Description
The Paleo board game is a co-operative adventure game set in the stone age, a game in which players try to keep the human beings in their care alive while completing missions. Sometimes you need a fur, sometimes a tent, but these are all minor quests compared to your long-term goal: Painting a woolly mammoth on the wall so that humans thousands of years later will know that you once existed. (Okay, you just think the mammoth painting looks cool. Preserving a record of your past existence is gravy.)
What might keep you from painting that mammoth? Death, in all its many forms.
Each player starts the game with a couple of humans, who each have a skill and a number of life points. On a turn, each player chooses to go to one location — possibly of the same type as other players, although not the same location — and while you have some idea of what you might find there, you won’t know for sure until you arrive, at which point you might acquire food or resources, or find what you need to craft a useful object, or discover that you can aide someone else in their project, or suffer a snakebite that brings you close to death. Life is full of both wonders and terrors…
At the day’s end, you need food for all the people in your party as well as various crafts or skills that allow you to complete quests. Failure to do so adds another skull on the tote board, and once you collect enough of those, you decide that living is for fools and give up the ghost, declaring that future humans can just admire someone else, for all you care.
The Paleo board game includes multiple modules that allow for a variety of people, locations, quests, and much more during your time in 10,000 BCE.
The rules are available for download here.
| Game Details | |
|---|---|
| Name | Paleo (2020) |
| Complexity | Medium [2.62] |
| BGG Rank | 216 [7.70] |
| Player Count | 1-4 |
Kevin Mc Gowan (verified owner) –
This is a co-operative game where you jointly lead your tribe through various problems within which each player controls a different group, the game ends when either you jointly complete the “Cave Painting” consisting of 5 pieces to win or have lost 5 penalty points (skulls) and lost. There are a lot of scenarios in the box each using a different set of cards for the player decks, these drive each game. To start the tribe deck is constructed, shuffled and dealt evenly between all players then each player is given 2 tribe cards which come with a few skills (circles bottom left of card). The tribe deck contains cards with various “backs” which gives an indication of what may be on the front side of it, on a turn each player takes the top 3 cards of their deck and decides which card to use putting the other 2 back on top of their deck in any order, it is useful at this point to discuss with the other players what you will be doing with your group as one of the options you may get is to “help another player” and not all cards have this option. When ready you all reveal the cards and choose one of the options on it, most cards are about gathering resources for which you will need a number of skills (e.g. 5 spear symbols to tackle the baby mammoth) if you have these skills either independently or together by being helped by others you reap the rewards – there is usually an additional cost of discarding a number of cards and if it is a useful card it will be burnt and out of the game, the most difficult cards give a “Cave Painting” segment as a reward and are burnt. Other cards in your deck may give wounds to your tribe members (death of a tribe member gives a skull), allow you to recruit tribe members or build tools. The round ends when there are no more cards left, then you must feed all tribe members and fulfil round end goals – failure gives skulls, then the cards are shuffled and dealt out and you go again until one of the game end triggers occurs. There is a deck of event cards and another of inventions which may be added to the mix to stop a particular scenario becoming stale. Overall it is an enjoyable game with plenty of variety through the scenarios and although we only played the first scenario it did seem quite well balanced however there is also an element of each scenario becoming easier as you get to learn what is in the scenario deck. For me there was nothing new in the mechanisms and the style of play reminded me of Robinson Crusoe but without the tightness of each individual turn/action making Paleo feel a friendlier game also I found the rules were a lot easier to learn than Robinson Crusoe. Compared to Lost Ruins of Arnak (another Kennerspiel contender) this is the more deserving of the award giving a fuller gaming experience.