Excavation Earth is a 2021 release from Mighty Boards that was kickstarted a year or so ago. It was designed by David Turczi, Wai Yee and Gordon Calleja. Now, I’ve not heard of the latter two designers before but David Turczi is somebody who’s work I am very familiar with. His epic time travelling worker placement game Anachrony is one of my favourites in the genre. Also, last year’s Rome and Roll was a highlight as well as one of the heaviest roll and write games I have ever played.

Anyway, back to Excavation Earth. This is a set collection game, with bits of area control thrown in. There are also worker placement elements as well as some hand management as well. The idea of the game is that some sort of extinction event has happened on Earth and all of these alien archaeologists have decided to come by and dig up what they can find from old human culture. Some of this will end up in museum collections, but the vast majority of it will end up being sold to private collections or on the black market. There is some definite humour here in the types of items that are considered valuable artefacts of human civilisation.There are number plates, lucky cats as well as some more…adult items in the kickstarter promo tiles.

Each player will have three explorers that can travel all over earth and a hand of action and fuel cards. Action cards have a colour and market symbol on them. You can move your explorers around the map by discarding action or fuel cards. The different spaces on the map will either give you access to dig sites to dig up artefacts, markets to sell your artefacts to collectors, or black markets to buy and sell your goods at face value. To interact with these spaces you’ll either have to discard a card of matching colour for some actions or a matching market for others.

At the beginning of the game, some artefacts are set up on the map and each of the six markets will have some initial demand for each of the different types of artefacts to be found. The artefacts themselves come in one of five different colours each with four different types giving a total of twenty artefacts to find. Over the course of the game, if you ever manage to get all four of a particular colour of artefact, you can claim a little bonus. If you manage ton get all five colours of a particular type of attract you’ll net some big end game scores. This is where the set collection aspect of Excavation Earth is found.

Each of the six standard markets will have varying demand for each of the 5 different artefact colours. The players can manipulate this to try and whip up a frenzy for what they are selling, but you can only sell at markets where you have already deployed some of your worker cubes as traders. To deploy traders you need to discard a card matching the market you would like a trader in whilst you have an explorer at that market’s spot.

Once you’ve done your trading, any cubes you used can be promoted to envoys on the alien mothership. This is like an area control game where the player with the most cubes in each of the three envoy areas can snag a load of points at the end of each round. There are nice stages in this game where one mechanism sort of flows into the next.

From round two onwards, there are some really powerful abilities tied to these mothership envoys. You can reclaim one of your envoys to use one of these powers. They can be really powerful if used well but you could well be giving up your majority in the area control so you have to be careful or make sure the power is really worth it.

As a game, it took a few rounds for it all to click into place. One aspect of setting up for each round is that you can see where the artefacts will be placed next round. If you’re clever you can try and make sure your explorers are all in those areas of the map as if you’re lucky, you may be able to grab more than one artefact for that action.

In a strange way this game reminds me a lot of Concordia. A lot of the actions give you opportunities to really maximise your efficiency by selling multiple goods or digging up multiple artefacts at a time. It all just requires a bit of planning. I’ve only played Excavation Earth a few times but in my experience, it’s the player who manages to spot these opportunities for extra efficiency that comes out on top.

The components are really nice. The player boards are all double layers, as is the market board. The artwork is clear and bright and the graphic design is good. Your explorers are these painted wooden pieces and they look great on the board as well. If you can get hold of them, the metal coins are excellent but the standard card coins are ok. But I do love me a metal coin upgrade.

There is also a solo mode included. Basically you’ve got an AI player that is driven by a deck of cards. For me this is probably the weakest part of the game. The AI player can break a lot of the rules that the human player is constrained by. This can make the game feel a lot more unfair in solo mode. It’s not terrible, and I’m definitely glad it is there what with people not really being able to have game nights at the moment, but it is a distant second to playing with other people.

And that is definitely something I want to do more of! I am really enjoying this game so far. I’ve not played with the promos or the expansion that came with the kickstarter yet, so I am eager to mix them in as soon as I’m ready. Excavation Earth isn’t a heavy game, especially when you compare it to something like Anachrony, but it definitely has enough moving cogs to keep me engaged and serve up some interesting decisions.