Archeologic

• Designer: Yoann Levet
• Publisher: Ludonaute
• Players: 1-4
• Age: 12+ 
• Time: 45 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

A city in the mountains was discovered, but no one dares to venture there without having mapped the place. Here is finally a mission for you, an archaeologist with implacable logic.

ArcheOlogic is a competitive deduction game whose goal is to first find the exact location of the buildings of the city.  To help you? An Archeoscope, the only research instrument capable of reading the coded cards left by the Ancients. Ask the Archeoscope your questions by adjusting its cogs, note the precious answers, and replace the buildings on your plan. Think carefully as some questions will take more time than others, but maybe their answer will help you win…

In this game, each player is competing to be the fastest to place the six buildings in the correct locations in the 5×5 grid.  To play the game, take one of the 28 coded cards and give each player some starting clues using the Starting Clue wheel.  The game recommends 3 clues for hard games and up to 5 clues for easier games.

On the city board, players place their tokens on the time track to start, and the viewfinder goes on the “1” space.  In this game, the player furthest to the back of the time track always takes the next turn; even if this means they take multiple turns in a row.

On your turn, the viewfinder automatically moves one space clockwise.  You can then spend a time to move it forward another space or 2 time to move it anywhere.  When you move on the time track, you always skip any occupied spaces.  Then, you ask a question on the device – using the row or column specified by the viewfinder.

There are different costs based on the question you wish to ask:

1 Time

How many different buildings are on this line?  

How many empty spaces are on this line?

2 Time

Which boxes of a specific small building are on this line?

Which trap boxes are found on this line?

3 Time

Which boxes of a specific large building are found on this line?

When you ask a question, you must always announce to everyone what you have asked, but you do not reveal the answer.  To use the widget, you first rotate the top dial so that the bright blue circle surrounds the type of question you want to ask.  This will cause the holes in the two levels to line up in a certain way.  Then, you take the card, and place it so that the letter or number matching the location of the viewfinder is in the circle at the bottom.  The symbols that appear in the holes will give you your needed answer(s).

Be sure to set the question first so that you don’t accidentally reveal extra information as parts of the Archeoscope move!

You have both note paper as well as a board and the six buildings to push around.  Take lots of notes – making sure to note both the question you asked as well as the information given.  Some players even note what questions other players asked – but I am not quite smart enough to really know what to do with that information.

Whenever you think you have solved it, you announce this on your turn, move your Pawn ahead 4 spaces and wait for your next turn.  If you get another turn, you check the solution in the rulebook.  If you have all six buildings in the right spots, you win.  If you don’t, you lose and are out of the rest of this game.  Note that it is possible that everyone loses.

There is also a nice phone app that you can use for both multiplayer and solo games.  There is even an expert mode, with harder clues, which can only be played from the app.  I’m personally not a fan of apps in games, so I haven’t really used it myself.

My thoughts on the game

Well, Yoann Levet is definitely getting a reputation for making deduction games with interesting widgets.  Last year, his Turing Machine attracted a lot of attention, and similarly, the Archeoscope in this game is also an eye-catching thingamabob.

There are only 28 different puzzles in this game, but honestly, as long as you pull one out randomly, you’re going to have to solve it each time.  All of the code numbers are permutations with 3s, 5s, and 7s as all the digits, so there’s really zero chance that you’ll remember a particular solution given the puzzle number.  So essentially, there are an unlimited number of games in this box.  Additionally, with the advanced options available on the phone app, as well as promised daily challenges, there is as much content for the game as you’ll ever need.

There is definitely an art to asking the right question, and if you can figure out how to not spend extra time moving the viewfinder to a different location, you’ll end up gaining a little bit on your opponents each turn.   Of course, as the markers tend to stay in a pack, oftentimes your one or two time question will still throw you four or five spaces ahead because you simply can’t avoid it.

That being said, it is definitely an intriguing decision to figure out what to ask and when.  I have learned to closely examine the building pieces, as they don’t all have the same traps on them, and you can use this information to maybe deduce where certain pieces are (or cannot be).   I use the note sheet to track my own questions, but I haven’t yet found a great way to gain information from knowing what questions my opponents have asked.  Admittedly, that doesn’t stop me from writing down the questions just in case – but again, that doesn’t particularly help me much yet.  The great thing about the widget is that you always know you’re going to get the right answer to your question.  However, as only one person sees the answer, it does feel a lot like solitaire though everyone is sitting around the same table.  This is not a good or bad thing, but you’ll likely fall on one side of the fence or not whether you like this sort of game or not.

As with many deduction games, if someone is just better at it, they’re likely going to win a majority of the games.  You can try to handicap the game a bit with the number of free clues given at the start of the game…  So, at least there is some way to mitigate a disparity in ability/brains.  Blissfully, in my game group, all the games we have played thus far have been pretty close.  Close enough that in our last game, one player felt they were close and made an early guess (had two buildings switched unfortunately) – but if he hadn’t made the guess that turn, he wouldn’t have been able to make one at all because the next player in turn order solved it correctly!

Our games are closer in the 30-40 minute range and that feels good for this.  The game itself is a bit dry and quiet as most people are usually puzzling over their board behind their screen; so it is not much for socialization.  But, if you like these sorts of deduction games (like Turing Machine), this will definitely be one for you to check out!

Until your next appointment

The Gaming Doctor