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So, You’ve Been Eaten. Easy to swallow or hard to digest? It all depends on whether you are The Beast or The Miner.
So, You’ve Been Eaten is a sci-fi themed game for from 0–2 players. Yes, that’s right there is a zero player option though you still need someone physically present to roll the dice and move the pieces.
The premise is that an intrepid Space Miner has been sent to journey inside the digestive tract of a giant Space Beast and attempt to harvest crystals that are lodged there whilst the Beast sends down harmful bacteria attempting to incapacitate and ultimately digest said Miner. Along the way the Miner may collect tools and aids left behind by unfortunate souls who never made it out and the Beast can develop Immune Responses that enhance its response. The Miner wins by collecting all 8 different crystals and the Beast wins by digesting the Miner!
Miner Yours?
So, You’ve Been Eaten is basically an asymmetric two-player game where one person is the Miner and the other the Beast. There are also two sets of solo rules: the Miner entering a Hibernating Beast or the Beast defending against a Robot Miner. Then there is the 0-player version of Robot Miner v Hibernating Beast. Just roll the dice and see what happens. This maybe a gimmick but it can be quite diverting, is very quick and gives the Miner the best chance of victory.
Eaten Mess
Four boards slot together to make the Beast’s Digestive Tract with a Miner’s control panel at one end and four bacteria tracts at the other. Each board is reversible with the Beast’s end having an Awake and a Hibernating side and the Miner being Human or Robot. The two middle boards are also two-sided representing different aids to play dependent on the rule set being used. Note it wasn’t abundantly clear which side of these middle two to use when. You can work it out but it would have been nice to have it spelled out for you.
The middle channel is the Digestive Tract where 7 of the 48 Stomach cards are laid out to give the initial stomach contents. Each card will have one of the 4 types of bacteria on it. 16 of the cards also show a crystal – 2 for each of the 8 crystal types. 20 cards have a tool on them, 4 each of the 5 tool types and the other 12 only show a bacteria.
Crystal Grazing
The Miner in So, You've Been Eaten starts by rolling 3 dice (D6 and yet the 6 has a line under it. Why?) and using them to either affect Stomach cards in that position in the Digestive Tract counting from 1 in front of you up to 7 by the Beast or to build upgrades or attack immune responses. The three main areas are Stun, Eliminate and Capture.
Stun lets you move a card away fom you up the tract pushing the intervening cards back towards you. It also lets you adjust one of the unused dice by one. This can be very useful.
Eliminate will remove a bacteria if there is a similar coloured bacteria either side of it. Both are removed. Better still if there is the same colour on both sides all 3 are removed.
Capture means you can claim the crystal if shown on the card.
All 3 of these can be upgraded to give additional powers. Stun now gives an extra die roll, Eliminate can remove an Immune Response and Capture can collect a tool. It’s a good idea to build these upgrades as soon as possible because Immune Response cards can downgrade them and if they are not upgraded at the time you lose a crystal!
Finally Adjust lets you change another die to any other number.
Having completed all actions the Miner is now attacked by the nearest bacteria. There is no way to prevent this unless you completely empty the Digestive Tract which is extremely unlikely. This sets a timer on the game for when one of the bacteria reaches level 4 the Miner perishes. So with 4 bacteria types the maximum number of turns is 13 and usually less. Unlucky for some!
Beastly Business
The Beast now responds. First it fills up the empty spaces in the Digestive Tract from its hand of seven cards. It can add extra cards if it has them at its end to push cards down and out by the Miner to clear crystals or push a more dangerous bacteria there. It then can try to take an Immune Response card.
To obtain an Immune Response card you must meet two requirements: have enough energy and have the given bacteria combinations in the DigestiveTract. Energy is gained by the number of crystals there are in the Digestive Tract and by discarding non-crystal cards to the bottom of the deck. If it has 5 Immune Response cards in play at the end of the Miner’s turn it wins.
Victory Is Mine But Not Miner
So, You’ve Been Eaten players alternate turns until either the Miner has all 8 crystals or the Beast has a Bacteria up to the 4th level or 5 Immune Response cards in play. If neither side meets its victory conditions before the deck of Stomach Cards are exhausted then scores are calculated from crystals gained and bacteria levels with a tie favouring the Miner.
Miner Difficulty
So, You’ve Been Eaten is the most, highly likely outcome for any Miner against even a half way competent human Beast. In the 5 two-player games played so far the Beast has won every time. Two factors influence this: the Beast has two routes to victory and it can control the flow of crystals.
The steady march of bacteria can not be stemmed and you need to clear a lot of cards out of the Digestive Tract to empty the deck before one of them reaches Level 4.
Immune responses build steadily too. The Beast should aim to always get one per turn. The Miner can eliminate them but only if the action is upgraded and has the right die number on the card. These should be kept down especially as they give the Beast extra powers. This leads to a lot of frantic fire-fighting towards the latter stages: clearing dangerous bacteria, upgrading actions and eliminating Immune Responses all whilst you are supposed to be collecting crystals.
Which brings us to the second great Beast strength: control of the crystals. Apart from the original 7 random Stomach cards in the Digestive Tract any subsequent gaps are filled from the Beast’s hand. So the Beast can hold back the 2 cards of any one of the crystals until virtually the last turn whilst the bacteria and Immune Responses steadily dispose of the Miner!
If the Miner can not win by collecting crystals the only other alternative is a score victory when the deck is exhausted. The Miner can score a maximum of 10 : 1 point for each of 7 crystals and 1 point for each of 3 upgrades. The Beast can score up to 8 on the Bacteria Tract and 4 with Immune Response cards though it will lose 1 point for each crystal still in its hand. This means the Beast will probably edge it by 1 point though fortunately a tie will result in a Miner victory.
Sleeping Beastie
All is not lost Miners! If the Beast is attacked whilst asleep, the first solo mode, then it doesn’t directly control the crystals and the Miner has a chance and gets more wins. The Beast’s turn is controlled by a Digestion Die giving varied outcomes. As two of these result in losing a crystal if present in the Stomach Tract the Miner should make every effort to collect these as soon as they come up.
Tin Miners
The other solo mode sees a Robot Miner attacking a human Beast and now the Miner has an additional route to victory by getting his piece 5 spaces along a Replication track. Movement on this replaces the acquisition of tools in the 2-player game and come along quite quickly from the automatic resolution of the Miner’s three die rolls. The Beast can pull this back by having the right crystals in play but this definitely tilts the play balance towards the Miner. A Robot Miner will also have to only collect 7 crystals but it’s usually the Replication Track that is the route to victory.
Miner Miracle
So, finally, the battle of the automata in the 0-player mode. Here, in my experience, the Miner dominates. One game was a Miner win in just two minutes!
Miner Tweaks
The designers for So, You've Been Eaten, suggest game balance tweaks in each variation if you are finding it too hard. In particular in the 2-player version the use of Skill Calibration Routine & Emergency Workload Enhancement Devices or S.C.R.E.W.E.D. tiles which will give the Miner tools or the Beast energy. My suggestion for the 2-player game would be to have the Miner only collect 7 crystals.
My De-Luxe edition contained a mini-expansion of Dyspepto-Beastmol tokens that when processed would give the Miner extra actions or make the Beast’s Immune Response cards harder to eliminate. There were also wooden bacteria tokens, a robot miner figure and actual crystals though in a couple of cases it was harder to match these up with the crystal cards.
The End Of A Good Meal
So, You’ve Been Eaten is a well-produced, attractive looking game with many variations to try. The concept and rules booklets are handled in an amusing witty manner, always a plus for me. The artwork and production are spot on. I would have liked to see a system where the Miner physically marched up the Stomach Tract particularly if you have the wooden figure but what we have works fine. I think the solo variations are potentially the stronger but if you’re playing 2-Player remember it’s hard being a Miner!
