Wouter & Ymke 
In 2027, ceramic fragments recovered from the Atlantic Ocean are dated to around 7100 BCE. Their craftsmanship seems far too advanced for that period, and further investigation reveals something much larger below the surface: two enormous concentric rings surrounding a central structure. Calling it Atlantis suddenly doesn’t seem quite so far-fetched.
An international expedition called Project Atlanteum is launched to investigate the ruins, and that’s where we come in. In Atlanteum, we each lead an expedition exploring the submerged city with submarines and divers. We’re recovering relics, contributing discoveries to a museum and helping restore three ancient temples. We’re all working on the same archaeological project, though naturally we’d prefer our own expedition to get most of the credit.
Atlanteum launches on Kickstarter on 3 November, and you can find the campaign page here.
👥 1-4 players, ages 10+
⌛ Playing time: 40-80 minutes
📝 Designers: Jaewoo Bang & Gunho Kim
🎨 Artwork: Sophia Kang
🏢 Publisher: Bad Comet Games (prototype copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
Each player controls two submarines that travel clockwise around the Outer Ring of Atlantis. Divers aboard those submarines can be sent into the connected Inner Ring, giving Atlanteum its mix of rondel movement and worker placement.
On your turn, you choose one submarine and move it. One or two sectors are free, with longer journeys costing oxygen. After arriving, you either explore the sector or refill your oxygen. Exploring can provide ceramics, stone and ore, let you recover relic cards or help restore pillars. Spending additional oxygen can improve these actions. The submarines already in a sector affect the oxygen cost of exploring and how much you can recover when refilling.
You then deal with the divers aboard the submarine you moved. If it still has a diver, you deploy one into a connected part of the Inner Ring. Once the submarine is empty, moving it forces you to recall divers instead. The Inner Ring is divided into collection, donation and temple zones, with a mixture of spaces that can accommodate several divers and spaces that can only hold one.
Relics can be added to your private collection or donated to the museum. Both require you to pay the card’s resource cost. A relic in your private collection gives you its ability and some artifact icons. Donating gives up that ability in exchange for more artifact icons and lets you place one of your plaques in the museum. Museum categories become more valuable as they advance through the exhibit halls, increasing the final value of matching artifact icons for everyone. The category where you place your plaque doesn’t have to match the icons on the relic you donated.
The other shared project is restoring the Solar, Lunar and Time temples. Players restore pillars and add them to the temples’ colonnades. Once a temple is completed, players are ranked by their contributions, which determines how much they benefit from that temple’s scoring condition. Different temple tiles can be used between games, so what the temples score can change.
The end is triggered when someone reaches 70 victory points, three artifact categories reach the third exhibit hall, or the Time Temple is completed. The current round is finished so everyone has taken the same number of turns, followed by one additional turn for each player. Relics, artifact collections, temple contributions and remaining resources are then included in final scoring.
Artwork & Components
There isn’t much empty space on Atlanteum’s main board. Atlantis is presented in turquoise and blue-green tones, with ruins, statues, coral and marine life filling the circular city. Add submarines travelling around the outside, divers scattered across the centre and transparent pillars appearing at the temples, and there’s plenty going on. I like looking around the board and spotting the smaller illustrations, though it can become visually busy once everything is in play.
The player boards move away from the ruins and look more like pieces of expedition equipment, with gauges, displays and tracks for your resources. The museum has its own marble-and-columns presentation. These areas are easy enough to distinguish around the table, but Atlanteum needs a fair amount of space once you add four player boards, cards and the separate museum to the central board.
Our favourite pieces are probably the submarines and divers. The chunky wooden submarines actually carry their divers, while the divers stand upright in their little printed diving suits once deployed. The transparent coloured pillars also work nicely on the board as the temples fill up. We played with a prototype, so the final production may still change.
Our Experience
During our first game, we were mostly moving submarines towards whatever we wanted at that moment. Need stone? Head towards stone. Want a particular relic? Go and get it. Several turns later, we’d wonder why one submarine was nowhere near anything useful or why a diver couldn’t reach the space we’d planned to use. With two submarines, we soon started leaving one near a particular part of the Inner Ring while the other travelled around Atlantis. Sometimes one of them barely moved for several turns.
We were also too protective of our oxygen. Saving it seemed sensible until we needed to travel farther, improve an action or explore somewhere another submarine had made more expensive. Running short at the wrong moment was far more annoying than spending it earlier. More than once, someone announced their plan, counted the movement and then spent a few seconds staring at their oxygen track before choosing something else. Apparently the expedition didn’t budget for unlimited air.
Recalling divers caught us out in a different way. Once we had relics with recall abilities in our collections, we started keeping a much closer eye on which submarine was about to run empty. In one game, the end was triggered just before a final turn where a recall was unavoidable. The cards were ready and the divers were where we wanted them, but there simply wasn’t enough time left to do what we’d intended.
Other players interfered more than we expected without ever directly attacking anyone. Submarines made sectors more expensive to explore, divers occupied spaces we wanted and temple contributions changed whether another pillar was worth adding. The museum produced a stranger relationship. Another player’s donation could increase the value of artifacts we’d been collecting ourselves, so we occasionally found ourselves hoping someone would make a move that was good for them because it happened to be even better for us.
The temples led to probably my favourite situation from our games. The final temple could have been completed, yet nobody wanted to do it. Finishing it wouldn’t improve anyone’s position enough, and leaving it unfinished gave the leading players more time to improve whatever it would eventually score. So there we were, supposedly restoring Atlantis together, carefully avoiding the one part of Atlantis that actually needed restoring.
Our games didn’t all head in the same direction. Relic combinations received more attention in one, the museum became more important in another, and sometimes the temples were worth fighting over much earlier. None of us settled into one approach that we simply repeated from game to game.
Our Thoughts
None of Atlanteum’s individual ideas felt particularly new to us, and I don’t think they need to. What we liked was having several things depend on the same submarine move. We were rarely just collecting stone or going after a relic. Where that submarine ended up was usually just as important.
I wouldn’t really call Atlanteum an engine builder. The six Outer Ring sectors remain fundamentally the same throughout the game. Your submarines don’t become stronger, you don’t collect an ever-growing group of workers and the basic actions don’t turn into much larger versions of themselves. Most of the progression is in your relic collection and scoring rather than in what you’re capable of doing. If you’re hoping to build an engine that becomes noticeably stronger during the game, Atlanteum doesn’t really do that. We didn’t miss it, but the sense of progression is fairly modest.
Trying to map out an exact strategy from the start didn’t make much sense to us either. Too much depends on which relics appear and what everyone else is doing with the museum and temples. Stone you ignored earlier can suddenly pay for exactly the relic you want, and an artifact category that didn’t seem particularly useful can become much more interesting as the museum develops. There are choices about what you want to pursue, but not everything will cooperate with that plan.
Four players was too slow for my taste. There’s more downtime, but the bigger problem is that quite a bit can change before your next turn, so you can’t always use that time to plan. A relic disappears, someone takes the diver space you wanted, or submarines change the cost of the sector you were heading towards. I’d rather play Atlanteum with fewer players.
Beyond that, we came away pretty positive. I like that the other expeditions are difficult to ignore without anyone directly tearing down what you’ve built, and the museum in particular creates some unusual shared interests. There are also still relics we barely touched and temple combinations we haven’t seen. I’m not done with Atlanteum yet, and I’d happily head back down there.
📝 We received a prototype copy of Atlanteum from Bad Comet Games. The rules, artwork and components may still change before the final release.
