Summary:
This is a simple worker placement game where each turn players strive to balance improving their subsistence 'caveman' lifestyle with acquiring resources to build huts or purchase civilization cards. The former takes the form of building farms to relieve end-of-turn feeding problems, breeding to acquire more cavemeeples, and building tools to make foraging for resources more rewarding and less luck-dependent. The latter is the means by which resources are converted into points. At the same time, one must always keep a vigilant eye over one's food supply as there are penalties for going hungry*. Any given turn consists of a number of phases, with players taking turns to complete each phase before moving onto the next:
1. Cavemeeple placement
2. Carrying out the actions
3. Feeding cavemeeples with stockpilled food.
This process continues until one of two eventualities: the number of civilization cards remaining is insufficient to completely refill the 4 designated spaces on the board, or one of the hut piles is empty. When this happens the game ends at the end of the current turn and points are tallied.
* disclaimer: there is actually a very viable 'starvation' strategy.
Components:
Stone Age boasts lovely components. The resources and meeples are well designed wooden pieces and aesthetically pleasing to the eye. The main gameboard and the player boards are solid, functional and colourful. The cards and huts are also superb. There are 7 dice and these are accompanied by a nice leather cup! The game also comes with a plentiful supply of plastic bags for all the loose components. Sadly, the quality of the game's components are let down by the crazily designed box insert, which when assembled, won't let the box lid close in entirety. Result = discarded insert! It's rumored the second print run fixes this problem, but despite this minor fault, I'd still give Stone Age's components a very respectable 9/10!
Setup:
Setup is quick! Pour out the wooden resources and food tokens onto their respective gameboard areas, shuffle the civilization cards and cardboard huts, placing them in their respective positions, give 5 meeples to each player, and then you're good to go. 8/10
Gameplay:
Gameplay is very much of the standard worker placement genre. Players take turns to place cavemeeples on one of the available actions on the main gameboard. In 2- and 3-player games there are some imposed limitations on where and how many cavemeeples can be placed. The options available for each player are as follows:
* Economy spaces - farm, tool, extra meeple.
Build a farm - use a cavemeeple to build a farm. Each farm equals one free food each turn.
Build a tool - use a cavemeeple to build a tool. Tools can be used to modify dice rolls, making resources more reliably required.
Breeding - place two cavemeeples in the 'lovehut' to create a third. Should make sense to the majority of us!
* Collect food.
Roll one die per cavemeeple placed here. For every increment of two, collect one food. There's no limit to the number of meeples that can be placed here.
* Collect resources - wood, clay, stone or gold.
Similar as for food but there are only 7 available spaces for each resource.
Wood - receive one for every increment of three.
Clay - every increment of four.
Stone - every increment of five.
Gold - every increment of six.
As you can see, acquiring stone or gold can be tricky without placing lots of meeples or having lots of tools.
* Huts
The number of players determines how many piles of 7 huts there are in the game. Building huts is the how players generate points during the game. Each hut comes with a varying cost in resources and the amount of points received corrolates precisely with the cost of the resources as above. For example, a hut costing 1 wood, 1 stone and 1 gold will give you 15 points. As players build farms, breed meeples and make tools, it becomes easier to acquire resources and feed your cavemeeples and the result is a natural shift from the 'economy helpers' to building huts around the mid-late game. Competition for the huts can be particularly fierce at the end. This is because unused resources are only worth 1 point each at the end of the game and so generally speaking, it's considered a criminal offence to have a plethora of unused resources at the end of the game.
Since one of the ways to end the game is depleting one of the hut piles, it's entirely possible to place a meeple on a pile with only one hut left and subsequently decide not build it. Watching everyone else panic into relieving themselves of their resources on expensive cards only for you to prolong the game another turn, can be rather amusing and advantageous, as can burning through one of the hut piles to end a game prematurely.
* Civilization cards.
There are four spaces available for civ cards; the first requires only one resource to purchase, the second two, third three and the last four. As you can see, if the civ card you need is on the third or fourth space it will require you to pay more heavily for it. From my experience, the first, and more often than not the second, are nearly always worth the resource investment. Only if the fourth card is really important to my overall strategy, or I have an abundance of low cost resources (e.g. wood), would I consider spending the 4 resources. Each civ card imparts an immediate one-off bonus plus it will give a boost to a player's scoring during the end-game. One-off bonuses include free resources, a free farm or tool, or a small number of victory points. Boosts to the end-game scoring come in the form of score multipliers relating to the number of tools, farms, cavemeeples or huts that you've managed to collect. There is also a specialized 'civilization' set of cards to collect. What this does is it creates an incentive for players to specialize sometime around the mid-game. If you've collected a lot of farm multipliers then clearly it makes sense to match this with building farms: 5 farms with 5 farm multipliers will give you 25 points during the end game. Since everyone starts with 5 cavemeeples, the meeple score multipliers always tend to be hot property, and rightly so! Once collected, civ cards remain hidden from the other players and so the end-game scoring is typically a tense and exciting affair. My experience is it's not uncommon to double one's score with an astute collection of civ cards... ignore them at your peril.
Gameplay 8.5/10
Time and scalability:
Stone Age plays quickly. A 2-player game should last no longer than 60 min and a 4-player game 90 min. I'm a family man and time's definitely of the essence, so Stone Age scores well here. I've played it numerous times on BSW, experiencing both 3- and 4-player games, and Stone Age scales incredibly well scaling for number of players. The restrictions imposed on placing workers in 2 and 3-player games don't feel unnatural or unfair and help make your choices all the more important. 9/10
Conclusion:
As you see from all this there's quite a lot of depth contained within a relatively simple game concept. Do you go for cards even if they are expensive, or do you try to snag the cheaper cards that you know someone else needs? Do you concentrate on farms, tools or more meeples, do you go for huts and putting score on the board early, or do you try the come from behind strategy, revealing awesome combinations of civs cards at the end. There are many paths to victory and each of these appear extremely well-balanced. This means that Stone Age is innately replayable. The fact it's just had a mini-expansion released means its replayability level just got even better too.
Resource collection is dependent on dice rolling and therefore there's inevitably an element of luck involved. However, the sheer number of dice you will roll in any one game of Stone Age should mean the good and bad rolls even out... bell-shaped curve and all that. Nevertheless, a really bad roll of 1's will always hurt, as does a perceived bad draw of huts or civ cards. Still, the upshot of this means Stone Age is appealing to newcomers will play well in mixed groups of gamers and non-gamers.
The best thing about Stone Age in my opinion though, is it really doesn't take itself too seriously, which really means it's a lot of fun!
Overall rating, a whopping 9/10.
Posted Thu Sep 18, 2008 11:02 am
