Elevating Card Play – Up or Down Review

Relatively quick card games are my bread and butter on work lunches, though of course we also make time for some other shorter games (like Cascadia).

One game that was not on my radar at all until I saw the Boardgame Geek GameNight! crew play it was a card game about building elevator shafts called Up or Down.

After playing it, I have to say that this is the best game about building elevator shafts that I have ever played.

(as an aside, can I just say that it’s so amazing that GameNight! has the wonderful Deborah Ann Woll on it sometimes? It’s really cool seeing her play games, and I have to admit that her being on this episode is what brought me to it)

Anyway, Up or Down was designed by Michael Kiesling and Wolfgang Kramer with artwork by Marek Bláha, Kwanchai Moriya, and Jina Rueter. It was published by Capstone Games in 2024.

In the game, you are playing cards in either ascending or descending order into one of your three elevator shafts.

If you can’t, or want to start a new one because you’re already at three, then you can scrap one of yours and discard the cards.

Those cards still get you a point each.

Remember that horribly named The Game card game where you are trying to get rid of all of your cards by placing cards in an ascending or descending order pile?

It’s kind of like that.

How is it?

Wow, I never knew how much I loved elevator shafts.

The most interesting thing about Up or Down is not necessarily the shafts, though it is a cool puzzle in figuring out where you want to start each shaft.

It is in fact how you get the cards for those shafts.

Each player will have three cards in their hand and six cards to choose from, arranged around the two draw decks.

You have to play a card where the value of it is between two of the cards on the table.

Then you can take a card on either side of what you played.

So if you play the 34, you can take either the 32 or the 39 and put it into one of your shafts.

(Trying really hard not to make any bad taste jokes here…oh, too late I guess)

That concept is the most interesting part of the game, but it does make the game a lot more tactical than it otherwise might be.

Most card games, you play what’s in your hand and while what is there is random, you do what you can with it.

In this case, what’s in your hand does not help your shafts at all (I’m really trying here).

Instead, you may be helping an opponent by playing a card that they might want, or perhaps making the gap between cards better for them so they can actually take what they want which they couldn’t do before with the old number out there.

It can be really frustrating having the card that you really want to play to an elevator in your hand and knowing that if you play it, it probably won’t come back around to you.

But it might!

There is of course trying to keep your elevators moving up or down in a good manner to score lots of points.

The card design is really great for helping you place the cards, with arrows going in the right direction, with the black numbers on top and the white numbers at the bottom.

The scoring is what really makes this game, though.

Each elevator scores points by counting the highest number of cards of a colour you have the most of and then multiplying it by the total number of cards in the elevator.

So the middle elevator above would score 4 (red cards) x 6 (total cards) for a total of 24 points.

It incentivizes the player to try to concentrate at least somewhat on one colour, but not necessarily to the point where there are huge number gaps and you can’t get that many cards into it.

It is a nice concession that if you have to scrap an elevator because you can’t (or don’t want to) play to it, those cards are still worth one point each.

This actually adds to the tactical play of the game, though.

Nothing is worse in the game then coming down to the endgame with three beautiful elevators, all high-scoring, but you still have a number of turns and you can’t play any cards to them.

One of them has to be scrapped.

If you can make it so there is a lot of room in at least one, then you might be safe.

But sometimes you have to scrap early so that you have time to build another good one.

Those decisions in a card game are really interesting, even if the game itself is random as hell.

After the two draw decks are empty (one face-up and one face-down, presumably so you at least have a little agency by being able to choose the face-up card, at least until the face-down deck is empty), you keep playing your last three cards.

These turns are pretty much done by rote since you don’t really have much choice, especially in your last turn.

What’s on the table are the only choices for your card.

Up or Down moves at a really brisk pace, clocking in at around 45-50 minutes in all of our plays, no matter how many players we had (5 or 6).

It would probably play fine at 4 as well (that’s what they played at in the video).

Essentially you just remove the top tiered number of cards based on the number of players.

It is also really nice that it plays 6 players very easily.

The artwork is really good, though as far as graphic design goes, it would have been nice to have some difference in the elevator inhabitants.

It’s a cool conceit that at the higher numbers, the doors are more open while as you go down in numbers, the doors are more closed.

But the same people got kind of boring.

It’s probably for consistency and ease of gameplay, so it’s not a huge deal.

Overall, I highly recommend Up or Down if you’re in the mood for a fairly quick card game before or after the main event, or on a lunch or something.

Who knew that elevator shafts could be so cool?

(this review was written after 5 plays)