Paleo is a 2–4 player cooperative game of prehistoric survival: ‘A new day dawns in the Stone Age. Your tribe fights for survival while steadily developing new advancements that lay the foundations of the human experience. But dangers abound: animals, storms, and hostile tribes await you in the wild. Can you survive?’ (From the rulebook.)
Each player takes control of a group of humans making up the tribe, the game being played over a series of days during which you perform various tasks (gathering resources, making discoveries or tools, and dealing with challenges such as attacking—or being attacked by—the local wildlife), followed by nights (consolidation and reset), until either you win, by gathering the 5 victory tokens to complete your cave painting, or lose as a result of collecting your fifth skull token.
Cards
Each player manages their group’s activities through the use of various types of card, which can provide, for example, food and other resources, add people to their group, or can reveal dangers. On each turn, players have to decide which of 3 cards to play based solely on their backs.
Forest images are likely to be food or wood, mountain cards often provide stone, and scary red cards are almost but not always bad—the lack of a guarantee of what you’ll find is part of the fun of the game. Some cards have additional clues on their backs: campfires typically result in additional tools or skills for your people; and mammoths and tents (in modules A and B, respectively; see the Setup section for an explanation of modules) are generally beneficial, often leading to the possibility of gaining victory tokens—in module C, it’s pictures of wolves on card backs. If you see a picture of something on the back of a card, that card’s probably going to contribute to winning, but any benefit may come at a great cost—e.g., you should ensure you have a lot of spears before you tackle a mammoth!
Once you’ve selected a card, you turn it over and see what you actually get:
- Action cards typically offer a number of options, some of which require you to have certain abilities and may have other costs (sometimes involving a random element via the roll of one or more dice) in order to gain benefits; e.g., for the first card shown above, if you have 2 skill icons in your group (i.e., on any person card in your group or tool token, but note that some tools have to be discarded when used, indicated by an arrow overlaying the tool’s ability icon), you can discard 2 cards from your deck to gain 3 chunks of wood (useful for constructing tools such as spears or torches), but if you don’t have enough skill, you can discard the cards to gain just one piece of wood, and as with many action cards, the final option is to help another player (described later)—actually, there’s a final, final option, to ignore the card without doing anything.
- Hazard cards are similar to action cards, but unlike those, if you can’t meet the requirements to perform the action, you must suffer a penalty, typically taking a wound (but can be worse); you do not have the option of ignoring these cards.
The ‘rewards’ you can receive by performing the actions on these cards include:
- Gain food, wood or stone resources, as described above.
- Convert resources into tools, known as crafting (the top option on the third card above)—choose one of the available options on the workbench, discard the specified resources and take the associated tool token.
- Gain extra members for your group (take a card from the people pile—final card in the image above) and add it to your section of the tribe.
- Gain dreams or ideas, adding a card from the appropriate pile to the top of your draw deck (such that it’s available for play on your next turn).
- Reveal a secret, to be acted on as instructed.
- Get hurt (take a wound token) or healing (removal of one or more).
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Victory tokens or skull tokens.
After playing the card, it’s usually placed on the discard pile. A few are removed from the game (i.e., sent to the cemetery space)—single use cards, of a sort.
Helping, mentioned above, means picking another player, and giving them access to your resources for the duration of the turn. For example, if you have spear icons, you can add those to their strength in battles, or if you have one, you can give them access to your protective pelt (to prevent wounds) or even take wounds for them. What you can’t do is discard cards for another player.
Some cards hang around once revealed, and a few of those have special abilities which you can activate by using the help action on the card, as opposed to on a person.
Pages 7 and 8 of the rulebook show all the action and reward actions available in the base game and their associated icons.
Each card has a number or letter indicating its type, which is very helpful in working out how to separate them at the end of a game as they will get mixed together. Base action cards have the number 1, people 2, dreams 3, and ideas 4. The back of the card alone is not sufficient to tell the cards apart!
Setup
Paleo does take up a fair amount of space, though the multiple boards can be laid out in different ways to fit your table. (To be frank, some of the board elements can be ignored, and just replaced with piles of cards and tokens—the cemetery is especially useless!)
· Wilderness: the primary features of this board are the spaces for discard piles. When you discard a card after play, it goes face up on one space; when you discard cards as payment for actions, they go face down on the other. The board also has spaces below it for parking cards as instructed by some of the modules (I’ll explain modules in a moment).
· Night board: contains the tracks for victory and skull tokens, so place those near it. This is also where you stack the secrets and mission cards used by the chosen modules.
· Basecamp: stores the stacks of people, dreams and idea cards, and is a convenient storage space for the resource tokens the tribe has acquired. Start off by adding 5 food tokens to the board.
· Workbench: stores tool tokens and idea cards. (This is actually a 3d assembly, but for clarity here, I’ve only shown the base along with the tent idea card and tokens from module B.) Start off by placing torch tokens, axes and spears on the spaces at the bottom; your chosen modules may add extra tools. Keep the remainder of the tool tokens nearby.
· Cemetery: a space for cards removed from the game.
Before you can play a game, you need to select some modules (little stories to add to the game, such as module A introducing a mammoth hunt, or module H giving your people the task of crossing a major river) to play with, normally 2, but sometimes more. The rule supplement describes the modules present in the base game, along with their difficulty levels, and suggests combinations to play with, but you can mix and match as you see fit. The recommendation for your first game is modules A (Bountiful Prey, which adds a bunch of mammoths and other animals) and B (A New World, which couples the ability to create tents with a requirement to have one in the night phase). (There are several mini-expansions providing additional modules: see the end of my review for more information.)
Each module consists of several extra cards. Place secrets and mission cards from the modules in the appropriate spaces on the night board—module A adds mission card A and secrets 1 and 2; module B provides mission card B and the tent idea card (meaning you can now craft tents). Add the modules’ ideas cards to slots in the workbench, along with their associated tool tokens. If a module specifies that it uses dice, place them within reach. Shuffle the remainder of the cards into the base deck, and then divide into roughly equal portions for each player.
Deal each player a pair of people cards. These cards show abilities on the bottom left (spear representing strength, eye meaning awareness, or tools indicating skill), perhaps with a tool token icon above that (which you take from the supply when you acquire the person), and their health is shown on the right—the number of wounds they can sustain before it’s goodnight Vienna.
And now you’re ready to play.
Daytime
At the beginning of the day, each player will have a deck of cards of their own to play from; the daytime continues until players’ decks are empty.
Players select the top 3 cards of their decks and choose one to play based solely on the image on the back, returning the others to the top of the deck. It’s worth looking at what cards other players are choosing from, and discussing what combinations make most sense. As an example, defeating mammoths is generally a good thing, but that’s only possible if you have enough strength (spear icons), so if a card with a mammoth on the back is in your group of 3 cards, your initial decision to play it or defer might be based on the strength of your own group. However, if your strength is moderate, you could rely on other players to boost it by using their helping actions, so if they have cards with trees, rivers or mountains on the back (which are likely—but remember, no guarantees—to have helping as one of the action options), you might want to encourage them to play those cards. As it gets closer to the end of the day (i.e., everyone’s decks are running low), you’ll need to make sure you have enough food to feed the tribe, so it can be worth placing emphasis on forest and river cards, in the hope of netting some.
This decision-making process takes up the majority of the turn time! This, no doubt, is the reason the rulebook suggests not making your first game be one with 4 groups in play.
Once everyone has chosen a card, you decide which actions to take on each card (if there’s is a choice) and in what order to activate them, assuming you have sufficient resources, as described in the Cards section.
Besides requiring the appropriate resources, card activation usually involves paying one or more cards from the top of your deck by discarding them—the number of cards in your deck represents time passing in a sense, and discarding cards in this way is a reflection of the time taken to perform the task. These cards are discarded face down (keeping some surprises for later), and if one of the discarded cards is red-backed, you take a wound—this is often the same penalty as not being able to take the action on the hazard card’s front, so it can be worth taking the risk of playing the card as you’re likely no worse off.
If a human sustains enough injuries, they die (earning you a skull token). If all the humans in your group die, you’re not actually out of the game; you immediately get a new person to continue with.
As described above, other card actions involve having dreams (i.e., taking a card from the dream deck and adding it to the top of your deck, therefore available as a candidate to play on your next turn; and dreams are generally beneficial and can offer options not available on other cards, such as the ability to peek at part of your deck and reorder it), crafting tools (e.g., converting a piece of wood and a stone into a spear), revealing ideas (which increases the range of tools and other objects you can craft), and gaining additional humans for your group.
This cycle of drawing cards, choosing which to play, then activating them proceeds until no one has any cards left, indicating the end of the day phase. Note that you can choose to end your day early by discarding the remainder of your deck—you might want to do this if you can see a large number of hazard cards coming (you’re always allowed to look at the backs of the cards in your deck) and don’t want to risk the damage, since dumping your cards this way doesn’t entail taking injuries.
Pages 10 and 11 of the rulebook do a nice job of showing the details of a single daytime turn.
Nighttime
After day comes night, when you have to feed all your humans as well as deal with mission cards. Incidentally, the rulebook describes running out of cards during the daytime phase as ‘going to sleep,’ such that night happens when everyone’s asleep—the implication here is that you immediately have to wake everyone to feed them! Oh well.
First, discard one food token from the basecamp cache for each member of the tribe. Take a skull token for every person left unfed; given that you only need 5 of those to lose, it’s a very good idea to make sure you accumulate sufficient food during the day. It’s also worth keeping the tribe small rather than amassing too many mouths to feed.
Module A’s mission card requires you to discard 3 more food as well as a pelt (so I hope you were able to craft one during daytime), otherwise take a skull token. Module B’s requires you to discard a tent, otherwise—you’ve guessed it—you take a skull token. (It is a bit of a shame that these prehistoric humans can’t look after their tent and save it until the next day—oh, no, they manage to lose it, so you have to craft a new one for this bunch of apparent incompetents when they wake up.)
Different modules will have different missions to deal with during the night.
Then the discarded cards are shuffled together, split into equal(ish) piles and dealt out to all players; and a new day starts.
The game ends as soon as you’ve either acquired all 5 pieces of the cave painting (through particular module-specific actions—killing mammoths in Module A) and win, or have been lumbered with 5 skull tokens and you lose.
Module J, The Beast, makes things somewhat tougher, as you have to confront a big bad beast once you’ve gained all 5 victory pieces.
Variants
The rules supplement outlines a few variants of the game.
You can have an easier time by using one or more of the following:
- when drawing a people card, draw 2 and choose one to keep;
- add 2 randomly selected idea cards to the workbench along with their tokens;
- add 2 stones and 2 sticks to your initial supplies; and
- when helping other players, you can donate cards.
If you prefer a harder game, choose one or more of:
- when you acquire resources, instead of adding them to the space on the basecamp board, add them to the members of your group, and each person can carry at most 2 resources; you or a player you’re helping choosing to use a card with a campfire on the back is the trigger for you to dump your resources at the basecamp; when consuming resources, you can use only those at the basecamp, and not any currently being carried;
- draw only 2 cards instead of 3 at the beginning of a turn; and
- when you add a person to your group, give them a wound token immediately.
If you fancy playing solo, you don’t start off with any food in the basecamp. When you reveal a card, you can call for help by discarding 2 cards to roll a die or 4 to roll 2 dice, and add any abilities that show up to yours for this turn.
About the author
Current favourite boardgames are Ark Nova and Spooktacular, with a side of Dune: Imperium - Uprising and Paleo. When not playing games or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside over 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). In any time left over after all that, L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
