Paleo second opinion

Forest images are likely to be food or wood, mountain cards often provide stone, scary red cards are almost but not always bad—and that’s a fun aspect of the game, that there’s no guarantee that you’ll get what you’re hoping for. 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 later 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 the benefit may come at a great cost—you need a lot of strength to defeat a mammoth!

Once all players have chosen their cards, the other 2 are returned to the deck, and players reveal their cards. Everyone decides together which actions to take on each card (assuming there is a choice) and in what order to activate them. Typically, you need to have a number of different icons on your collection of humans and tools in order to activate a card, e.g., you need strength, as indicated by an arrowhead, to attack animals, or skill (crossed tools) to make something, and if you don’t have sufficient of the appropriate icons, you can’t perform the task on the revealed card. However, many cards provide ‘helping’ as an option—a player with that card can share their resources with another player. If even that doesn’t help, the card can be ignored, with one exception: hazards must be played, and almost involve players taking hit points, in the form of injuries to one of their humans. If a human sustains enough injuries, they die (earning you a skull token—see later). If all the humans in your group die, you’re not actually out of the game; you start with a new one. Among the resources that ‘helping’ lets players share is the ability to take damage—a helping player can sacrifice one of their humans instead. Something I’ve found, particularly early in the game where everyone’s rather underpowered, is that among the set of revealed cards, at least one will be impossible no matter how we combine forces, which makes that a strong candidate for use in helping another player. 

Besides requiring the appropriate icons, card activation usually involves paying 1 or more cards from the top of your deck by discarding them—the number of cards in your deck kind of represents time passing, and discarding cards in this way is an indication of the time taken to perform a task. Be aware that discarding a red-backed one causes you to sustain an injury, so sometimes it’s better to choose to play the hazard card and suffer its consequences rather than have to discard it to perform an action on some other card, and most likely suffer similar injury anyway. 

A few of the other card actions involve having dreams (i.e., taking a card from the dream deck and adding it to your deck to play from; and dreams are generally beneficial), crafting tools (using collected resources, such as 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 and don’t want to take the risk, since discarding this way doesn’t involve taking injuries. 

After this comes night time. First, you have to feed all your humans as well as deal with ‘mission’ cards (see later); if you can’t feed everyone or complete these missions at the end of the day, you gain skull tokens. 

Then the discarded cards are shuffled together, dealt out to all players, and a new day starts. 

Let’s return to setup. There are several different card decks in this game; some are separated out, some are munged together, and some are ignored for any given game. The easy ones are the dream, idea and human cards, which all have their own spaces on the base camp board. The remainder are the base deck (common to all games) and a number of modules, cards representing little stories to add to the game (such as module A introducing a mammoth hunt, or H giving your tribe the task of crossing a major river); a game typically involves a couple of modules, and the rest are set aside. This module system affords a high degree of replayability, especially when you can get hold of more modules via the many expansions to the game. Each module contains cards to merge with the base deck, a mission card to add to the night board (i.e., a requirement which must be fulfilled during the night phase), optionally some secret cards which will be brought into play to by other module cards, idea cards, and cards to be added to the wilderness board. 

The recommended modules for your first game are (A) Bountiful Prey, which adds a bunch of mammoths and other animals, and (B) A New World, which couples the idea card for tents (i.e., you can perform a crafting action to create a tent) along with a requirement in the night phase to have a tent. Other missions include diseases and their cures in Rare Fever, and The Wide River, which includes a raft idea card and a river, in the form of yet another series of cards. 

All of these different decks do make for a fiddly setup, and an even worse teardown because cards in initially separate decks end up joining the main playing deck via discards, so you may have to sort cards into the right decks at the end. Talking about discards, when a card is played, it’s discarded face up, but when cards are used to pay for actions, they’re discarded face down. This does a nice job of keeping some things for surprises for later on, instead of seeing every card as you play a round; eventually you will see all cards, of course, but hopefully there are enough of them, and sufficient swapping between modules, that you won’t remember everything that’s coming up.