Welcome to our review of Hans Im Gluck and Z-Man Games‘ Paleo! Have you ever dreamed of being a caveman at the dawn of civilization? Not a question you hear every day, but it’s one you’ll be facing when you sit down to play this game. In Paleo, 2 to 4 players have groups of cavemen to keep alive and grow into a society. The game takes about 60 minutes to play and is geared to players ten years old & up. Let’s learn how to play this fascinating game!

Game Overview – Paleo

Paleo is a cooperative game. By working together, all players will either win or lose together. The game’s primary goal is to gain victory points represented by a cave painting – five pieces of the picture are each victory point.

The game takes place over multiple day and night cycles where players draw cards from their decks and complete actions to help benefit the tribe. During the day cycle, players work through their deck of cards to either action or discard them. Players should be working towards the mission cards of their scenario and ensuring they have enough food to feed every member of the tribe. During the night cycle, players complete those missions and feed the tribe. Failure to do either of these will result in the group receiving a skull, and gaining five skulls will cause the players to lose the game. We’ll get into more detail about how the game plays further down in this article.

Game Components

Paleo includes three boards – A Night board, A Wilderness board, and a Base Camp board. 

These mainly store cards and tokens during the game. They are graphically on the theme and look excellent. The Night board stores the cave painting, five skulls, the secret scenario cards, and the mission cards. The Wilderness board stores the faceup and face-down discard piles. Finally, the base camp board stores the resources the group has gained along with the humans, dreams, and ideas decks.

The game also has a cardboard “graveyard” where some cards and humans go when they are defeated instead of the discard piles. Finally, the last major board item is the workbench. This two-level card display stores the players gained ideas and associated tokens. The workbench looks impressive, and we liked how it’s an assembled piece of the board, which gives the game an added depth. 

The game also comes with many cardboard tokens representing everything from pelts to torches, to tents, amongst other things, and fifteen decks of cards. The tokens help remind you what you achieved, and you can spend the tokens to help with some actions. The cards are also beautifully designed. The backs show various scenes, and everyone’s deck will consist of different cards. The backs are the key to the players deciding where they want to go next.

Game Setup

Paleo does take a few minutes to set up. Initially, when you open the game up, you’ll need to separate all the cards into their groups. Luckily, each deck has a number or letter on the front that identifies which group it belongs to. Group 1 is all the base cards that get used in each game. Depending on which scenario you play, the lettered cards used will vary. The lettered cards are combined in multiple configurations to form a specific scenario. 

The boards, workbench, and graveyard get configured in a row. The tool tokens are in front of the workbench, and the other tokens are off to the side.

Finally, each scenario has additional setup instructions found in a supplemental rulebook. Most include other mission cards, secret cards, and ideas that you start with. These also get added to the board. You may even use dice in your scenario; it all depends.

Speaking of which, the player’s first decision is to decide which scenario they want to play. The first scenario uses the base cards combined with the A and B module cards. Some modules go up to the letter J included in the box. The group takes out all cards with the “moon back” from chosen decks. These cards get placed on the Night board and are the missions you must complete as a group every round. 

Overall the setup is a bit involved. However, the rulebook does an excellent job of walking you through how the items are laid out and includes a helpful visual to show where everything goes.

Game Play

So let’s get into how Paleo works. A lot is going on here, and the different modules to swap in and out, along with ten additional blank cards, allow for varied gameplay every time you sit down to play. For this review, we’ll be talking about Scenario 1. Scenarios do not need to be played in order, and this is not a campaign game. They provide a variety of challenges. 

The game is played over hands during the day phase until each player runs out of cards, then the game switches to the night phase before starting a new Day Phase. 

How Paleo gets played

During the Day Phase, The goal, as mentioned above, is to work your way through your deck of cards. To do this, each player looks at the back of the top three cards in their deck. They do not look at the front. Everyone picks one card and places the other two back onto their deck in the same order, then they all flip that card over simultaneously. 

The backs of each card have different illustrations that tell the players the location where the action will take place: forest, mountain, river, home, in dreams, etc. Cards can have additional images on them as well as the base image, like a mammoth, for instance. These will give the player an indication of what they’ll face at that location. Not all cards provide this type of information; some cards are downright nasty events.

If the card is not red, players choose one of the actions on the card to complete. They must meet all the requirements of the action. If they can not or choose not to complete an action, they can ignore and discard the card. The actions include “Abilities” (Skill, Perception, or Strength), Discarding cards, and possibly discarding tools or other items like food. Each action provides a “reward.” we say reward in quotes because they aren’t always good. 

Players get the item(s) to the right of the action they complete. Sometimes this is food for the tribe, stones to build stuff, wood or taking additional people, dreams, or creating/completing ideas. 

One thing we noticed is that during the initial few-day phases, cards can be utterly unattainable because you won’t have enough abilities to complete them. The good thing is you don’t have to discard these cards without doing anything. 

Players can forgo doing an action themselves and instead commit all their humans and tools to another player’s action. The help action introduces the cooperative aspect of the game. Multiple players can assist one another as well. For instance, bringing down a Bull Mammoth takes eight strength icons. Early in the game, this will be unattainable, so you will tend to use the help action on the card instead of attacking the mammoth to help another player. However, in a later Day Phase, the card might come up again, and if all players band together and help the player who turned over that card, you may be able to reach the required eight strength. The original player must complete the rest of the action, including discarding any cards. Other players can help by discarding required tools like a torch if needed. If the action is successful, players can split the rewards. Now one little wrinkle in this is the dice. They are not in the first scenario, but other players have to commit to helping you before you roll the dice, which adds required abilities to complete. 

The players then repeat the process of taking the top three cards and choosing one until each player runs out of cards, ending the day phase. The day phase is where the strategy of the game occurs. 

Throughout the phase, players need to keep in mind their missions. Every scenario requires you to return one food to the supply for every human in the game. Beyond that, the group needs to decide what’s important to do during the round. 

Some decisions include: 

Do you grow your tribe by adding more humans, which brings more abilities to complete more difficult actions (Bull Mammoth), but it costs more food? Or do you keep your human group small and rely on adding tools that give you the same abilities with fewer mouths to feed. 

Of course, ensuring you have enough food throughout the day is a top priority. Still, if you don’t grow your tribe, it is difficult to reach these minimum requirements. Each scenario has additional missions you need to plan for during the day phase. 

In the first scenario, your missions require you to have three additional food tokens beyond what you need to feed your group. You also need one animal pelt and a tent. Animal pelts are gained by hunting as a reward. On their own, players can spend them to prevent damage. Still, in the first scenario, you need to ensure you keep at least one amongst your group because if you don’t, your group receives a skull. The tent is also a mission requirement in the first scenario. It is an idea card on the workbench. Players can gain the tent by doing an idea action during the day phase. It requires “Skill” (an ability), wood, and pelts. Should you fail to complete a mission successfully, you must also add a skull to the night board. After five skulls, the game ends in a loss.

After the day phase, Paleo then shifts to the night phase. The goal of the night phase is to complete the missions you were planning for during the day phase. Not completing a mission almost but not always results in receiving a skull. Skulls also come from humans in your tribe that have taken too much damage, and other cards can also give you skulls when you fail an action, so you must be wary. The night phase is a cleanup phase in that, after completing or not completing (as the case may be) the missions, one player gathers up the face-up and face-down decks, shuffles them, and deals them back out to everyone. 

The last thing each scenario has is “secret” cards. These are numbered and specific to a scenario. They live on the night board and are referenced in the action cards as “rewards” (although they are not all rewards). For instance, on the baby mammoth card in the first scenario, the reward for killing the animal is food, which is good. Unfortunately, players also get a secret card, and without giving away too much, it’s a red-backed card. So not all secrets help – you never know.

So how do you get Victory Points?

We’ve mentioned several times how you get skulls and lose the game, but how the heck do you get victory points? Well, victory points appear on your action cards, dream cards, and idea cards. Often the reward for completing an action, like killing that Bull Mammoth or spending resources to build a stone circle idea, will get you a victory point. Once you have all five victory points, you can assemble the cave painting and win.

Game Strategy

Our initial strategy for Paleo was not good. In the first two games, we lost, and we lost badly. There were three reasons we lost. There are three ideas you can always build without an idea card being present on the workbench. These are a torch, a stone tool, and a spear. The torch grants perception; the stone tool adds a skill; while the spear adds strength. We thought (and were incorrect) that once you apply the stone tool or spear to complete an action, you discard it back to the supply. Unfortunately for us, that’s not the case. The only tool of the three that gets discarded is the torch. Once we figured that out, we had more skill and strength tokens left for later in the game. Another reason we lost was our overall strategy of keeping our groups of humans low. Doing this prevented us from completing the more complex actions and, therefore, not having enough to be successful and gain victory points. The final reason we lost was that we always avoided red-backed cards. We’d take damage to discard them or “Go to Sleep Early,” which means discarding the rest of our deck and moving directly to the night phase. During the third game, we adjusted our strategy, directly taking on the red-backed cards. We found that while we couldn’t help others, we could complete the danger and gain a reward without taking damage. We also grew our group of humans, and each person then focused on one of the three abilities to become strong. As the game progressed, we followed this strategy, and it only took about three rounds to complete the Cave Painting. 

Overall Impressions

Paleo is an enjoyable cooperative game. If you are looking for a game with not a ton of story and is easy to pick up from gaming session to gaming session, Paleo might be for you.

We love the illustrations and the strategy of having enough food and resources to complete the missions in the night phase. The secret cards also add an exciting twist to the game. 

What we think could be better is doing more actions during the night phase. Granted, we only played the first couple of scenarios, and we know that if we end up playing the J modules, the game becomes quite hard. It’s apparently “Lethal” on the skill level.

So if you want to play a fun cooperative game for 1-4 players, check out Paleo! We are getting it into our store next week!