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Cavemen: The Quest For Fire box art
2012 Ranked #6,253

Cavemen: The Quest For Fire

A card-drafting strategy game where tribal leaders hunt, recruit, and discover inventions to achieve knowledge and prestige. Food keeps a tribe alive, while teeth buy influence and control the conch that determines first access to opportunities.

Family Games Card Game Prehistoric Auction/Bidding Open Drafting

Players

2-5

Play time

45-60 min

Age

13+

Complexity

1.88/5

Rating

6.34

Harder to teach Highly interactive Deep strategy

Overview

At a glance

Is this game right for my group?

ABG editorial scores on a 1–5 scale.

Teachability 2.3/5

Harder to teach

Replay value 3.9/5

High replayability

Interaction 3.7/5

Highly interactive

Player scaling 4.0/5

Scales well

Strategic depth 4.5/5

Deep strategy

See all 5 specifications

How it plays

How does it play?

Cavemen: The Quest for Fire is a card-drafting game in which players take the role of tribal leaders.

Core mechanisms

Key systems that shape the decisions players make.

Read the full game description

Cavemen: The Quest for Fire is a card-drafting game in which players take the role of tribal leaders. The tribes compete for opportunities to hunt dinosaurs, recruit tribesmen, and discover new technologies, vying to be the first with enough knowledge and prestige to invent fire and usher in the age of modern humanity! You have two resources to manage: Food and Teeth. You must spend Food each turn in order to keep your Tribe from starving. Teeth indicate prestige among the tribes. Use Teeth to bid for the conch and to acquire Cavemen and Caves. Each turn, cards are drawn from the deck to fill a common Card Pool. Players take actions based on what is available in the pool. For example, if a Beast is drawn into the Card Pool, you can hunt it for Food and claim its Teeth as a sign of your bravery. If you hold the conch during the Action Phase, you benefit by taking your Action first and taking a second Action after everyone else has gone once. Players can bid Teeth to take control of the Conch from another player. This can be important to get the first pick of the cards in the Card Pool. The game features 21 different inventions that allow players to evolve diverse strategies, capitalizing on their tribe's individual strengths. There are challenging decisions every turn as players must evaluate what resources are available, guess what their opponents will do, and weigh the amount of risk they're willing to take.

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Editions

Language and publisher variants currently recorded in the catalog.

Edition Year Language Publisher / Region
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Player resources

Rulebooks, player aids, FAQs, and solo resources.

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Game and edition data

All specifications (5)

Play and group

Players
2–5
Best with
2–4
Play time
45–60 min
Age
13+
Complexity
1.9/5
Credits and catalog connections

Credits

Designers

1
Dan Cassar

Artists

2
Claus Stephan Mirko Suzuki

Publishers

1
Rio Grande Games

Linked items

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