I have somewhat mixed feelings on games designed by Simone Luciani. I disliked Tzolk’in for quite a while before coming around to the side of appreciating its complexities. I find The Voyages of Marco Polo, and it’s sequel to be quite satisfying, but I fail to see the enjoyment in Grand Austria Hotel and Rats of Wistar. Nucleum was cool, and while I enjoy Lorenzo Il Magnifico, I’m also not going to be the first one to sing its praises (that’s Tim from Board Game Hot Takes‘ job). What ties all these games together is the fact they’re all medium to heavy Euro games with an emphasis on resource management. So when I heard he was involved with a lighter set collection game, I was intrigued. I’m always interested when designers step out of their comfort zone!

Mesos is a card-driven strategy game set during the Mesolithic era, where players take on the roles of early tribal leaders guiding their people through the transition from nomadic hunting to settled life. Mesos focuses on drafting cards from a shared market linked to turn order: taking more cards generally means acting later in the next round, creating a tradeoff between short-term benefits and long-term positioning.

Players build their tribes by acquiring character and building cards, some providing immediate effects (like food collection or discounts on buildings) or long-term benefits (such as a set collection engine that scores points at the end of game, or a discount when it’s time to feed your tribe). Central to the game are recurring event cards that test how well players have prepared their tribes over time, with increasing rewards and penalties.

The cards themselves are all fairly simple. Artists and Cultists are mostly for satisfying event cards, hunters let you gather more food the more you have. Gatherers provide perpetual food to feed your tribe, builders make the powerful building cards cheaper, and the engineers rack up points based on how many you have, and how many different symbols they display.

What really drives the tension in Mesos is the card market. New cards come into the top row, at a rate of the number players +4. At the end of a round, whatever cards are left over, flow to the bottom row. Players take turns moving their totem from the player order tile onto one of the card acquisition tiles. The further down the row they go, they more cards they’ll be able to take, and further still, the more opportunities they’ll have to pick from the new, upper row instead of the stale lower row. Once all players have placed their totem, from left to right players pick the cards they’re allotted, and go back onto the player order tiles.

The obvious comparison for Mesos is 7 Wonders if you replaced the draft with the turn order mechanic from Kingdomino. There is more to it than that, but the feeling of 7 Wonders was on my heart and mind every time I played Mesos. Unlike 7 Wonders, there is much more than a single point of conflict. First, the way the cards flow into the system is wide open, everyone can see everything. If you’re gunning for a specific building, you can be sure that everyone else can see what you’re trying to do as well.

In Mesos, there are 4 events that come out every age. One punishes you for not having enough artists, another rewards the player with the most cultists. One sends your hunters to work to feed your tribe, while another triggers the feed-your-people mechanism. The rewards and punishments for each event increase in severity as the ages progress, encouraging lagging players to remain competitive.

The brilliance of Mesos lies in how these systems interlock. I saw Simone Luciani’s name on the box and immediately thought that it was going to be a much more complex game than it was. But was pleasantly surprised at just how simple and natural the game felt. Mesos rewards both tactical drafting just before events trigger and/or hate drafting and denying your opponents access to a suite of cards, and long-term planning for big end-game set collection points.

But don’t mistake “light” and “simple” for “mindless.” The turn order track decision offers such an intense trade-off, that every time you interact with it, it forces you to weigh your options. It’s incredibly tempting to go last to get 3 cards, but how will you feed them? What if the artist you need for the event is sniped before I choose? Maybe you should prioritize going earlier in the order just to get the single artist, and forgo the shaman altogether? Can you gamble that your opponent won’t grab that artist before you, and you can grab both the cards you wanted?

It’s an intense moment of weighing your options. And it can sound like a lot, but it really isn’t. These are small choices that create the context for the rest of the game. Each card essentially only has a single use, and everything is open and obvious to all players. It’s the market that creates the multiple choices and the tension of knowing what everyone else wants that makes this game so interesting.

I suffer pretty hard from loss aversion. And while points can always be paid in the place of food, I think a large part of the game is knowing when to forgo food collection and chose points in other ways. In one game, a player managed to earn over a hundred points from his engineer cards. He was on the bleeding edge of starving every round, but he handily won the whole game.

Mesos is much more interactive and heads-up than you’d expect a simple card drafter to be, it’s certainly more interesting than the ever popular 7 Wonders. The placement of your worker pawn to pick your drafting order and number of cards has a feeling of weighty consequence to it. All cards drafted are face up to everyone, so you’re always critically aware of where you stand in the race to grab certain cards. It hurts to make these decisions, the good kind of hurt that makes you rub your forehead while straining to think about what the other players are going to do.

Mesos proves that when a designer steps outside their established playbook, the results can be both surprising and exceptional. Stripping away the complexity of Luciani’s heavier games reveals just how sharp his instincts are when it comes to creating interlocking systems that generate tension, drama, and real decision-making. In Mesos, the open information, clever card flow, and agonizing turn-order tradeoffs make it a far more engaging game than it first appears. This isn’t just a lighter Luciani game, it’s a lean, tightly-wound experience that makes my brain hum.