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A century from now all that remains of Earth is the detritus that humanity left behind. The races of a neighboring solar system have a penchant for artifacts left behind by extinct races. In Excavation Earth, you lead one of these races of alien explorers on their quest to excavate rare human artifacts and curate the ultimate art collection to sell off.
Excavation Earth is divided into three rounds, each of which starts with players drafting a hand of multi-use cards that will be used to perform actions. Players then take quick turns playing actions that allow them to move their explorers around the world map, excavate for artifacts, and deploy traders to bazaars and influencers to affect prices and wheel and deal on the black market.
The artifacts you dig up can be either sold to the bazaars housed on one of the aliens' ships that landed on Earth or added to a collection that will be sold off as a coherent art collection to museums back home. Excavation Earth ends after three rounds and the player who makes the most money during the game wins.
Excavation Earth includes a solo mode by Nick Shaw and Dávid Turczi.
—description from the publisher
- Rich, multi-layered economic engine with many interaction points
- Clear, satisfying scoring through gallery samples and market activity
- Distinct asymmetric abilities add variety and replayability
- Solid base rules foundation for expansion integration
- Rule complexity may be challenging for new players
- Some components and rules may be abstract or dense for beginners
- Archaeology meets economic trading in a market-driven, artifact-focused economy.
- Earth in a grim post-human future where aliens excavate human artifacts to sell them for money.
- Competitive strategy with asymmetric factions, gallery scoring, and market-driven outcomes.
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- Card-driven actions — Players use a hand of action and travel cards to perform moves, excavations, and marketplace actions.
- Market trading / buyer interaction — Place traders in markets and manage buyers to sell artifacts for credits.
- resource/hand management — Discard cards to perform actions and manage artifacts/samples for scoring.
- set collection — Artifacts collected are placed into a color-coded gallery to score points based on rows/columns.
- Set collection / gallery scoring — Artifacts collected are placed into a color-coded gallery to score points based on rows/columns.
- Staffing / asymmetry and scoring — Asymmetric faction abilities affect where you can excavate and how you score, with end-round scoring.
- worker placement — Move explorers around the board to dig sites and markets to access artifacts and action opportunities.
- Worker placement / exploration — Move explorers around the board to dig sites and markets to access artifacts and action opportunities.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- this game is an economic game
- the earth is no longer inhabited by humans
- they're gonna learn about us
- we're going to give a brief overview of those rules
- everybody has their own asymmetric ability as well
- there will be a link to the kickstarter campaign down below