Day 9 - Paleo

Paleo is a game I own pretty much everything for and I love it. I played the base game to completion solo, then again with my family. Well this Christmas I also introduced it to my partner in the hopes of playing it all over again!

In Paleo you control a group of humans in the paleolithic era. You begin the game by combining two decks of scenario cards with a base deck to form the scenario deck. This will give you a set of goals for surviving. You win by achieving certain milestones, which are marked by adding to your cave painting. You lose by gaining too many skulls through tragedy such as losing members of your tribe.

Each day you split the scenario deck evenly between players. Each player draws the top 3 cards of their deck, examining the backs. They can choose any one to face, placing the others back on their deck to face later. The backs of the cards hint at their content, woods and mountains contain natural resources, while streams have animals to hunt. There are also hazard cards, that contain bad stuff that could hurt you, but if you discard hazards instead of facing them, you will be hurt too, so sometimes it's better to face your fears head on.

I also threw in New Beginnings, mostly because I like the more powerful humans and the puzzle of using the farm board to ensure you stay fed. New Beginnings ups the difficulty of the game, but also makes it a more satisfying gamery experience in my opinion.

We played Howls in the Night & Next Steps, a scenario that focuses on defending the camp from wolves. We lost our first play, but my partner immediately asked to play again. This time we split our focus, with me working on getting tools and resources and ideas and them working on hunting and killing the wolves that plagued our small band of humans.

Happily we won, with a scholarly focus on creating paintings and idols and sure, we also took out a cave lion and most of the wolves too. It looked dicey at points but was a throughly enjoyable play.

If you want a co-op experience that's a little outside of the norm, then Paleo is definitely worth a look. Plus if you want it, theres a ton of content out there for this one!