Let's Play Freedom: Underground Railroad

Obviously we don't have a lot of opportunities for board gaming during the pandemic, but I did get a chance to play Freedom: Underground Railroad last month.

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Freedom: Underground Railroad is a co-op game for 1-4 players, set before and during the US civil war. The objective is to abolish slavery, both by gathering support for abolitionism and smuggling freed slaves north to Canada. 

Like so many board games these days, the setup feels really complicated, but when you actually start playing, it isn't, so you just gotta have faith in the process. The system of buying and using tokens to perform actions, along with the various player roles and so on, initially feels difficult but isn't too fiddly once you actually get going. The components are reasonably well-made; there's quite a few cards, tokens and doodads, and a couple of special dice for random slave catcher movement.

Basically the game is like a co-op puzzle: you move slaves north, collecting money on the way and trying to avoid slave catchers. The mechanics are nothing fancy, but they work. Where the game really shines is theme. There's a rotating series of cards featuring people and events of the time, which are pretty good; here's an example:

But the biggest thing is that you really get into the theme of the thing! You beat the game by buying a set amount of support tokens and freeing a certain amount of slaves; you lose if too many slaves get caught or you can't do this in the allotted turns. It's not really a problem if some slaves are caught, and when we started we figured it would be okay if we lost some; once we started getting into the game, it was not! So I'd say it was a surprisingly intensive experience. But it was also fun, and hey, we won!

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So this was a very brief sojourn into Freedom: Underground Railroad, and I obviously can't comment on how it stands up to repeated playthroughs. But I really enjoyed playing it, and I think it could even have some potential as an educational game: the theme, as I said, is spot on. The only downside I can really think of is that the game is a bit on the expensive side for what you actually get in the box. Overall I definitely recommend it.