Archeos Society is a set collection push your luck and hand management game.

Title: Archeos Society

Year Published: 2023

Designer: Paolo Mori

Publisher: Space Cowboys

Players: 206

Game Time: ~60 minutes

Set-up Time: ~5 minutes

Ages: 12+

Theme: Early 1900s exploration.

Mechanisms: Set Collection, Push Your Luck, Hand Management.

How to win: Gain the most points by exploring the different tracks, collecting big sets of cards and exploring the benefits of people and locations.

Game Description

You explore legendary sites! You must decide whether to form small expeditions for quick progression or larger expeditions that are more efficient but slower to assemble.

How to play Archeos Society

Learn how to play Archeos Society in a quick, concise way. I don’t lie about the length of my videos in the title! This is a 10-minute video teaching all the rules, roles and advanced site boards in 9 minutes and 58 seconds.

Main Mechanisms

Set collection, push your luck and hand management are all rolled into eh card drafting element. You’re drawing cards to collect sets. You need to push your luck as you discard any extra cards after playing a set, also the game could end at any time.

USP

I mean, this is a complete retheme of Ethnos so no USP here, sorry!

Theme

Old-school exploration is a theme that is done a lot. To have (fairly) thematic elements to the different roles though is a new one.

Setup & Rulebook

Setup is fiddley. Even if you use one of the scenarios you still have to get the cards needed and shuffle them together very well.

The rulebook is good, but I kinda already knew how to play the game which helped.

Components & Artwork

The components are fine. Some iconography is hard to read and even hard to find in some cases.

The score tokens for the player colours show the vehicle they represent in another player’s colour which is confusing.

The art is OK.

Ease of Teaching

This is easy to teach but there needed to be a crib sheet with the roles on.

The symbology on the advanced side of the site boards isn’t very clear.

Similar Games

I’ve already mentioned Ethnos, a game this is a retheme of. But the drafting and hand management is what I call “Ticket to Ride Style”.

Archeos Society Summary

It’s hard because I already knew I would like this game, it’s just how it compares to Ethnos.

Ethnos has a fantasy theme which I prefer.

Archeos society has double-sided boards with advanced abilities that are much better than Ethnos’ randomly assigned scoring system.

Ethnos has area control which has more player interaction than this game’s race down a track.

So it’s up to you which you prefer.

Round-Up

A very fun game with plenty of replayability.

Rating

I give it 7/10