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Main Catalogue | BOARD GAMES & CARD GAMES | Rio Grande Games | Stone Age

Stone Age

Price: £34.99

Board Game; 2-4 Players; Ages 10+ by Rio Grande Games The times were hard indeed. Our ancestors worked with their legs and backs straining against wooden ploughs in the stony earth. Of course, progress did not stop with the wooden plough. People always searched for better tools and more productive plants to make their work more effective. In Stone Age, the players live in this time, just as our ancestors did. They collect wood, break stone and wash their gold from the river. They trade freely, expand their village and so achieve new levels of civilization. Players 2-4, Ages 10+ GAME REVIEW BY COUNTER MAGAZINE Hans im Glück / Rio Grande 2-4 players, 60-90 minutes designed by Bernd Brunnhofer reviewed by Alan How Closely resembling Pillars of the Earth, Stone Age is a game about placement of your pieces to gain resources, which are then are used to buy cards that earn victory points. At the start of the game each player has 5 pieces. On your turn you send one or more of them to an area of the board. Then the next player does likewise and this continues until all players have placed all their pieces. In addition to the resource areas, there are three special areas where you can place your men and these often get taken early. One enables you to increase your number of men for future rounds; another provides a permanent increase in food production - a scale marks the free food produced per turn (up to 10 points per turn). The last is an area to generate tools. These provide a die point once per round, which can be very useful. With enough of these tools, you can get multiple one-off tools which increase through further tool development to three lots of +3 dice improvements. As you can see these benefits are really helpful and are generally grabbed by players as soon as they can. There are four areas where the pieces get resources. These are taken by throwing dice, one for each man sent to each resource area and the number of each resource depends on the divisor. At the wood area, each three points will yield one resource while at the gold mine each 6 points will yield a gold bar. As you are dealing with dice, you have to consider the risk of not getting the resources you need against the limited number of men who will not be available for other areas. And as in all the better games, there are always more things that you would like to do than you can do. Apart from the food hunting area, the others all have limited spaces to place men and as each player can only visit each area once, it is important to decide how many men to place not only from the point of view of getting your own resources, but also to deny other players. The resources are used in several ways. There are four piles of victory point cards which require combinations of resources to claim these points; this is the most obvious use of the resources. A secondary, though valuable option is to acquire one of the four civilisation cards available each turn. Finally, players can use resources as a substitute for food when feeding their men, but this is not a great use of resources as they are more valuable elsewhere. The cost of the civilisation cards varies between one and four resources and cards that are not acquired in a previous turn slide down in price, so expensive cards do reduce in price. The cards themselves have two features. The first is an immediate game benefit and the second is an end of game benefit. The early benefit is an improvement in a player\'s current situation, so this could be more food, a small number of victory points or even some more resources. The card options are clear from the symbols on the cards, so players not reading the cards the right way up can clearly see what to do. An interesting example of one of these cards is the one that allows a player to throw a die for each player. Each number rolled produces a benefit, as described on the card, and the players choose one each, beginning with the player who bought the card. The benefits include various resources as well as improvements in food production and an increase in tools. If the cost of the card is (say) three resources, there is a chance that the payback may not cover it. However, if the cost is only one resource, then it is likely that the payback will at least be a better resource and could be one of the card\'s really good benefits. The second feature on the card only takes effect at the end of the game. One type of card will show a picture of an item that is gathered into sets. One of these will score 1 victory point; 2 will provide 4 points and the highest number (8 different types) will give 64 victory points. This is a strategy to get a large number of VPs by obtaining cards with a different symbol to expand the set. Alternatively, the benefit on the bottom half of the card will show a benefit for another type of set collecting. There are four types of these, such as providing a multiplier to the number of men a player has. If you can get several of these types of card, you may focus on getting more men in play. As the cards come in all sorts of combinations, you may try to get a card for its top and/or bottom bonus. The last area to attract your men is the victory point cards and these require resources to be swapped for the card. Each shows either a specific combination, such as two wood and 1 brick, or a number of resources and a range of types which will provide a variable number of VPs depending on the combination used. The points for these cards vary between about 10 and 30, so getting the right resources is really important. Finally each turn players must feed their number of men in play. You start with enough food to last at least the first turn, but sooner or later you will need to hunt for food. This is similar to the other resource areas, in that you place your men in an area and roll dice, but the divisor is 2, so food is the easiest item to gain. As food has no other use, you really only want enough of it and not too much. The tendency is to play these people last as there is no competition for places and the other areas of the board have limited spaces. The game is very intuitive to play. You know the risks of playing pieces to areas requiring die rolls. You also know that the desirable areas will be heavily fought over, so making use of the first player turn (which rotates one person each round) is important. Victory appears to be more likely if you have a balanced strategy, but this is not a guarantee and the routes to earning VPs are varied, interesting and develop through the game. The game itself ends when the cards cannot fill the vacancies or when one of the four piles of VP building cards is depleted. So the end game is predictable in that you know how long that you have got to finish the game, so planning is important to maximise your personal end of game position. The last two areas allow you to increase your men in play and provide one extra food each turn. All games of this type (such as Leonardo da Vinci from da Vinci Games) have a feature of getting more men, and Stone Age is no different. The downside in this game is that you have to feed all your men in play or lose a penal 10 VPs. Stone Age features a really good set up card. This shows how to set up a game and is a model to other games of how to clearly show all the game elements. Overall Stone Age is an excellent game. It has an immediate appeal as the presentation is fresh, clear and appealing. The game has clear goals. This is something I always seek in a game and you can see where short term goals - collection of resources - link to longer term goals - cards and building cards. There is also the requirement to keep your food up to the levels you need, while the rotating turn order means that you need to plan for when you will have first choice about the best options. Finally, the luck element, prevalent in dice rolls can be mitigated, though when good cards turn up for you is still down to chance. Even this is mitigated as the number of choices is sufficient to provide good enough opportunities to make progress. All in all Stone Age plays well and is one of the better games to fit into a 90 minute timeframe.

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Main Catalogue | BOARD GAMES & CARD GAMES | Rio Grande Games | Stone Age

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