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.

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