Archeos Society Board Game Review

Set collection games come in a myriad of different forms. Most are small box games, and only include a deck of cards. This makes sense as set collection games are, for the most part, a more complex card game! Still, every once in a while a game comes around that changes up the formula a bit, and Archeos Society is that game. Let’s take a look at this fantastic game from Space Cowboys!

How to Play

In Archeos Society, players are creating sets of cards to score points and move up on a variety of different colour tracks. These tracks will provide a number of bonuses to the players – points, extra cards, etc – but deciding which tracks to advance on and which to ignore is a decision that will make or break your game.

Players will take turns drawing cards and attempting to play sets of colours or symbols. Each set of cards will have a lead card, and that lead card will have a bonus ability that players can use.

For example, in almost all cases, when you play a set of cards from your hand, you are obligated to take any cards in your hand NOT part of that set and place them face up in the draw area for any other player to take on their turn. If you have the Doctor as your lead card, however, you can keep a number of cards in your hand equal to the size of your played set.

There are a dozen different cards to choose from, and each game will only use 6 of those cards. After a predetermined number of rounds the game will end and the player with the most points wins.

Is It Worth It?

I really love Archeos Society, as do many members of my gaming group. With so many board games coming through the GamesReviews HQ, it is impossible to keep them all a few months after our review cycle has ended. Some get passed around to friends to play, others get donated to the local library. The best, however, stay in the collection and get one of the coveted spaces on my gaming shelves. Archeos Society is a game that gets a spot on the shelf, and it’s not likely to come off anytime soon!

Want to see what I thought of the components, and let you know what came in the box? You can read our unboxing article here .

There are two things in Archeos Society that set it apart for me when compared to other set collection games. First, the number of cards that come in the box, and the fact that you only use half of them to play a game, means there are countless options when playing this again and again and again.

In some set collection games, you can build some kind of strategy to win since you know what’s all included in the game, and since (in general) the impact of one card on another is pretty low. It is the opposite in Archeos Society.

In Archeos Society, your strategy will depend on which cards are in play. With each of the six decks in the game having a different power and ability, how you use those cards together will be key to winning the game. You can’t just focus on one and ignore the others – you are bound to lose. Even if you aren’t creating a ton of coloured sets, you still need some of those cards for the powers they provide!

The other thing I like about Archeos Society is the tracks you move up with your little vehicles. These tracks can be perilous, and strategizing how you plan to go up each one can be difficult. There is a bit of risk to going up a track, but I like that this game introduces that sense of unpredictability.

When you succeed, it’s glorious. When your plan fails, it’s heartbreaking. Still, however, I can guarantee you will come back again and again. As we noted with the variety of cards, there is a variety of tracks as well. Each board is double sided and includes a basic way to use the track, and an advanced way! It’s fun to mix and match these as well to even further mix up the experience.

Another great feature are all the powers on the character cards. These do a ton of different things, and to go over them all now would be a bit much. However, some of these cards feel like mini expansions for the game as you introduce different boards and tokens into the game, once again mixing up the possibilities and creating a game that isn’t easily mastered.

Conclusion

The theme here has been variety. There is so much variety in Archeos Society, and you don’t often get that from set collection games. The set collection genre is very vanilla, and honestly in many situations, once you’ve played one of them, you’ve played all of them. Archeos Society is doing something a little different, at least based on my history. And I’m here for it all day long!