ArcheOlogic, in addition to having the most offensive capitalized letter in the history of board games — seriously, how do you pronounce this thing? aar-kee-OH!-laa-juhk is as close as I can get — is what I mentally categorize as a “doohickey deduction game.” As in, it’s got a doohickey, and the entire game is more or less about using that doohickey to feed you information.

Which makes sense, given the game’s provenance. Yoann Levet was also half of the design team behind Turing Machine, itself a doohickey deduction game. As with that title, ArcheOlogic is a clockwork engine whose engineering is perhaps more interesting than the gameplay it spits out.

The Archeoscope, a.k.a. the doohickey.

Remember when archaeology was about pillaging ancient grave sites? ArcheOlogic sure does. On the surface, both figuratively and thematically, that’s where the game opens, with rival archaeological digs separated from a pristine buried ruin by approximately ten feet of sediment. But rather than breaking out the shovels and brushes, your goal is to map the complex from above. On a timer. You’re racing to be the first one into the place, but initial scans indicate that the complex is filled with deadly traps. I’m getting the sense that ArcheOlogic doesn’t reflect best practices.

At least our ransacking is aided by a high-tech doohickey! Enter the Archeoscope. I’m surprised they didn’t call it an ArcheOscope. This thing, like most doohickey deduction game doohickeys, feels great on the fingertips. By aligning a paper disc with the proper holes, one can peer into the Archeoscope to glean vital information about the complex below.

If only the doohickey weren’t so cryptic. At its core, this is a game about optimizing one’s questions despite two major limitations. The first is that the doohickey only produces frustratingly specific details. For example, you might ask the doohickey whether there are any fire traps in the complex’s fourth column. “Yes, two,” the doohickey might respond. Not audibly, of course. You’re peering into little punched-out holes, which reveal dots or symbols, not actual sentences. This is a doohickey, not an oracle. Because it’s a doohickey and not an oracle, it’s entirely possible that you’ll jostle the doohickey’s alignment against that paper disc and get the wrong reading. If you do, that’s on you, Geoff. Provided the doohockey is correctly aligned, its information is sound. “How many of the square room’s cells are located on the second row?” you ask. “None,” the doohickey responds, silently, via symbols, in a feat of engineering that makes you wonder how Levet crafted this thing.

The second limitation is that every question takes a certain amount of time. We’re talking about abstracted time here, pips on a board, not actual seconds or minutes. The more detailed the question, the more pips it requires. Asking something simple, such as “How many different rooms are along this particular axis?” or “Are there any gaps in the temple complex on the fifth row?” only requires a single space on the time track, while more telling questions, such as “Tell me exactly how many portions of the L piece from Tetris are located along the top of the map” moves your time marker up by two, three, or four spaces. This risks breaking away on the time track, gifting multiple small questions to your opponents before you’re again permitted to ask something new of the Archeoscope.

Little by little, these trickles of information help you fill in your concealed map of the complex. Again, this is a race. At some point, maybe even before you’re fully ready, you’ll flip to the back portion of the rulebook to check your proposed layout against the answer. If you’re correct, you win. Otherwise you fall into a spike trap and die horribly.

Archaeology!

Sorry. ArchaeOlogy!

Racing to plunder a lost ruin.

Okay, so perhaps ArcheOlogic isn’t the best introduction to the discipline of archaeology. How is it as a doohickey deduction game? Like the Archeoscope spitting out frustratingly specific details, it depends on what we mean by that question.

Conceptually, ArcheOlogic does something very cool by asking players to arrange shapes on a grid. There are six shapes in all, and they must all be arranged so that they fit onto a five-by-five map. Only three squares will remain empty, and each shape must be carefully aligned so that its traps are in their proper spaces. It doesn’t “feel” like you’re charting a buried complex — for one thing, how do we know that the complex contains these rooms in these shapes, with these traps in these spots? — but whatever. Putting the pieces together, fretting over their proper spacing, getting feedback from the doohickey and having to reassess your assumptions, is all tangible in a way that deduction games don’t often manage.

Which isn’t to say it’s all fire traps and spike pits. In its one concession to the actual field of archeology, ArcheOlogic also happens to be a bit of a snooze. Its puzzles shift from profoundly abstract to more or less solved in short order; there’s simply so little wiggle room that every session has gone from ignorance to hypothesis to certainty in roughly the same timeframe. Isolate one or two pieces and the arrangement of the entire complex snaps together.

That might not be a problem, except in addition to being a doohickey deduction game this is also a race between players. Sadly, though, it’s a race without any interaction. You’re hardy even on the same track. Everyone labors in isolation, then comes up with a solution at roughly the same time. Worse, those labors are punctuated by waits for your turn with the Archeoscope. More than once, I’ve foregone petitioning the doohickey for complex information because I didn’t want to sit around for ten minutes while Geoff asked three little questions in a row. Not exactly an intriguing in-game incentive, that.

In those gaps, I spend most of my time thinking about the sheer craftsmanship behind ArcheOlogic. It’s quite the thing to behold. The spinner wheels, crammed full of information that’s too dense and too abstract to comprehend. The Archeoscope doohickey, narrowing the static until the slightest signal breaks through. I wonder, sometimes, if one could cheat by learning to visualize the information on those discs. Probably. With practice. Not that anybody would bother. You could probably learn the basics of a foreign language in that time. “¿Dónde está el baño?” That sort of thing.

The layout snaps together after a few clues.

That’s what I mean when I say that ArcheOlogic’s quality depends on the sort of questions we ask. As a feat of cardboard engineering, it’s a pleasure to watch this thing function. You know, once. Maybe twice. Beyond that, I don’t need to spend more time in its presence.

Because while this is a serviceable doohickey deduction game, that’s all it is. It doesn’t spark my imagination. It barely even gives me a reason to sit down at a table with my friends. When we get right down to it, I suppose I make a poor doohickey archaeologist.

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A complimentary copy was provided.