Introduction
I have wanted to review Stone Age for a while now, but every time I sit down to do it, I...decide to go on BSW and play it instead. The review that follows is one that survived many aborted attempts and 40+ online plays (5 face-to-face), so I hope my experience with the game will give me a different perspective. I will not post pictures and/or go into the rules too much since you can look at the other excellent Stone Age reviews for that.

Let's get some of the basic stuff out of the way, so you'll understand what I'm talking about later.

What is the objective/theme of Stone Age?
If you must really care, it's leading your tribe out of the Stone Age. If you don't, it's getting victory points. Victory points are gained through construction of buildings and collecting cards, which symbolize higher forms of culture and specialization of workers. Buildings give you immediate one-shot victory points when you pay for them, while cards provide you with end-game multipliers to gain more victory points. You have to be as efficient as you can in two parts of the game: gathering resources, and converting resources into victory points, in order to win.

What's a sample turn like?
Players go around placing workers on the board, at one site at a time, until everybody has placed their workers. The start player then resolves all his actions in whatever order he chooses, then the second player does the same and so forth. The number of workers at each site is limited (except for hunting), so it is key to know what you want the most and what other people want too. The possible locations to put workers on can be divided into 3 main areas: the village, which gives various forms of long-term benefits; the resource-gathering sites, where you can gather food, wood, brick, stone and gold, which help you feed your people and get victory points; and the building sites and cards sites, which allow you to convert your resources into victory points.

What forms of player interaction are there?
The usual form of player interaction in any worker-placement game, where players will attempt to simultaneously grab locations they covet the most and/or deny an opponent a location she covets. Any site in the village, the forest (to collect wood) and at least 2 of the 4 available cards each turn are always heavily coveted, and most player interaction in the game happens there.
Example: I see Player 2 has placed a worker on the 2-cost card, announcing that she plans to purchase the card there with any 2 of her resources. She has no wood (the cheapest construction resource) and there are only 3 spots open in the forest. Hence, I place 3 workers there, forcing her to gather more expensive brick (the next-cheapest resource) in order to fund the purchase of the card.
Example: I really want to get both Building A and Building B this turn. Building A is more important to me. However, I feel that one of my opponents really wants Building B this turn (by looking at what resources she has). Hence, I will place a worker on Building B first, then I will place my next worker on Building A, which I predict nobody will take.
Example: I really want to get a building that requires wood. However, I have no wood. I look at the forest and see only 2 spots open. Hence, I probably shouldn't place a worker on the building, because somebody might notice it and intentionally screw me over by filling up the forest before I can place workers in there, wasting the use of my worker at the building.

What skills are needed to do well in this game?
- Memory. Cards, once purchased, are held face-down in the players' hands. Cards define the strategy a player is using for the entire game, so it is important to keep tabs on what cards everybody has. It's not needed to remember exactly how many of each end-game bonus each player has (and indeed, uncertainty over this loosens the game up and makes it more interesting), just which kinds of bonuses each player is going for (namely civilization, shamen, builders, farmers and artisans). This will help you know what to deny them from with your worker placements.
- Know what other people want. This will allow you to pinpoint sites where, if you place worker(s) there, you will kill two birds with one stone: help yourself and deny your opponent.
- Manage risk. Since you get to resolve your actions in any order you choose, you can place a worker on a building you cannot purchase (say you need one more brick), because you can also put workers in the clay pit and resolve the brick-gathering action before you purchase the building. However, what if you don't gather enough brick? And how many workers do you think you will need to place there to gather that precious piece of brick? (resource-gathering is determined by dice, so you only know it's possible to get, say, 0-3 bricks, but never know exactly how much).
- Weigh short-term and long-term benefits intelligently. Should I keep purchasing cards and working on my end-game multipliers, or should I start going for some instant benefits now? It all depends on how long more you think the game will last.

What game(s) is Stone Age similar to?
- Saint Petersburg (same designers). The cards get cheaper next turn if nobody buys them. The civilization cards in Stone Age score very similarly to the end-game scoring of the Aristocrats in St. Petersburg. Both games share the simultaneity of gathering resources and gaining victory points: in Stone Age, you can (and will want to) do both in a turn; in St. Petersburg, you can gain both VPs and money in a phase, allowing you to spend that money immediately in the next phase. Both also share the strategy of saving some resources at the end of each turn/phase, to leave flexibility for purchases in the next turn/phase.
- The Pillars of the Earth. Gather resources and convert them into VPs, often in the same turn. Stone Age allows you to retain your resources from turn to turn. Pillars uses cards for resource-gathering; Stone Age uses dice. Pillars has a lot of exceptions and fiddly rules that introduce unnecessary complexity, while everything in Stone Age is intuitive and easy to grasp, so you can worry more about your strategy, not how to play.

My take:

Let's start with the excellent components. You've probably seen Stone Age at the FLGS and marveled at how the box is literally bursting at its seams (it closes somewhat properly once you've un-punched everything though). That is proof of how wonderful the bits in the game are. There are very nicely sculpted wood, brick, stone and gold resources, none of that wooden-cube crap. Enterprising players will probably use these bits in other resource-gathering games that feature these resources. Food tokens come in VERY plentiful 1, 2, 5 and 10 denominations; you will never run out of food tokens or have to "make change", as happens with so many other games. The game board is lavish and pretty. And everybody loves the leather dice goblet, which allows you to tidily roll your dice (at most 7 at a time). What I feel is really great (and most people overlook this) is that Stone Age provides a neat divider to compartmentalize all your bits, and also more-than-enough zip-lock bags that allow you to store your bits. All this goes to show that the publisher really thought about the end-user when designing and manufacturing the bits. I love it when publishers consider the little things that make gamers happy. At just a little over $30 MSRP, Stone Age is bang for your buck, even if it were a crappy game.

But enough about cosmetics and into the actual meat of the game. Is Stone Age fun? Yes. In your first few plays, it might seem a chore with all the moving of meeples and bits around the game board (players helping each other out really speeds up the process up here), or even a 4-player solo efficiency exercise if the players don't grasp the importance of denial with worker-placements. However, with just 2-3 plays, you "get" the player interaction, you understand the variety of victory strategies and which are compatible with each other, and the enjoyment of the game escalates from there. Central to the fun of Stone Age is an everlasting quest to create the perfect turn. Each turn is like a mini-game of itself, where you try to maximize the number of VPs you can gain there, screw your opponent into wasting the placement of a worker and/or paying more for something she needs, leave yourself flexible to obtain resources in the next turn, and, ideally, do all of the above. Stone Age, like many Eurogames, is all about efficiency if you want to win, and the process of sharpening your skills and becoming more efficient is very gratifying, and hence fun.

The dice throw a bit of a wrench into the meticulous planning, and lighten the game up a little, because with any game that involves dice, the more you try to plan and script something, the more likely the dice will fail you*. You roll a number of dice equal to the number of workers at the site every single time you gather resources, and the sum total on the dice, divided by resource cost, tells you how much of the resource you gather. The dice are a welcome addition here, because without them, the game would seem more like an efficiency exercise (since you'll know exactly how much of each resource you get, like in Pillars). Also, just the plain action of rolling dice (in the leather goblet by the way!) makes Stone Age feel more like a "game", instead of cold hard math. The good thing about dice in Stone Age is that it doesn't make the game luck-dependent. Sure, you will be screwed once or twice in the game, but the sheer number of dice rolls in the game virtually guarantees everybody else will get screwed once or twice too. The key idea is to “cover your butt” by not stretching your resources too thin so that when you do get screwed, you don’t get screwed too badly. You can also safeguard against bad rolls by being conservative and placing more workers at each site. This increases the number of dice you roll, and makes it more likely for you to obtain what you need. Rolling dice is fun, but it sucks if it introduces too much luck into gameplay. With Stone Age, you get the best of both worlds: rolling a crapload of dice, but with it having a negligible effect on the luck factor (that comes mostly from card-draws and building-draws). What's not to like about that?

*My philosophy on games that involve dice.

Stone Age is a strategic (as opposed to tactical) game, where you usually pick two strategies (through the first couple of cards you purchase) and stick with it, with the occasional purchase of a card not compatible with your strategy in order to deny the leader from it. The available strategies are accumulating workers, farms, tools, buildings, and collecting different culture cards. The beauty in this is that you cannot go in with the same strategy every time and expect to win. The most astute Stone Age player usually settles on the first viable strategy that presents itself, and picks up a second strategy when it becomes available. What strategy to pick also depends on what other people are going for. If two or more people are going after the culture cards, ignore them and let them fight each other for it. If nobody seems interested in the tools multipliers, nab them if you don't have a primary strategy yet. If everybody’s going for farms and shutting you out, screw collecting food, and go for a starvation strategy. The point is few games of Stone Age will be telegraphed. There is no “favorite strategy”, because stubbornly sticking to what won you the game last time is not going to work – the cards and buildings may not come out the same way, and you might not be playing against the same set of players. This gives the game legs, which is why I haven’t gotten tired of it yet. Also, every victory strategy is balanced – I have seen the game won by every combination of strategies. This really speaks to the amount of playtesting and thought that went into the game design. Some cards or buildings might appear overpowered at the start, but give the game a few more whirls, and you’ll find that they actually fit well into the game. You might hear rumblings of “starvation strategy is broken” if you hang around the Stone Age game space long enough, but take it from me that it is not true: the person who goes for it can be stopped, and experienced players will sandbag that player if she becomes a threat.

I can’t find too many faults with this game. One nitpick could be that I wish the game had more player interaction. There is plenty of competition of obtaining the spots in the village in the early game, obtaining the building spots in the late game, and obtaining wood-gathering and card-buying spots all game, but there is rarely competition in obtaining brick, stone or gold. I would suggest reducing the number of spots at these sites to increase competition for these resources and make the game more tense. Also, despite my earlier discourse into how the game is mostly luck-neutral, I do find one particular, albeit rare, instance which is very, very lucky for the player who encounters it (detailed here, but not of importance if you haven’t played Stone Age before).

A last note about how Stone Age scales with the number of players: I feel that the game becomes more tense and luck-neutral with more players, because it’s harder for you to nab multiple great spots with your workers. Different people have their preferences. I like both 3-player and 4-player, but I dislike 2-player (many people like it though). The game plays almost the same with 3 and 4 players, but very differently with 2. If there are new players in the game, however, playing with 4 is indisputably the best idea, because playing with fewer introduces two new unintuitive placement rules that might confuse the new player. Playing with 2 players takes 45-60 minutes, playing with 3 takes 60-75 minutes, playing with 4 takes 75-90 minutes. Playing with new players can tack on about 30 minutes to game time.

How would I rate this game? In my personal ratings, this was the first (and so far only) game I rated a 10, because I do believe that I’ll always be up for playing this game (at least until I hit 150 plays, maybe). A big draw of the game is that it strikes the perfect balance between accessibility and complexity. I have found that accessible games are great for newbies but not so fun for veterans as they often sacrifice replayability to make the game simpler, while complex games are great for veterans as something new always happens, but they can be intimidating for newbies, especially if it entails taking your licks in 20 consecutive games before you even have a chance at winning one. In Stone Age, new players can get the hang of the game pretty quickly, because the few rules in the game are all very intuitive. Experienced players will also find the game enjoyable, because there are different victory strategies to pursue and combine, and every game is different, due to the variability in card and building draws, the outcome of dice rolls, and the how different players value the resources and cards in the game. I think Stone Age is a solid middle ground between people who want a next step up from the gateway games, and experienced gamers who want to introduce the former to more complex games, yet don’t want to sacrifice too much enjoyment for doing so. Because of this, I encourage you to try Stone Age, regardless of your gaming background.