If Dungeons and Dragons is an encyclopedia, and Spirit of the Century is a book, then Primitive is a zine. It’s a singular vision, it is unapologetically lo-fi, and it also happens to be excellent.

So Primitive is this tiny book – pamphlet sized – and it’s saddle-stitched by hand. It looks like something a religious zealot would leave on a bus. If things like layout and page count are what you gauge quality by, Primitive will disappoint. If you can’t imagine a hand-assembled, quirky labor of love also meeting a very high standard of content, then you’ve probably never read amazing zines like Dishwasher, Craphound, or Library Bonnet. The form factor is mysterious and inviting – I think that’s the plan, anyway.

Among gamers, there’s some kind of low-level fascination with the Paleolithic. There was Sticks and Stones, a tactical war-game set in the era (my vote for oddest contribution to the genre), there’s GURPS Ice Age and Low Tech, there’s Og. Everybody loves a caveman, especially when you pair him with a dinosaur. Cavemen are cool. You get to narrow the possibility space down to what you can beat with a stick or run grunting from. There’s a lot of drama and humor wrapped up in that duality.

On the surface, Primitive delivers that experience. You play archetypal cavemen, doing caveman stuff. It can be hilariously funny. But the really clever thing about Primitive is that it rewards you with more than that. In Primitive you are playing people in a liminal state, on the cusp of something amazing and transformative – language – and all the freight of civilization and culture that will follow its acquisition. It’s a game about forming and maintaining a society.

The core of the game highlights this sharp divide – the first (almost the only) choice you make when creating your dude is how to balance your dice between Primitive’s two attributes – Civility and Savagery. Will you kick it old skool with a stone club and a snarl, or are you poised and ready for something more? The dichotomy between these two is central and compelling. Every choice you make will push your tribe one way or the other, and both can lead to utter disaster. In one game I played a guy who heavily weighted Civility. He was a thinker and a man of the people. And when the tribe from across the lake showed up to murder us, we had no use for thinkers, just dudes who could bash their enemy’s faces in first.

Your tribe is central to everything you do in the game, and everybody share’s certain aspects of the tribe’s nature. Maybe you are all good swimmers or stealthy hunters. Maybe you bear the mark of your God or all know how to make fire. The tribe is represented by a pool of dice, and this pool represents all the resources you’ll ever have – you build your characters from it and you draw on it later to help you succeed in conflicts. As a group, you all have to rely on the tribe pool, and you’ll all be watching each other carefully for abuse of the shared resource. It’s a wonderfully evocative way to enforce mutual dependency.

Finally, the game’s killer app is actually a sharp constraint – you can’t talk in character. You can’t use words to communicate ideas. You can grunt, you can gesture, you can dance around and pantomime the pterodactyl that’s coming to eat your babies, but you cannot talk. And that’s awesome. In play it leads to genuine misunderstanding, frustration, and occasionally terror. I was surprised at how effective it was when coupled with the game’s society-focused mechanics.

The game has a GM, and the GM’s job is to push adversity onto the tribe. You can probably imagine how all the elements I mentioned above work together – you’ve got guys who are more or less savage or civil, they are compelled to work together and rely on each other – to trust each other – and they can only communicate in the simplest ways. This is already a stressful situation, and piling on the anxiety is very easy. Here's a plague! There's a mastodon! Who are those ape-men? Primitive’s results in play can be comic or tragic, depending on the tone you are after, but I think they do a good job of modeling an uncertain world on the cusp of change.

Primitive is a very DIY sort of game – the author, Kevin Allen Jr, repeatedly encourages you to make it your own. He provides lots of tools to pick and choose from. There’s a full tactical combat system, complete with initiative, and if you use it you’ll need to scrounge up some rocks, sticks, and bones to serve as miniatures and range-finding tools. It’s pretty cool and certainly in keeping with the theme, but you can also drop the whole thing if it isn’t fun for your group. There’s an entire supplement called Record of Threats that details crazy challenges to throw at the hapless cavemen, including Sleestaks and Vikings. The core of the game is where the real gold is, though.

So to reiterate, Primitive isn’t for everyone. It’s small and weird and certainly the product of one guy’s passion. But if you can get past that, it’s a wonderfully functional game that provides thought-provoking and exciting play.