Players: 2-6
Playing Time: 1 hour

The Components

Caveman comes with a variety of components.

The Board: A four-panel board depicting a volcanic island overlaid with a hexagonal patterning of circles. There are also spaces along the edges of the board for each of the players to place their technological advances.

I found the board largely utilitarian as opposed to beautiful, but it gets the job done.

Cardboard Bits: A large set of cardboard bits. These include 22 resource tiles which show the goods that players can collect to gain technologies. There are also 17 colored pieces for each players: 4 caveman, 4 cavewomen, 4 cavekids, and 5 technological development pieces.

These discs are all printed on sturdy cardboard. They feature good artwork and are generally easy to distinguish from each other (thanks both to the art and the fact that different types of discs come in different sizes).

Dinosaurs: These are the coolest element in the game. They're 8 fully painted plastic dinosaurs that look entirely gorgeous. You actually only need three of them for the game, so the other five are free bonuses. The publishers have promised to eventually release some rules that suggest how to use the extras.

Cards: A deck of 60 square cards. They're each medium weight, and printed full color, though they're mostly text, so the colors don't get as good of use as they could have. Each card has two (colored) areas. The green area tells a player how much he can move his cavepeople while the red area either contains an event or else tells him how much he can move a specific dinosaur. I wish some icons had been used to make the special events easier to parse, but the cards are generally a fine component.

Rulebook: Six pages of rules each in German and English.They're printed full-color on glossy paper and have some helpful examples. Unfortunately, they're also massively incomplete.

The problem is that the designers decided not to include most of the rules in the rulebook. Instead they appear, largely in bullet point form, only on the reference card. You can mostly figure out how things work, but there are inevitably special cases that couldn't possibly be detailed on the reference card. As a result these rules end up being some of the worst I've ever seen in a game--though fortunately the game is simple enough that you can largely skirt this inadequacy.

Reference Sheets: Two cardstock sheets in each of German and English. As noted, the actual rules are contained on one side in a very text-heavy set of bullet points. The other side is much more helpful for ongoing play: it tells you what resources you need to make all the technologies, how to breed, and what all the die results mean.

There are any number of small mistakes in the component design which I didn't feel worth bringing up in the individual areas, but which do add up due to their total number. For example: the purple and red player colors are too similar; the quick reference cards don't take advantage of the color-coding of the resource discs; and the technological discs are hard to see when placed on the board because their on-board spaces are printed to look exactly like the discs themselves (with no shading or anything to help out the contrast). Even as a whole, these problems aren't a big deal, but they do speak to a general inexperience on the part of the game's publishers, which I also think comes across in graphic design which is generally rudimentary.

Overall, the components of Caveman are good quality and relatively easy to use. The player reference sheets offer some good utility. But, there's also a lack of true beauty in the pieces thanks to a lack of solid graphic design. The cute dinosaurs really stand out, but they're the biggest standout. I've thus given Caveman a somewhat high "3" out of "5". It's slightly above average, thanks mainly to its dinos and its very fun theming.

The Gameplay

The object of Caveman is to grow your tribe and gain technologies.

Setup: Each player chooses a color and takes the cavemen and developments for that color. He also claims the beach space on the board which matches his color.

15 of the resource tiles are randomly placed on the board in appropriate spaces spread across the board.

The three dinosaurs are randomly placed in three spaces near the center of the board.

The card deck is shuffled and placed in the middle of the board (atop the volcano).

Order of Play: A player's turn consists of six parts:

• Card Draw
• Tribe Movement
• Dinosaur Movement
• Fights
• Development
• Tribe Growth

Card Draw: The player draws a card. This may list an event which could have a good or bad effect on himself or generally change the board by adjusting some of the technologies. If it doesn't have an event it'll allow a certain amount of dinosaur movement.

Whether there's an event or dino movement, the card will always allow a certain amount of caveman movement.

Tribe Movement: Based on the card draw a player gets 3-8 points of movement. If a player has four or less caveperson on the board, he may use a point of movement to move a caveperson onto his beach. Any other points of movement are used to move a caveperson one space.

There are stacking limits: no more than three friendly caveadults and one cavekid on any space. In addition, cavekids never move on their own: they instead move automatically with an adult. Finally, the beach spaces are sacrosanct for each tribe.

When a caveperson comes to an enemy caveperson or a dinosaur, they must stop. They may choose to stop if they come to a resource space, which will let them gain technology or grow their tribe, as noted below.

Dinosaur Movement: A card may allow a player to move one particular dinosaur 2-4 spaces. They must stop when they come to a caveman.

Fights: When a fight occurs, both sides roll dice. A caveperson rolls 1-3 green dice, depending on the number of tribesmen in the space. A dinosaur rolls 1-3 red dice, depending on which dino it is.

The green dice hit 1/3 of the time, plus an additional 1/6 of the time if the tribe has spear technology. A red die hits 1/2 of the time. Whoever scores more hits wins. A dino loss causes him to be recreated on one of the central dino spaces. A tribe loss causes a loss of a number of cavepeople equal to the difference in hits.

Development: There are six different technologies. A player may gain one technology on a turn by having cavepeople standing on each of the two resources required to build the technology. This doesn't actually expend the resource. The five possibilities are:

• Flint + Flint = Spear technology. Improves combat.
• Flint + Wood = Fire technology. Improves cavekid survival.
• Animals + Animals = Furs technology. Improves cavekid survival.
• Wood + Wood = Wheel technology. +1 cavepeople movement each turn.
• Caves = Wood = Camp technology. Protects tribes from being attacked in caves.

A caveperson who develops technology can't also be used to grow your tribe.

Tribe Growth: First, you see if any cavekids survive. For each cavekid you roll a yellow die. There's a 1/3 chance they grow up into a caveman or cavewoman, a 1/3 chance they die, and a 1/3 chance that they grow up only if you have the appropriate technology (fire or furs).

Then your cavepeople can have babes. This requires three cavepeople. You must have a caveman on an animal resource or a cavewoman on a fruit resource then you must have a caveman and a cavewoman in the same space. None of these people may have been used to develop technology. If you meet the conditions you get a cavekid in the space with the caveman and cavewoman.

Winning the Game: A player immediately wins if he gets all 8 caveadults on the board or if he gets all 5 technologies on the board. Alternatively, when the deck of cards runs out whoever has the most caveadults + technologies wins.

Relationships to Other Games

Caveman shares some ideas about resource management with The Settlers of Catan. In both games you have to gather togther a multitude of resources (via slightly different means) that you combine using a formula into something ultimately needed for victory points.

However, Caveman has a lot more direct confrontation than you'd find in almost any German game that was produced in the 1990s. In many ways, the game actually feels like an Anglo-American hybrid game as a result. Alongside some solid mechanics, you also have direct confrontation and a large number of randomizers (including both dice and cards).

It looks like the publishers, MAG, are actually centered in the UK, and the game design is more typical for that country, with highly-themed, somewhat random precedents going back to Games Workshop designs like Chainsaw Warrior and Doctor Who.

The Game Design

Caveman is ultimately a light game and a pretty random one too. I cannot see it being enjoyed for anyone looking for a more serious game. However, within those constraints, it's got some fun elements.

The resource management gives you thoughtful, tactical things that you can do every turn, as you try and struggle to create new tribespeople and/or discover new technologies. There's even some opportunity for changing strategies because the location of resources will change over the course of the game due to events.

Beyond that, the game either succeeds or fails based on sheer fun, and individual players will be able to determine their own likes here. If stomping around with a dino and eating other players' peoples sounds fun, then the game will be--but the randomness implicit in that is high enough that you shouldn't expect good strategy to have more than the barest influence on actually winning.

I've given Caveman a slightly high "3" out of "5". For a family game it's got some fun nuances and some interesting innovation.

Conclusion

Caveman is a game primarily intended for the family and the casual player. American players who are amused by Steve Jackson and similar games may similarly enjoy it. It's got a lot of fun color and some nice mechanics but the strategy is minimized due to several random factors. If you're looking for something like that, look no further, but don't expect a serious German game.

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