Paleo 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.
Paleo includes multiple modules that allow for a variety of people, locations, quests, and much more during your time in 10,000 BCE.
BoardGameGeek Description:
A strategic game of adventure and dexterity
The fabulous city of Paleo was swallowed up by the oceans 5,000 years ago and fell into oblivion. A parchment manuscript has just been discovered, revealing the location of its gates. The city’s immense riches described in the manuscript have inspired much desire and greed.
As the head of a team of explorers and mercenaries, you have set up camp in the Paleo Archipelago. But other teams have also arrived at the scene.
Protected by your mercenaries, your explorers are ready to launch a search for the keys that will give access to the city. It is up to you to take advantage of the archipelago’s many reefs in order to stay ahead of your competitors.
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In the basic two-player version of Paleo, players set up the 65 x 65 cm board with four central reefs, two sanctuaries for each player in the corners of the board, and five supplemental reefs placed according to various rules. Each player controls a team of five explorers and three mercenaries; you move these pieces by flicking them with your finger as in Crokinole. If your mercenary hits an opponent’s piece, that piece is removed from the board; remove all of the opponent’s pieces, and you win the round and score one point.
The explorers are used to enter the opponent’s sanctuaries and recover two keys that then allow the player to enter the gate of Paleo in the center of the board. (Any of your pieces that enters a sanctuary can be exchanged for another piece already captured by the opponent.) This victory is worth two points, and a complete game requires a player to earn four points to win.
Rules are included to accommodate three or four players, in addition to rules for ten other games for 2-4 players such as hockey, a kayak race, and Capture the King.
