Game Overview: Through the Ages
Civilization building is a common theme among board games: 7 Wonders, Sid Meier’s Civilization, Agricola, Civilization, Advanced Civilization—but the highest rated, and nearly the highest rated board game period, is Through the Ages: A Story of Civilization. This is a game I would like to get into, and given the success of my Quarriors! play through, I thought I’d demonstrate some of the mechanics of this game to give any friends (who want to become best friends) a preview of what I might ask them to play.
Of course, Through the Ages is much, much different than Quarriors! For one, TtA has three different versions you can play: Simple, Advanced and Full. The rule book says “Even the Simple Game can take several hours to play…” (I can promise you that, unlike in my Quarriors! over view, I will not go through an entire games worth of play) and there are way more mechanics than just roll, buy, attack and cull… Without further ado, let’s look at some of these mechanics as I take Boots on in another game:
You’ll remember what the set up looks like, I’m sure, but here it is again (hand for scale, yes: it is fiddly and yes: I am a hand model [see commercials I shot for Margaret Anderson Kelliher]):
The yellow disks represent, basically, people and the blue disks represent resources. Each white disk represents a civil action I can take each turn and each red disk is a military action (not very important in the Simple Game as military only counts for bonus points at the end).
The score board/indicator track here keeps track of our Culture Points (or Score, highest culture wins!) Technology Points and how much Military Strength we have as well as the Culture and Technology we produce each turn. Our yellow disk on our “Philosophy” technology above gives us a Technology point and our Warriors give us a Military Strength. Ok, holy moly, already a lot of jargon and wooden bits. Time for a:
CAT PIC INTERLUDE.
Anyway, back to the game.
We are currently producing zero happiness. How true, board game, how true. Happiness also doesn’t matter in the Simple Game… I mean, the happiness of your yellow disks. Hopefully you are happy to be playing the game although if your name is Jeff and you have a Meryl Streep Blog that’s probably asking too much already.
So I opted to start the game off, and in the very first turn of the game the first player only gets one action instead of the four he would generally get from his despotism and you are only allowed to draw cards from the board:
The play example in the book has first player “Adam” selecting Moses, so I follow suit. Notice the white circles underneath each card, one white circle indicates that the card can be drawn for, you guessed it, one civil action. Patriotism, however, with two circles underneath would require two civil actions to draw. Pop quiz: Would I have been able to draw this card on the first turn? NO.
Moses will allow me to increase my population for one bag of laundry food fewer. Thanks Mosey! Increasing population is generally a good thing, unless you’re a human and increasing population just means greater demands on limited resources. BUT I DIGRESS. At the end of every turn your Farms and Mines produce resources:
For each yellow disk on my Farming and Mining technology I take one blue disk from the resource pool and place it on the card. Now those blue disks represent food and resources! Great. I also get to move my Technology and Culture scores up if I am producing either of those:
You see that my orange cube on the bottom, or my Technology Indicator, says I get one lightbulb each turn, so I move my orange cube at the top which represents my current Technology Points to the right one square. Onto Boots’ first turn.
Boots gets two actions as 2nd player and he chooses:
Work of Art and the Library of Alexandria, screw Frugality. He places his Wonder, the Library of Alexandria, under construction next to his government card:
And he keeps the Work of Art card in his paw for now. He then produces resources in exactly the same way I did and there you have it! We survived the first turn. I promise there will only be one or two more of these.
To begin the second turn, we remove some of the unselected cards from the board and fill in the spaces.
I do have some great hands. Goodbye, Frugality! It is now my second turn and I get full use of my four Civil Actions as represented by the white disks on my government card (if that sentence made sense, please stop what you’re doing and come over to my house and play this with me, thanks.)
I use one civil action to play my leader card and my second to Increase my Population. Now, normally this would require two bags of food as indicated by the 2 with arrows in my Yellow Disk bank, but Moses lets Manna rain from the sky to reduce that cost to one. I remove one blue disk from a farm and put it back in the bank to indicate that I have used one food, and I bring one of my yellow disks from its bank and put it in the Unused Worker Pool which is the box currently above Moses’ head.
My next action is to take the Pyramids off the board and put them into construction, and then I build another bronze mine by paying the cost of a new mine indicated by the 2stones (and I pay this by returning two blue disks from my Mine to the pool… good God, I’ve lost you, haven’t I.) and moving one of my unused workers to the Bronze Mine Card. Whew. My actions are done so I now produce my resources…
My two Farms allow me to add two new blue disks to the one that was already there, and my three mines produce three blue resources.
Boots second turn is pretty similar to mine except he lacks Moses’ power of saving food when increasing population (which he does) and then he builds a farm instead of a mine and draws two more cards:
Those three cards in the right hand corner are his hand, not in his play area. He then produces his resources and ends up with three food and two resources.
The beginning of the Third turn sees a draw from the Event deck:
Oh ho ho! Both Boots and I have a worker in our unused pool, but I decide to forgo this benefit while Boots takes advantage—he is a violent cat. He moves his yellow disk from his unused worker pool to his Warrior card.
My turn sees some population growth and building an urban building. See if you can figure out what I did by looking at this picture taken after my four civil actions:
I increased population twice: 1 food for the first addition, and 2 food for the second (normally, that second person would have cost me 3 as indicated by the 3 with the arrows around it in my yellow population bank, but remember: Moses, Manna? Yeah? …) I then paid three resources to build a temple! Which increases my Culture production by one and gives me a Happy Face. Now, I have also uncovered a symbol that has 1 bag of food and the word Consumption. This means after my farms produce food, I have to pay one back for my workers or lose culture. Thankfully, I’ve got two farms so after they produce I am left with one food:
Boots takes his third turn, again, look at his board and see if you can parse what might have happened…I barely can, and I was there!
First, he uses a civil action to play Hammurabi as a leader which gives him a fifth civil action at the expense of one military action (A good Simple Game move as military actions are meaningless as far as I can tell) He also uses an action to play Work of Art to score 6 points to take the lead. He pays an action to draw Printing Press, increase his population by one and he also built a stage of his wonder for one resource—You can see there is now a blue disk on his Library of Alexandria. Under that disk there is a 1 indicating the cost of that stage of the wonder. The blue disk stays there to remind us we are one-fourth of the way to expanding our hand (the benefit of building the Library. Normally you can only hold as many cards as you have civil actions.)
And that is the end of the third round. The Simple Game continues in a similar fashion and more varieties of cards are introduced on the game board—when the final card from the Age I deck is dealt, the game is nearing an end and your civilization is scored.
I am overwhelmed but also excited about playing this game. There are still many mechanics I have yet to explore, like playing technologies, upgrading buildings and changing governments, but of what I do know of this game, I am anxious to give ‘er a go.
So, come over, pet my cats and play some games with me!
