Paleo is a fascinating co-operative, card-based, engine-building game by Peter Rustermeyer. 2 – 4 players take on the role of early humans struggling together to survive everyday life in the harsh, but vibrant world of the Stone Age. Winning involves collecting food, stone, and wood and pooling resources to invent tools that help keep your cavepeople alive for just long enough to collect puzzle pieces that are finally assembled into something that will outlive all of them: a Lascaux-cave-style mural of a mammoth.
How To Play
The game is divided into two primary phases, Day and Night.
Paleo is a fascinating co-operative, card-based, engine-building game by Peter Rustermeyer. 2 – 4 players take on the role of early humans struggling together to survive everyday life in the harsh, but vibrant world of the Stone Age. Winning involves collecting food, stone, and wood and pooling resources to invent tools that help keep your cavepeople alive for just long enough to collect puzzle pieces that are finally assembled into something that will outlive all of them: a Lascaux-cave-style mural of a mammoth.
How To Play
The game is divided into two primary phases, Day and Night.
Each player starts with 2 human cards and a personal deck of locations and experiences that is dealt out face-down to each player at the start of each Day. Each Human has their own job and set of skills. Warriors come with spears, Gatherers are good at Perception, Crafters have Hammers for building etc. Each Human also has a number of Hit Points/Hearts that they can sustain before dying.
During the Day phase players draw three cards from the private deck that have been dealt out to each player (keeping their hand invisible to the other players), and secretly choose one from this selection. Each card represents locations available to their small group of humans. In these locations you will find animals, plants, dangers, and challenges (which by solving at high-cost often permit marvellous boons to be granted to the players).
The chosen cards are then all revealed simultaneously to the group and choices are made collectively about which to attend to and which to neglect. Dangers can be deferred by not be selected to be played, but if this is done they reenter the deck and must be confronted later.
Each card can be resolved either by committing skills listed on each player’s Human cards; discarding the card to the (often to take damage); or can be ignored in order to lend aid another player’s Humans in their endeavours.
Once the full set of every player’s deck is used up, the game proceeds to the Night phase.
In the Night phase, all Humans have to be fed (or they die and the whole table receives a negative point), and collected resources can be traded in for Victory Points (puzzle pieces that are assembled to produce the Mammoth Painting). Collect 5 Mammoth pieces, you win. Fail to do this before you collect 5 negative points (Skulls) from dead cavemen, you lose.
Different “modules” are included in the game that describe different Victory conditions. One will focus on building shelters as the Victory condition, another on building stone henges, another on sustaining an increasing number of Humans to the end of the game etc.
Review
A sign of a really well-designed game is that it builds its themes into its mechanic and play experience. Paleo is absolutely one such game. It is in the synergy between game-playing experience and theme that Paleo really excels. It is not mandatory that anyone learn anything from a history-themed game, of course, but Paleo really gives you an insight into Stone Age life. The passage of time is represented by drawing cards from a deck. The more opportunities you pass over, cards you are forced to discard, the quicker you move through the deck and the less you are able to achieve overall in the Day. The more resources required by each card the slower another player who helps you to achieve your goal moves through their day – signalling distraction and delay. This is a well-known engine in boardgames, but it does well here in demonstrating how time-consuming and laborious everyday tasks would have been in the Paleolithic period.
The game plays out in simultaneous action as each little “team” or individual draws three cards from the deck and chooses one before revealing their choice to the rest of the players. Each time this occurs there is a moment of real drama as you suddenly realise that your sense of how this part of the Day will play out is quite different from your fellow players. The feeling of surprise and randomness that beset Stone Age life is represented here through the revelation of the other players’ cards. Suddenly what you thought was a day harvesting millet is suddenly a day fighting back and skinning a sabre-toothed tiger.
“Paleo” is an evocative title. For me, for slightly the wrong reasons. It sounds like the diet you get lectured about the virtues of by some guy at the gym who is always trying to get you to invest in crypto. But the world of the game is not some zero-sum, “red in tooth and claw” place where each primitive human is seeking some competitive edge over every other. It is less “dog-eat-dog” proto-capitalism than “everyone chips-in to catch and train dog, then uses dog to provide companionship while they invent painting”. Peter Rustermeyer has a really good point to make about Stone Age life here. They may look tough and unapproachable from the art (all unadorned sharp lines, grizzled beards, spears and the like), but there’s a sweetness about these Stone Age denizens. All they really want (often won at the cost of many lives along the way) is to daub a really neat picture of a hairy elephant. Yet herein lies a little problem I have with Paleo. Perhaps the only one. The super-serious Eurogame artwork can appear a little incongruous. It might even be a little off-putting to some younger players who would likely really enjoy the experience overall. Dominik Mayer’s art is superb in itself – evoking an organic, highly-coloured world reminiscent of an Henri Rousseau primitive – but slightly misrepresents the game experience. There is a warmth and humour here that the art does not really lean into as much as It might. Resting in the Night phase after the difficulties of the Day is a poignant and charming moment. This is a society trying its best to accommodate the people that it can and make things that matter: Art, Security, Aid for each other.
Paleo seeks to marry some of the thoughtful point-scoring play of a typical Eurogame with the excitements of something more family friendly and approachable. As such, it occupies an exciting hybrid space that recent games like Wingspan have carved out for themselves. It reflects the changings audience for table-top games where fun tends to trump maths. We have beautiful design, rich art, and a fascinating work of world-building combined with a less daunting and rules-heavy mechanic than many equivalent Eurogames. Fans of Wingspan and its spin-offs will likely love Paleo. I look forward to playing the various card-based expansion that are already available: A New Beginning, The Initiation Rite, The Hornets, and The Terror Birds.
I cannot help but feel, though, that this development of a hybrid game space does also give Paleo a little bit of an identity crisis. The real game is convincing the other players to attend to the thing you really think is essential when they have their own concerns right in front of them, and their own little group of people to look after. Cleverly for a co-op game you often actually do start to care a little more for your group (just by virtue of them having been dealt to you) than another player’s. Not always. Sometimes you can willingly sacrifice one to a great goal, but while their resources and skills are pooled, each Human belongs to someone. This is a deceptive game. In its marketing and design, it presents itself as a simple resource-collecting enterprise or fast paced “Co-Operative Adventure” (as it says in the tag line), but this is no Forbidden Island or Talisman. Hiding in here is a compelling social game. The great leap forward for humanity was, after all, not just advancing technology, but our mastery of language and politics. This is subtly shown here in the gameplay. Once you get to grips with the mechanic, the primary task of most players becomes one of negotiation. The How-To-Play guide does not quite lean into this side of things, but I found it to be the principal fun of the whole experience. How can you explain to the others at the table that rather than joining a dangerous hunt your day is better served at home by the fire reproducing new humans, bravely and furiously? I do not know if everyone’s game group is more instinctively agreeable and egalitarian than mine, but there are enjoyable disputes to be had. One player might wish to spend my time establishing organised religion (for some reason?). Another might want to explore a cave network. Another might want to fight bears. Why does each have value over another. There’s a lesson here about humanity. Dang, in spite of ourselves, we’ve just invented Democracy.
The game boards are beautiful and made with genuine, loving attention to detail. Paleo really is a first-rate production. The three main location “Base Camp”, “Wilderness”, “Night” are each distinct and evocative. “Night” depicts the charming light effects of a campfire on a cave wall. Day depicts an enticing three-dimensional world of exploration and possibility. The discard pile is a 3D model of an elephant graveyard and there is a multilevel “workbench” that serves as a card stand and resource silo. Assembling the pieces the first time was a minigame in itself; a work of cooperation that is almost demanding enough in itself to feel like a metacommentary on the themes of the game proper. For me, it required lots of grunting, furious pointing, and confused furrowing of our heavy, Neanderthal brow ridges. Do make sure the first time you play Paleo eo (and you should absolutely play Paleo) you leave enough time to set up. It is not easy the first time and you do not want your first experience to be a Freudian primal scene of Cane and Abel screaming and violence. After that, the game box gives you lots of baggies and slots to organise things for quicker starts.
