Base price: $36.
1 – 4 players.
Play time: ~45 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 2
Full disclosure: A review copy of ArcheOlogic was provided by Ludonaute / Flat River Games.
Actually had the bandwidth for a little game day earlier this week, so that was nice. We played a run of three or four games, which is the most gaming stamina I’ve had outside of Board Game Arena since, uh, January, I think? I’ve been a little too busy, I think. I’m between a few games and a few projects, so I have a bit more time. We’re trying to make everything work. Plus, Gen Con is coming up! Can’t wait to spend five of the hottest days of my year in Indianapolis praying for a cold snap. It’s never going to happen, but keep an eye out for cool game updates while I’m there! Something for everyone. In the meantime, let’s turn the clock back and check out a release from a bit ago: ArcheOlogic!
In ArcheOlogic, players are seeking a lost city that was just discovered in the mountains. Everyone wants to go explore it, but you thankfully have enough sense to realize that going to a lost city without mapping it thoroughly will almost certainly end up with you being cursed, skewered, or both. Not ideal, and you can’t afford another hit to your premiums in this economy. Thankfully, the city is made up of six buildings, and using your patented Archeoscope, you can ask questions to learn more about what awaits you on the peak. Unfortunately, learning takes time and time you may not have: nobody remembers the third person to discover El Dorado, after all. So use the best of your logic and deductive skills to figure out the layout and get there before your rivals. Can you solve the puzzles that await you?
Contents
Player Count Differences
Not a ton beyond it being harder to predict what row or column you’ll be able to ask about on your turn. Early on, players are a bit skittish about moving the Viewfinder (which, why would you need to?), so you just kind of get what you get on your turn. As information starts to bubble up, however, players start wanting to know more about specific areas on the board, which brings everyone down unless you happen to be perfectly synergized as a group. Unlikely. With more players, you’ll find it hard to be certain that you’ll be two spaces ahead in two turns, as players may advance the viewfinder more or just move it entirely someplace else. At two, it’s pretty back-and-forth with a bit of shifting based on players asking more complicated questions. No major differences otherwise, though, so I’m not too bothered by the player count.
Strategy
- Time matters. The more information you can glean from a question, the more time it costs to ask. This doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll get more information, however, so be careful. Time is precious and wasting it gets you nowhere. If your opponents waste time, however, jump on that: sometimes you can get multiple turns. You can even use that to mess up what place the next person is going to ask about by spending time to move the current round’s row or column. Rude, but effective.
- Don’t fall into the trap of an easy answer. Does the information just confirm your assumptions or is it logically sound? There’s a lot of temptation, given the speed element of victory, to take what you get and massage it into what you think, but that doesn’t always lead to good results! Double-check and verify your questions from other angles to be certain.
- Given that you don’t get a lot of information from your opponents, you may not be able to use their turns for much. That’s fine; you can focus on your own turns.
- Watch out for valid rotations. This got me once; I got risk-free, risk-free, spike trap, and I assumed it laid out exactly like that in the puzzle. It was rotated 180 degrees and that caused me to guess wrong early on and waste a ton of time!
- Before you attempt to solve, double-check your potential solution to make sure it doesn’t invalidate any of your previous information. This is the key; make sure your assumptions and your information are aligned. You don’t want to guess incorrectly just because you didn’t check your notes!
- Look for pieces of information that are mutually exclusive where you can. Once I got that there were two buildings in Row 1 and three in Row 4. I know those buildings can’t be the same, so I’ve already figured out five of the six building locations. That’s a big step forward!
- Sometimes the best (and most cost-effective) move is just to guess. Do you want to guess or spend two to move the Viewfinder to the correct row and then spend three more to ask about a specific block? Guessing is only four time, rather than five.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- It’s a bit like Turing Machine but with shapes instead of numbers. Great if you love shapes and hate numbers, terrible if you have bad spatial reasoning or you struggle with visualizations. I like shapes and like numbers, so this is a relatively low-volatility concern for me personally.
- There are a lot of different options to play. There are not only a ton of options for the base game but there’s also an expert mode with even more clues and such on the web app, which is pretty cool.
- I do like the smaller scale of the game. It’s pleasant, but you can still work with all the pieces and such quite easily. I was worried that the game would be too tiny, and while I wouldn’t be opposed to a larger game, I’m actually relatively unburdened by what I’ve got here.
- Logic puzzles are very much my jam. I love trying to figure out how I can glean information based on two potentially mutually-exclusive pieces of info. It’s even fun to watch other players because sometimes you get to see the moment it clicks for them. Love that.
- You can kind of keep playing even after someone wins. Let everyone do the deduction if they want! If you use the web app, you don’t even have to see the solution to check yours, which is great. Even if you’re wrong, you can get right back in there.
Mehs
- I think from just a typing standpoint I have to really take umbrage with the name ArcheOlogic. The big O in the middle fills me with a primal dread.
Cons
- The “your answer was incorrect, so you lose” standard rules make sense but also suck. Use the web app; it’ll tell you which shapes were wrong and you can just keep playing.
- It’s decently easy to fall into a hole made purely of confirmation bias; be careful with that. Just because you get an answer that you expected doesn’t mean that your prediction was correct; there might be a rotation or a mirroring or a similar-looking layout that would have given you the same answer but is incorrect, here. We made this mistake in both of the games I played, whoops.
Overall: 8 / 10
Overall, I like ArcheOlogic when I don’t have to type out the name! I get why the O is big, but it’s still annoying. There are some parts about the game that are a little silly and kitchsy (like the Archeoscope), and I love that for the game, and there are parts that smartly blend deduction, logic, and spatial reasoning to create a pretty challenging game. I’m excited to dive more into the Expert Mode gameplay now that I have some downtime and see how that expands the game, but even without that I’m pretty satisfied with the play. I enjoy the “last person in line goes” approach to gameplay generally (it’s mostly clockwise with some exceptions for particularly powerful actions), and I like the implementation here giving a sense of how “strong” certain actions are. Art-wise, it’s fun, though I wouldn’t have minded a brighter game. I’m a sucker for bright colors in my gameplay; it’s how I can tell you I already really enjoyed Cascadia Junior. I think you’ll see players who resonate with the spatial logic elements really enjoying ArcheOlogic and players who struggle more with spatial reasoning bounce off. It’s a particular skill that not everyone brings to the game table, and the game can be frustrating if that’s something you struggle with. I don’t personally, but I’ve seen it. If that’s not you, however, you’ll end up finding ArcheOlogic to be a lovely, thinky, and quick logical deduction game, so check it out if that sounds like your thing!
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