comfortably secured while someone else had picked up several smaller tiles with far fewer pieces. From the next game onwards, we became much less interested in how large our colonies looked and much more interested in whether another piece would actually change who controlled something.
We also underestimated individual mycelia during those first plays. A single exposed piece sitting between two forest tiles doesn’t necessarily look threatening, especially when there are more obvious fights happening elsewhere. Then somebody turns it into a mushroom and suddenly reaches an area you thought was safe. After being caught by that a few times, we started paying much more attention to where everyone could grow next. This naturally resulted in several conversations involving, “You’re obviously going there,” followed by, “No I’m not.” Sometimes the second person was even telling the truth.
That changed how willing we were to cover each other as well. Early on, we mostly did it when control of an area was directly at stake. Later, we sometimes covered a mycelium simply because we didn’t want to find out what its owner intended to do with it. The compensation made those choices slightly painful, particularly if several opposing pieces were involved. There were turns where interfering was clearly useful but would empty our own supply much faster, so we left someone alone and hoped they’d find somebody else to annoy. Other times we paid the price and then immediately complained about having to hand over the extra tiles.
Towards the end of our games, we also started watching everyone’s remaining supply much more closely. You can see when another player is getting close to being unable to continue, which gives you some idea of how much time you might have left. In a few games, one of us desperately wanted another turn to sort out a contested area while somebody else was perfectly happy for the game to finish. By then, the open forest from the first few turns had usually disappeared completely. Almost every useful position was connected to somebody else’s plans, and we found ourselves paying much more attention to the other colonies than we had during those rather friendly opening turns.
Our Thoughts
Most turns in Underwood follow the same basic structure, but that doesn’t mean we were always looking for the same thing. One mycelium might help secure a forest tile, another could get us into a new area, while another mostly needed to become a mushroom before somebody covered it. There aren’t many different actions to consider, so most of our attention stayed on the forest itself and on choosing which part of our network we actually wanted to use next.
The mandatory growth rule turned out to matter more than we first assumed. Activating a mycelium doesn’t mean placing whichever pieces you feel like placing. You have to fill every eligible adjacent space in the forest tile you choose. Some positions therefore cost only one new tile to use, while another mushroom might require three or four. Covering opposing mycelia drains your supply further because of the compensation you have to hand over. Your supply isn’t just a pile of pieces waiting to enter the forest either. Running out of your own mycelia can end the entire game. Where you grow, how much that growth costs and how quickly you spend your supply are all tied together.
We also ended up looking at the two sides of a tile quite differently. Leaving something as mycelium preserves the possibility of using that position on a later turn, but another player can cover it before you get the chance. Turning it into a mushroom protects that space permanently, but now you’ve committed to growing from it. The scoring makes that distinction important because mushrooms are considered before mycelia when determining control. For us, this is where we spent most of our time thinking: which positions needed to become permanent now, and which ones could we risk leaving available for later?
There are limits to how much Underwood changes between games, though. Everyone has the same pieces and follows the same process, and once you understand the central system there aren’t new abilities or combinations waiting to be discovered. Changing the shape of the forest moves the useful borders and connections around, while the four variants introduce trees, clearings or the ant trail in different ways. After that, it’s mainly the other players who determine which parts of the forest become important. Players who want asymmetric factions, card combinations or new abilities appearing from game to game may find that a little narrow. The open information can also slow things down with players who want to calculate every possible majority. There were certainly moments near the end where one of us stared at three neighbouring forest tiles for longer than the mushroom theme probably deserved.
I’d mainly point Underwood towards players who enjoy spatial games where everyone can interfere with the same board. You need to be comfortable with having your pieces covered, because protecting every useful mycelium simply isn’t realistic. At the same time, covering someone isn’t free, so there’s little reason to interfere just because you can. I also like that the fungal setting makes what could otherwise have been a fairly abstract game easy to understand. Networks spread through the forest, mushrooms become permanent positions and competing colonies literally grow over one another. The board at the end looks like the result of everything that happened during the game rather than just a collection of scoring markers.
After our first play, we thought Underwood was quite straightforward. A few games later, we were paying much more attention to individual mycelia, everyone’s remaining supply and exactly how much we needed to commit to different parts of the forest. There still isn’t a huge amount of rules to deal with, and I don’t expect every play to show us something completely new. But we found more going on between those mushrooms than our rather polite first game suggested. We’ve enjoyed seeing how differently we approach the forest now, and after several plays we’re still happy to put it back on the table and see where everyone decides to grow next.
Underwood is due to release from dlp games in autumn 2026 and is planned as one of their new releases for Spiel ’26 in Essen. You can find the other games we’ve already covered in our Spiel ’26 overview.
📝 We received a pre-release copy of Underwood from dlp games.
