Taken at face value this guy is playable but almost unbelievably weak for a 5 XP card. He's got good soak, +1 to a stat, and an ability that pays back his own play cost, if you have expensive insight events to play. But every color but green now has level 0 allies with +1 book, and some of them even generate resources. Compared to a Dr. Milan Christopher or Lawrence Carlisle, he gives a little more soak and a faster pay-back but little else for 5 XP.

But maybe we can make him worthwhile by really leaning in to that burst economy function. This guy is a good candidate for Calling in Favors, since you can spend all his money and then bounce him to hand to get another ally out and then bring him back in with a fresh set of secrets.

Speaking of secrets, the new Enraptured can generate crazy numbers of secrets as a free action, and this guy can turn that into resources.

I won't be surprised if there turns out to be some kind of weird infinite that involves cycling your deck to replay insights over and over that you pay for by enrapturing Archibald here repeatedly.

Still don't like him much if I'm playing fair, though.

Archibald seems very powerful when comboed with Library Pass (5) to turn all of your secret using tomes into resource events. Library Pass (5) encourages you to "read" your books as fast as possible and get rid of them so you don't have to pay any of the late fees, but lots of Tomes either exhaust, like Scroll of Secrets or Old Book of Lore or have too many secrets to use in just one turn like Scroll of Prophecies and Grim Memoir. With Archibald, you'll never waste any secrets so long as you have pricy insight events to bankroll. This combo is available to any Scholar investigators, and one half of it is even a permanent card. But of course, Seeker Agatha has access to every insight event in the game and an extra action to play them through her ability.