Disclaimer: This is a first look based on one play of the final production prototype at Essen 08.

After the success of Through the Ages it is inevitable that the license would expand. Being a big fan of TTA I was hoping for an Age IV card expansion or something similar to draw the game out a bit. No such luck.

Roll through the Ages (RTA) is a game supposedly predating TTA by letting the player build through the bronze age. At least that's the official line, the game doesn't support that as you can both build the obelisk wonder and the great wall wonder.

On the surface RTA is Yatzee with different symbols. Unfortunately that's the feeling I got after the first play through – you re-roll your dice three times, just like in Yatzee.
Dice


You roll as many dice as you've got cities. These can come up with population, which lets you build more cities and wonders, food which lets you feed your cites, coins which lets you buy advancements and goods which lets you save up money for later turns (you can't save coins). There's also a two-goods-and-skull side letting you collect two goods but also incur the possibility of a disaster.

Goods are saved from the bottom of the scoring track up, the higher you go the more each good is worth so you've got an incentive to collect more of them in a single turn. You can also save food from turn to turn and you'll need as much food as you've got cities or you loose one point per unfed city.
Resource board

As each food dice only gives you two food, this means you've got to roll at least half (rounded) of your dice as food. That's where advancements come into play, get agriculture and you get one more food per rolled food result.

You score points for monuments you build (mostly for being the first player to build a certain monument). Building monuments, as building cities, is a matter of rolling enough manpower on your dice and supposedly you've got a contest element here but with two players it pretty much fell through.

That's about it for the game; roll, rinse, repeat. While RTA might make a semi-decent filler for children's families there isn't much for the serious gamer here, nor much similarities with TTA.

On the up side the game has a decent amount of heft; if you like your games solid this is it. It's also short and it's got nice graphics on the box. For me that wasn't enough to make it a buy. Perhaps I played the game wrong or expected too much out of it. Even so I don't think I'll be easy to convince to try it again.