It was my birthday at the weekend, which means another board game was added to the collection. This time the new addition is Paleo, a co-operative game in which the players try to keep their Stone Age tribe alive long enough to complete a cave painting while also completing various missions.

The game is divided into rounds and each round is split into a Day Phase and a Night Phase.

The Day Phase revolves around drawing cards (each player has their own deck from which to draw) and resolving actions. These actions generally involve having abilities withing your tribe and/or discarding cards in order to gain resources. Alternatively, the card will normally give you an option to help someone else achieve their action.

Interestingly the backs of the action cards vary and this variation provides an indication of what sort of card you are about to draw. This is relevant because, when drawing the cards, you draw the top three without looking at their faces and use the backs of the cards to decide which one to keep and in what order to return the other two cards to the top of your deck.

Cards are drawn simultaneously and, once everyone has drawn a card, they are all turned up and actions are resolved at the same time. This results in a lot of talking as the players have to decide between themselves which action or actions are most beneficial to the tribe and who needs to help who in order to achieve them.

Obviously, as the tribe gets larger (and there are cards for this) more challenging actions can be accomplished, which bring the tribe ever closer to its victory conditions.

Once a player has drawn all the cards in their deck, their tribe members go to sleep. Once all of the player decks are exhausted, the Night Phase begins. This involves feeding all the members of the tribe and then resolving any night missions that have been drawn.

Once this is done, the played cards are shuffled and dealt into player decks and a new day begins.

I did like the amount of talking to each other that this game involves. This is a very co-operative game in which the players need to constantly discuss everything in order to achieve the best outcome for their tribe. This is helped by the fact that drawing cards and resolving actions is done simultaneously so that there is very little downtime in this game and everyone stays very involved throughout.

Obviously, we have only played this a few times so far, but I can see that the game has a lot of potential for replayability, not least because of the various “modules” included with the game. These are additional sets of cards that can be shuffled in with the action cards to change the difficulty and to create unique challenges.

It took us a couple of attempts to get to grips with this game but, once we did, I really enjoyed it. The mechanics of it are very straightforward and, once you have a handle on what the various card symbols mean, it’s very easy to understand. None of this, however, detracts from the fact that the game has a lot of depth and a massive potential for discussion.

Paleo really is one of the best co-operative games that I’ve played, and I can see us bringing it out quite frequently in the near — and not so near — future.