Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
The medium-weight Euro-style efficiency game category is so crowded right now! Between reviews for Meeple Mountain, games played from my legacy collection, and new games I tried at conventions, I played about a hundred different games last year in this category.
Atlantis Exodus (2025, Capstone Games) is a medium-weight Euro-style efficiency game designed by George Halkias and Konstantinos Karagiannis. The game’s main selling point is the theme—players serve as kings (sadly, kings are the only option here) trying to evacuate the citizens of Atlantis over the course of five years (rounds).
Getting citizens trained and then evacuated on ships and off-island settlements (such as residences, workshops, and agoras) is the goal of the game. This being a Euro, you don’t want to bite off more than you can chew; players who can’t efficiently move citizens from their player board into a settlement will lose lots of points during end-game scoring.
The secondary selling point is the rondel action selection system used to navigate each round. That puzzle ended up being less interesting than I was hoping, as a fan of other rondel games such as Glen More II: Chronicles, Sabika, Kraftwagen: Age of Engineering and Shipyard. Atlantis Exodus takes a round or two to get interesting, but a mix of bonus actions and fun chaining mechanics just gets the game over the hump.
Ride the Wave
Atlantis Exodus accommodates 1-4 players. In each round, players place then move their large king token to various areas of a changing, three-ring rondel that rotates at the end of each year. There are three rounds in each year, and five years in the game. During each round, a player can take at least two actions, or up to six actions if they possess bonus tokens. Based on the location of a newly-placed king, they get an immediate bonus before taking their actions for that round.
Let’s pause right there. Atlantis Exodus says it plays in about 90 minutes. As my first four-player game suggested, that is absolutely not possible. Even with fast players, you are looking at a minimum of 30 actions per player over the course of the game. Four players equals 120 actions. Now, none of the actions in Atlantis Exodus are complicated: players can take one step on an inner track that grants a small bonus every few spaces, or take an end-game scoring card from a common market if they have the matching citizens.
But besides the actions, players have to collect their king bonus before beginning their actions. Again, none of those are complicated—gather books (the game’s most prevalent resource), gather gold or bonus action tokens, maybe a tile that can be placed into that player’s settlement area.
This bevy of actions led to a whopper—my first four-player game took a hair over three hours after I finished the somewhat breezy teach. Period, point blank: Atlantis Exodus isn’t nearly interesting enough to justify that long of a playthrough. No matter where you land on the decision point of whether the game is for you, I beg of you: play this with two, maybe three players. The game loses nothing by having fewer players (there is a very light amount of blocking that takes place, but the blocking is tied to bonuses, not main actions) and you can probably get through a game in 90-120 minutes with fewer players.
At the start of each year, players select a spot in turn order for that entire three-round year. Using a system similar to games such as On Mars, players can select the first-player spot but get no bonus for the year…or select a small bonus by going later in turn order. (There’s even a spot available in a four-player game that grants a player the opportunity to break the rule of one king per rondel space.)
Unlike On Mars, the bonuses available for going later in turn order are really weak. One bonus grants a player one reference book, a bonus you can get in about a dozen other ways during the game. Going second grants a one-step bonus on the Apotheosis track, that inner track that grants minor bonuses mentioned earlier. Save for two very specific moments on the Apotheosis track no one is ever going to just choose to go second to get a one-step bonus that will likely result in no benefit.
This led to a seemingly important choice turning into an obvious one—you’re going to choose the first space if it is available. Not once across my four plays did a player say “you know what? I need a brown reference book pretty badly, so let me just choose to go third, even with all the other spots available.”
“Get to the Chopper”
Beyond these choices, Atlantis Exodus flows nicely. Players mostly collect citizens and reference books, so that untrained citizens can be advanced down one of about a dozen different profession spaces shown at the top of each player’s personal mat. Once trained—or, even untrained, for a much smaller bonus—citizens are “sent off” the island by taking an action to move them from the training area into the settlement area of the player mat. Each ship and building type accommodates 0-5 citizens, and can be collected whenever a player needs enough housing to take on new citizen meeples. Some settlement buildings (Workshops) grant bonus goodies when players collect certain citizen types from the rondel. Others grant a handsome one-time bonus.
All settlement tiles cover an instant bonus for the player, so Atlantis Exodus does a nice job of building mini combos over the course of each year. And moving citizens into the settlement area provides another chance at scoring, when mid-round scoring takes place after years two, four and five based on the majority each player has across the three categories of citizen: scientists, workers, and intellectuals.
The way these actions come together to build a scoring mechanic was fun, and by the time I got my fourth play in, I could see some of the magic behind the way Atlantis Exodus was designed. The first one, usually two, rounds of the game are kind of dry, with limited actions available as players build up their pool of reference books to train workers to take on various tasks in their settlement area to score points and move around the Apotheosis track.
But rounds three through five were a blast, by the time players had a small engine going with their Workshops, had a couple bonus tokens to spend on their turns, or Influence cards (one-time bonus cards) to use to take a more powerful version of a basic action.
What Didn’t Work?
The big elephant in the room: the choice of colors for the citizen meeples. I just checked—it is 2025. Still, we have games that hit the market using white meeples as Intellectuals and brown meeples as Workers. You won’t believe the moment when your mixed ethnicity play group sees the space to train brown Worker meeples from untrained Workers to either Builders, Stonemasons, or Day Laborers. (Yes, I know—brown workers start with no skills and go from nothing to a Day Laborer!!!) Meanwhile, untrained white Intellectual workers go from untrained to either Priests, Scholars, or Counselors.)
If Atlantis was a real place, and we were trying to be historically accurate…well, even then, I would have taken issue with how the choice of meeple colors played out. But Atlantis isn’t real!! Are we really saying that in 2025, we couldn’t have tried to avoid this???
Atlantis Exodus is a mixed bag from a graphic design perspective. In an attempt to keep some components, particularly the Influence cards, language-free, the game relies a bit too much on icons that needed to constantly be referenced in the rulebook. (The small player aid cards don’t help as much as nature, or the designers, intended.) Sometimes, you won’t have an issue—yep, that icon means take a purple reference book; yep, that Knowledge card for end-game scoring clearly means that ships are worth an extra point. But other times, such as the Monument scoring tiles or the way each meeple type scores during mid-game scoring phases, the iconography was a miss. The English translation for the rulebook is only OK, so there were some minor stumbles even when icons needed to be deciphered during play.
Solo was a great way to learn the game, but it’s a high score challenge that doesn’t really illustrate the struggles a player might face at higher player counts when kings get in the way. With solo, two king tokens each block a single space on the rondel each round, so it’s easy to plan around where those tokens will be as a player takes their turn. I would not recommend Atlantis Exodus to a player whose only intention is to play the game solo.
“Fun, But I Wouldn’t Buy It”
Atlantis Exodus does some interesting things, but in a field that just finished (for my money) the greatest single year of Eurogame releases since at least 2016, it’s really difficult to recommend Atlantis Exodus over the cream of the crop from last year. (For the record, 2016 included games like A Feast for Odin, Lorenzo il Magnifico, Scythe, Great Western Trail, and a few other games many hobbyists consider classics.)
I really enjoyed the back half of games of Atlantis Exodus, particularly my third and fourth play, once I had a better feel for the importance of each citizen category and how I could juice up my engine. I found that using brown meeples and workshop tiles early, along with training white meeples to get big jumps on the Apotheosis track, were more important than purple meeples in the early game, which are used for end-game scoring cards.
That also means I’m beginning to figure Atlantis Exodus out, in a game that doesn’t change much beyond the end-of-year rondel rotations. Even 1-2 more plays would be enough for me with this design, so I think a lot of players will play this three or four times before moving on.
Supercharging the player order bonuses might make that process more interesting. Featuring more Monument bonus tiles might shake things up a bit. Giving players 1-2 Influence cards to begin the game might give the first and second years of the game more life. But none of these are currently built into the design, leaving us a bit empty-handed.
I love the majority of the Capstone catalog, so I was excited to try this from the moment they announced this was coming to the US. Sadly, Atlantis Exodus didn’t hit the way many of Capstone’s recent catalog hit (such as 2024 releases Age of Rail: South Africa, Ark Nova: Marine Worlds, or Beyond the Horizon). Give Atlantis Exodus a look if you are a fan of rondels and you manage a smaller playgroup.
Atlantis Exodus details
- Designer: George Halkias, Konstantinos Karagiannis
- Artists: Dennis Lohausen
- Publishers: Capstone Games, dlp games, IFROM Games
- Release Date: 2024
- Player count : 1 - 4
- Age range : 14+
- Time range : 90 minutes
- Mechanism(s): End Game Bonuses, Once-Per-Game Abilities, Rondel, Tile Placement, Turn Order: Stat-Based
- BGG Geek Rating: 7.63714 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 4.0.
- More articles about Atlantis Exodus.
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