Through The Ages: A Story of Civilization
Czech BoardGames, Vladimír Chvátil, 2006
3-6 hours, depending on number of players and game level
2-4 players (3 strongly recommended)

Through the Ages is a civilization-building game from Czech Board Games, one of their debut releases from Essen 2006. It is currently in the process of being reprinted, and is in pre-order from FRED and FunAgain Games.

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What to make of Through the Ages? It's a big, long, somewhat complicated, and extremely ambitious game from a first-time publisher. It's got a tremendously appealing theme (empire-building through the ages) with cameos from such historical figures as Alexander the Great, Caesar, Napoleon, and Sid Meier (well, that last guy might be a little out of place). It's won much applause, a very high rating on BoardGameGeek, and the most vocal, fanatical fan base since Age of Steam. But given the small number of copies currently in circulation, what does all this mean for the rest of us contemplating jumping on the bandwagon of this much-prized game now that it will reach broader circulation?

Game Description

In Through the Ages: A Story of Civilization, players take on the roles of nations, all beginning in antiquity with nothing to their names but a small population, some Agriculture and Bronzeworking, a Warrior, and a Despot with grand ambitions. Your despotism gives you 6 actions you can take a turn, 4 civil and 2 military.

From these humble beginnings, you must grow. To grow, you'll need new technologies. These new technologies – Irrigation, Iron, Swordsmen, a Code of Laws, Alchemy, Arenas, Monarchy, or Drama, just to pick a small selection from the first age – are available for draft from a queue of cards. Cards near the front of the queue are cheap (one civil action), while cards later in the queue are expensive (3 civil actions).

Drafting the card from the queue and putting it in your hand, however, is only the first step. It must then be researched, built, and utilized, which requires, respectively, ideas, resources, and people – the three key resources in the game, and what you'll spend 90% of your time managing. To take them in reverse order, you grow your population by building agricultural improvements and producing a food surplus, and then taking a civil action to grow your population base. Your initially grossly inadequate resources – used to build virtually everything in the game, including more mines – are produced by your initial starting bronze mine, and expanding production requires a person to work plus a civil action to build a new mine plus some resources. Having bright new ideas to turn into future technology requires you have a research technology (you start with Philosophy) and build a lab by spending resources to build the building plus, again, have a person available to work there.

This is the general pattern that most of the game falls into. Essentially every improvement to your culture requires that you a) draft it from the queue for some number of civil actions; b) play the technology card in front of you by spending a civil action and some idea points; and then, possibly c) building the appropriate building, mine, farm, or military unit through spending an action, the required resources, and having a free person to do the job. There is some variation amongst the cards; some improvements (like a Code of Laws) are inherent to your civilization, and once drafted and researched do not require spending resources or devoting new people; Wonders of the World like the Pyramids require spending civil actions and large resource payments but not ideas or people (apparently the Pyramids really were build by space aliens); and military units must be built with military actions instead of civil actions.

This is most of the game. You must balance the need to produce resources, people, and research, and then spend those things wisely to advance your civilization in order to produce yet more resources, people, research, and, at some point, victory points (provided by many buildings and Wonders). Through the Ages looks like (and to some extent is) an empire-building game, but the overwhelming majority of the basic choices are economic, and the key decisions, as in Saint Petersburg and most other games of this type, revolve around when to start giving up infrastructure development in favor of doing things that actually generate victory points.

This orderly technology procession is great, but where are the disasters, wars, and other random events? Well, most everything else not covered by this technology model has been lumped into an event deck which contains a mish-mash of stuff, and from which you can draw for the cost of a military action. Some of the cards are just random events that affect some or all the players, for better or for worse; some of them are military tactics cards which you can add to your civilization (at the cost of military actions) to get bonuses for your military units; and some of them are actual military campaigns, like raids, pillaging, or full-scale war.

This is where those military technologies and units you bought at such great expense a few paragraphs ago come into play. Say you draw a Raid card and wish to use it against someone. You pay the military actions to activate the card, and announce the player you are targeting. You add up the total military might of your civilization, with the attacker and then the defender being allowed to sacrifice some of their units to increase their totals. If you win, by having the higher total, you get to do the event (steal your opponent's resources, maybe, or burn down a few buildings).

So. You merrily progress through three ages of this stuff, starting off with Bronze and Iron, Alexander the Great and Aristotle, Fighting Bands and Temples, the Great Wall and the Pyramids, and end up with Oil and Industrialized Agriculture, Elvis and Sid Meier, Entrenchments and Movies, and Fast Food Restaurants (who says we haven't improved the world in the last 10,000 years?).

Now, I've explained here only the vital, core bits of the game. For a card-driven game with limited types of resources (cards, action points, technology, resources, and people), there are actually a surprising number of rules once you play the full game. Corruption can eat into your production, managing people requires managing your grain supply (keeping your people fed and happy involves a couple very awkward and confusing mechanisms that you will likely have to ask about repeatedly), transitioning to a new government type can be done peacefully or through revolution, there are special rules for colonization events and wars, and late-game air forces have their own special rules, to pick a few. I wouldn't call the rules load excessive – once you get going, the main elements of drafting and playing cards and managing your production infrastructure and population are fairly simple and for the most part quickly internalized, and actually can get somewhat repetitive – but this is still a game with a fair number of pointy edges, rules-wise. Nothing terrible, but it's a significantly more complicated game with a lot more rules grit than Puerto Rico or Francis Tresham's classic Civilization, just for reference.

Analysis

So what to make of it all? There is a fair amount going on here, and this rough description probably gives you little idea how it plays in practice.

A lot of games can generate interest and fun through exploration of the game system. A game can present you with a complex environment, and lots of levers to pull, preferably not clearly labeled, and let you explore how the environment works. Through the Ages has undeniable appeal in this way, much like Puerto Rico or Race for the Galaxy. You start your first few games with a bunch of rules, a few pieces, a large and largely unknown stack of cards, and then you wing it for 4-6 hours, trying to wend your way through a chaotic situation. Like some other, harsher civilization-building games – say, Antiquity or La Città – in the early game your civilization frequently feels on the brink of falling apart, and you're constantly looking for the chewing gum that will keep it going for the next few turns. For many, myself included, this constant flirting with disaster is fun, especially if the game is well-engineered enough to keep you close to the edge but rarely push you over it. Antiquity is an example of a game that succeeds in nailing that zone. Through the Ages is not as successful, because it is at its core fundamentally an economy-building game, and it's pretty easy to get behind on the power curve early, be unable to ramp up your production, and never really be able to catch up – and so fall over the edge. But, it's reasonably close. I found exploring the game-world of Through the Ages generated enough fun to last through the first game and into the second before the basic tactics were mastered and the composition of the various card decks, and thus the landscape of the game, was understood.

There is an enormous caveat here, though. Probably the game's biggest problem, and it will be a complete show-stopper for many, is the military conflict system. When conflict comes up through card play, players compare military and the loser takes it on the chin, usually fairly hard. The results of this combat are often close to deterministic; you can look at the military totals and see who you can beat up on without very much risk – and that person is likely to be someone who is already behind in production or population and hasn't had the chance or ability to improve their military. Yes, that's right, this game actively and strongly encourages you to beat on players who are already doing poorly. Even once you get experience with the game, falling behind on the military track is usually not a matter of neglect (although it certainly can be), but more likely to be chance, lack of opportunity, or an already weak position.

Quite honestly, this is an appalling feature, and some players I have played with simply avoid that whole aspect of the game even when it would be to their advantage to use it, simply because it is so distasteful. I do not recall ever playing a game which had such a frustrating and harsh penalty for already being behind, nor can I think of a game offhand which makes already strong positions so hard to chip away at (even the notorious The Great Dalmuti/Dilbert: Corporate Shuffle is arguably friendlier to the players who find themselves behind through bad luck or early-game mistakes). It can be utterly infuriating to sit on a weak position and have the other players start raid after raid on your position because it is clearly their best play. The more players in the game, the more problematic this becomes.

One more thing about the military system before I quit beating on it, it suffers from not only being a horrible game system, but it also is completely unevocative of actual historical conflict. To be blunt: if I start a war with a neighbor, I want to roll some dice. I want there to be some chance, some sense of risk: war is nothing if not risky. Through the Ages' bidding system not only has extremely undesirable game effects, it's also just plain boring.

Anyway, so, you've gotten past game one or two, you've decided you can live with the military conflict system, you've figured out the basic economic system, and you understand the contents of the various decks of cards. The exploration phase is over, as is a lot of the inherent fun that goes with it; we now come face-to-face with the game's true self, if you will. How does it hold up?

This depends on what you think of Through the Ages' secret, a secret which to me was extremely well-camouflaged on play one but became clear by play three: despite appearances, Through the Ages is a short-term optimization game, a lá Caylus (or to a much lesser degree Puerto Rico). There is virtually no room for any kind of long-term planning or strategy, for a number of reasons.

Firstly, access to cards and therefore technology is extremely unpredictable. Before too long, the cards available for draft will start to turn over almost completely between your turns. So you can't play based on what will be available next turn or the turn after, you have to base your decisions on what you currently have available and probabilistically what is still remaining in the deck. This is OK, but does not go that far and becomes repetitive in a game that can push 5 hours.

Secondly, your ability to alter the focus of your civilization to exploit opportunities as they come up is minimal. If, say, you realize that your current problem is that you don't do enough research, it is prohibitively wasteful to shift a population token currently doing Gladiator Galas in the Arena into Philosophy. You really want to build up your research capability from scratch. Once you've built up that research capacity and caught up, it is then equally hard to shift back to something else. So the game rewards building exactly what you need for the long term. But, since all the players' empires are completely identical and undifferentiated (there are no hidden cards, no position-specific cards, no geographic differences, no particular strengths or weaknesses), and since the topography of the game (in terms of the composition of the card decks) is known and the same for all players, "exactly what you need" does not cover a lot of ground. You cannot be tempted by some random fluctuation in what the game system offers you on any given turn, which is only a tiny portion of the overall picture. If you are given the opportunity to "go for a military strategy" because you are able to draft a couple military technologies early in an age, this is for the most part a false choice. You could not prepare your civilization for this eventuality because you could not know ahead of time that it might be available. It will be hard to repurpose your existing infrastructure to pursue this new goal because of the extreme cost of switching your existing population to the new tasks. Even if you should succeed, you'll have to switch back at some point because a long-term focus like this is not generally viable, due to the dictates of the card decks, and you'll eventually end up paying the same prohibitive switching costs yet again. Instead, you have to take a laser-like focus to the game, building exactly as much military as the game requires you to in order to stay out of last place on that track and take advantage of the known mix of military events, but no more, since it's simply too hard to haul your civilization into a new direction in an attempt to take advantage of a new perceived opportunity.

I should say that once this is understood, it is not necessarily a problem. Plenty of games that are purely short-term-optimization games are rather popular, although admittedly not many are this long. On the scale of these things, Through the Ages is in line with Caylus and has substantially less opportunity for planning or strategy, or for player positions to develop in interesting and divergent ways, than Puerto Rico, and vastly less than Phoenicia, San Juan, Race for the Galaxy, or Civilization, just to pick a range of mechanically similar empire-building games. Be that as it may, I think that ultimately for me the telling blow is that for what it is, Through the Ages simply runs too long and has too much downtime. The 2-age game is OK, but the full, 3-age game gets very repetitive 1.5 to 2 hours before it's over because the types of decisions you are making don't change much and don't have much range. The third age feels almost identical to the second age, just with all the numbers increased somewhat and with different names, and the second age in turn looks a whole lot like the first age. And while you're fiddling your tiny little beads, trying to get the right resources to the right place, everyone else is sitting around twiddling their thumbs, waiting for their turn to come up so they can do the next small, incremental step in pushing their civilization forward.

Which brings us to...

Theme

A lot of games which are perhaps not that riveting from a decision-making perspective can make it back in theme or ambiance. So how well does Through the Ages fare?

I think a lot of effective game theme can be broken down into a few separate but linked questions: how effectively does the game cast the player into an interesting, concrete role? How evocative are the types of decisions the player makes in that role, and how plausible is the game-world that evolves as a result of those decisions? And how strong is the game's narrative? Through the Ages stumbles in all these areas.

For starters, what role does the player play, exactly? It's clearly not the despot/king/queen/royal line/freely-elected president/leader of the moment for the civilization in question. Even if we set aside the timeframe of thousands of years, leaders like Napoleon, Caesar, or Winston Churchill are drafted through the card deck, and you clearly are not them, nor are you leading revolutions against yourself when you change government types. If you are not the leader of your people, then who are you? I like to think of the role you play in the game as being some sort of Tolstoy-esque "will of the people", the irrevocable force of humanity behind migration and change that all leaders must bow to. If you look at it that way, the theme of Through the Ages actually makes some sense. You can get into a philosophical debate about the importance of famous leaders to the scope of history, but if like Tolstoy you believe that Napoleon was a product rather than a driver of his times, then producing history through a lot of small short-term optimization decisions rather than any kind of over-arching strategy does make sense, and is arguably thematic.

But is that role interesting or concrete? I think concrete roles make a big difference, such as the visceral draw of being an art speculator in Modern Art, a colonizer in The Settlers of Catan, a hobbit in Lord of the Rings, or even a property magnate in Monopoly. Through the Ages puts you in a role that lacks that draw. The role of a "force of history" is hard to get in to, simply because I don't know what kind of decisions such an entity would make, and in game terms, decision-making processes are a big chunk of defining a role.

How plausible is the game world? On the surface, not very. The game presents you with all sorts of weird spectacles, and not just spear-armed war-bands dueling with tanks. Aristotle lives several thousand years, and the Great Pyramids provide extra oomph to a nation's civil infrastructure into the Victorian age. But the real problem is that these nations cohere and grow in a rational, orderly manner for far, far longer than any people in history. No dark ages, no rise and fall of the Macedonians or the Romans, none of the cycle of boom and bust that is a feature of real history can or will ever occur. The foundation on which the game works never changes; assault-rifle armed infantry are just swordsmen with a higher cost and combat factor, and so you get a smooth progression which is notably ahistorical (and, needless to say, a little dull). All these factors combine to kill the narrative of the game: the fact that the game is, when viewed at a distance, extremely orderly does not make for interesting stories.

Which brings us to the end. During my last (and most likely final) game of Through the Ages, while I was fiddling around resources and population and trying to improve my technology and get everything to come out right, I said, "this really would be better as a computer game". Which, of course, it is – as the homage to Sid Meier as a leader card reveals. This is Sid Meier's Civilization (the original) ported to a board, to a surprisingly great degree, and much of it is only explicable when you bear that in mind.

One could fill many books cataloging the attempts to transfer something from one entertainment medium to another with mediocre results when the advantages and disadvantages of the target medium are not fully grasped; and this is what we have here. Through the Ages has instead embraced the limitations of both genres: the micromanagement, linear game-play, and very limited and highly structured player interaction of an early-90s computer game, constrained again by the time, complexity, interaction, and presentation limitations of a board game. As such, Through the Ages ends up being functional and workmanlike, but ultimately mediocre.

Thank you for this great analysis. I learned a lot from it for sure makes TtA in the Try before Buy pile.

Thank you Chris, for your incisive review as it has made me take a much closer look at the game and whether to purchase or at what price point.

Your criticisms of the different aspects of the game were quite helpful and some things will bother me much more than others (military comments=bothersome, role the player plays in the game=negligible).

My question is this. You paint quite the negative picture of the game (despite certain caveats) and I'm wondering: to what do you attribute the immense popularity and super-high rating here at the Geek? Yours is certainly the minority view, though as I look through user comments, I do pick out bits and pieces of your criticisms in them.

I'm just a bit confused about the wild popularity of the game and it appears that people, in general, are willing to WAY overlook its shortcomings and pronounce it great, living up to that conviction by spending megabucks to own it.

You lost me when you try to claim that Phoenicia and San Juan have significantly more "opportunity for planning or strategy, or for player positions to develop in interesting and divergent ways". Couldn't disagree more.

oh, come on, Chris, you know it's just because you lost that last game

actually, this is a very well written review! you capture some points about the game that i dislike... such as the "pick on the loser" aspect of military game. but, as you also noted, many can and frequently do ignore this aspect... making sure to "just" keep up, so that they don't become a target. i find the economic game much more appealing.

and i guess when it comes down to it, i am very thankful that the game resembles the computer game. i enjoyed that, and i enjoy this. i think it is very themeful, if you count for the theme, evoking the game play of a computer game

one more thing i noticed: in the beginner game you're told to place four victory point cards face up at the beginning of the game. i actually like this style better than the completely hidden victory point cards, that are only known at the end.

also note: we were playing one rule wrong. you're only allowed to draw a maximum of three military cards per turn.

Thank you for the insightful and balanced review. I feel like your review is the closest I've got to playing the game so far. Well done!

Thanks Chris, you've saved me a few quid on this one!

Chris, you need to restart your blog, badly. Great review.

Isn't it 4 civil and 2 military?

I look forwards to reading the rest on the train tonight

Sorry, it is in fact 4 civil and 2 military.

Thank you for the review. I found your Analysis section very illuminating, and I wish other reviews would go into as much depth as to how the mechanics play out.

Chris, very well written review. It's great to have a well thought out, dissenting piece up for this game. I'd be interested to know how often you've played the full game.

I adore the game, but as i claimed in my review I was always going to - I love "growth" games where you run some sort of logistical engine. I've played 40+ games, and it is starting to get a bit old. My wife is still entranced by it, though.

A couple of points...

1. The military deck (the "mish-mash of stuff") - the events aren't random. They're passed through the hands of the players, who seed them into the future events. If you have a strong hand of military actions, you have a lot of control over the event flow.

2. The military game... I'm not sure how it could have been done better, while maintaining the nicely integrated game systems. Conflict is a risk, not deterministic - the soft and spongy looking defender may have defence cards to drop down. Wars are worse - the attacker actually take the penalty if they lose. To get totally brutal - if you're way behind on the strength track, how can you expect not to be thumped? If you maintain strength parity, you'll probably be left alone. If you don't like the whack-whack-whack the weak, there is the included "no ganging up" variant.

3. "Rules Grit" - really? I don't find it that bad. You cite examples of colonisation (a simple auction of strength), wars (basically an aggression that is resolved on the following turn), air force (doubles a tactics card). I've basically explained them in a sentence... not a lot of grit there. I've taught this to friends who read a review in Counter - they found it easy to grasp (full game, too).

Again, well done. Great counter-balancing review.

I think the problem with this review is that Chris's level of understanding of the game is only a tiny fraction of what he thinks it is. If you watch some good (experienced) players play the game, and you notice that they never end up with hopeless positions early on, then you might conclude that it's actually not true that the game punishes you with bad positions even when you don't do anything wrong. There are a lot more viable lines of development than one might at first think.

And a military strategy is definitely not risk-free. It costs to build up your military, it costs to launch wars or aggression, and there are many things one can do to blunt the effects of such a strategy. Sure, you can get clobbered if you completely ignore your military, just as you get clobbered if you completely ignore production, or you completely ignore population, or you completely ignore happiness, or other essential elements of the game. If you don't like games that are unforgiving of mistakes, you certainly shouldn't play this one.

The most wrong-headed analysis is that this is a game of "short-term optimization" alone. I think that is just totally wrong. What makes the game complicated is exactly that the strength or weakness of a particular position is comprised of very many variables, which take a lot of skill and experience to weigh against each other in any particular situation. Obviously, as with any game, your objective on any given turn is to make the move that gives you the best position at the end of that turn. But that isn't very useful as a guideline, if you aren't able to figure out what makes one position better than another.

Well, sort of. They are pretty random in the sense of there being a lot of stuff in there, a pretty small portion of which is going to be helpful to you. In the games I've played, it's not uncommon for people to just throw something on the stack for the couple VPs with no idea whether it will benefit them when it actually comes around to fire some 8+ turns later. You hope, but the flow of the cards can be pretty swingy on a turn-to-turn basis so it's hard to tell. The tactics are pretty egregious in this sense, either you get one of the small handful of tactics card you need in the given time frame for a significant bonus or you don't. Same with the Age III bonus scoring events. Either you get one that helps you or you don't, and tactics that you can't match are pretty worthless. Not a lot you can do about any of this, other than making sure you have 3 military actions one way or another.

There is a lot of randomness in the game. That's part of the charm, especially in the early games, but also part of what makes it a game mostly of very short-term optimizations.



I think the bottom line on the whole military thing is that Through the Ages is an economic game, and from an economic perspective, military is essentially an extremely regressive tax. In order to get into the situation of mutually assured destruction that takes the military element essentially out of the game, players need to make fixed outlays to build to appropriate levels of military strength. Healthy economies have little trouble doing this. Weak economies will have to make significant sacrifices to keep up, but if they fail to do so, they will be savaged, potentially taking them out of the game very early. Wars in this game are never fought between strong powers. They are not a tool to rein in a leader. They are a mechanism for the strong to pick on the weak, and profit greatly from it. The problem is, being weak is frequently something you don't have a lot of control over. Maybe you couldn't get Iron until late in Age I because everything was snapped up before it got to you, or even worse, maybe you missed out on Iron entirely and then the only two Coal (in a 4-player game) were late in Age II. Your production could be anemic for significant periods through no real fault of your own, but you are forced to make those military outlays lest your already tenuous production be vulched.

This could have been done better by making it more fine-grained (more but cheaper units), making more of the rewards victory points or more incremental instead of some of the extremely nasty effects, making the advantages of fighting stronger and higher-tech opponents greater, or making it more exciting and evocative by (for example) rolling some dice so players who don't draw the limited number of defense cards in the deck don't feel so totally helpless. It could also have helped to give the loser some idea points, perhaps, to reflect what they've learned from their defeat. It could have allowed for different levels of defeat - if you lose but put up a fight it could be better than putting up no defense at all.

Regardless, I think the problems with the military system tie in with everything else, it's just that the military is the most egregious manifestation. If the fates of these societies were more interesting, if they went through cycles of waxing and waning as real nations do, then the odd military defeat would be part of the cycle. But since it's really just a brutal, compound-interest economic game - an uncharitable view might be that it's basically Saint Petersburg with a huge amount of chrome - the military thing just doesn't work.

It bears mentioning that classic Civilization just abstracts this stuff out in a way that makes sense. It takes the view that the Macedonians may have overrun Persia in that time frame, but the Persian people were still the Persian people, the change in leadership was just a head transplant, and the Persian civilization continues. Only real population pressure from other tribes causes problems. This is a tack that Through the Ages could have taken also, had it not been so bent on recreating the Sid Meier's Civilization computer game.



Well, one of my complexity metrics is "how long does it take before you are playing the game entirely correctly". The results for Arkham Horror are still pending, but the number for Civilization was 1. I think I've played Through the Ages 5 times, and I've yet to play with a group that got everything completely right (although we were pretty close last time). That's a lot of playing-hours. As is typical, it's not that any one thing is hard, but the accumulatino of little things: the air force rules are easy to read, but hard to explain and harder to remember when they finally come up; the rules for figuring out your grain drain and smiley face requirements we'll generously call awkward; there are a number of limits and costs (like on your military draws, as John mentions) that are easy to miss; the revolution vs. peaceful transitions need to be explained; removing yellow tokens at the end of the age needs to be remembered ... none of it is onerous, but there is a lot of it, and in a typical situation where one person has read the rules and has to explain it to everyone assuming they don't have any specific knowledge, there is a lot of stuff in there to remember. Obviously, if you get two or three players who all know and have read the rules, you're a lot better off, but this is not necessarily a typical situation.

Again, I'm not saying the rules are terrible or that it's an undue burden. Most of it is pretty straightforward. It's just that compared to some similar games, it's it bit more complicated and edgy than you might expect for a game of its general type.

Chris, thanks for the detailed and opinionated review. I use the word "opinionated" in a complimentary sense, because it's useful that you tell us what you like and dislike.

I really like this game, but I can see that our differences in rating are due in a significant way to differences in personal preferences. I have a great tolerance for games with runaway leader problems---I rate Outpost a '10', for instance. To me, your concern in this regard is like complaining that Chess has a runaway leader problem because once you've lost your queen it's hard to recover. So don't lose it! But it's a valid and useful comment. My perception is that, among experienced and skilled players, it's managing that risk that makes the game interesting.

I also think some groups can play this game more quickly. I've now played a number of full games in three to three and one half hours. We probably cheat a little by having one person start his or her turn while the previous player is still finishing, where it doesn't seem to matter. Clearly this is a game where many groups will raise their enjoyment level by speeding play up.

This reasoning seems to suggest that high production (making lots of rocks) is essential to military strength, and I think that's just not very true. High population is at least as important, and if you don't have high production then you should have more people, or more lightbulbs, or more military actions, etc. All of which can help you deal with military challenges.



There are some games that don't work, i.e., the mechanisms just don't function properly. There are other games that I don't like, i.e., the mechanisms work the way they are supposed to, but the resulting game isn't much fun for me. Your statements about TTA, even to the extent they are accurate, all fall into the second category. The military mechanism punishes players who fall too far behind. This is true. But that doesn't make the game "broken". It's not an inviolate law of boardgaming that games should have built-in mechanisms to help out people who fall behind. It's just a personal preference of yours.

TTA is going to appeal to precisely the people who are put off by this tendency in many recent games.

Not to be snarky, but if you re-read the review, you won't actually find "runaway leaders" to be one of my complaints. I think the military system needlessly punishes players who are already doing poorly, but this is rather different thing. I was trying to come up with a way to extend your chess analogy, but I realized it wasn't a good idea. Chess is a deterministic 2-player tactical game in which we expect this sort of thing, and once we suffer a severe reverse we expect to lose the game quickly. That's just fine. Through the Ages is a 4-player economic game with significant randomness which will go 4 hours plus whether you are doing well or not. So we hopefully have rather different expectations.

I actually do not think that Through the Ages has a runaway leader problem at all. There is so much chaos in the way in which the advancements come out, and a sufficient scarcity of critical ones, that the player who is ahead at the end of Age I (say) may well fall back in Age II due to simple lack of access to critical technology cards. And the game pushes you enough with escalating costs that being ahead of the curve in Age I doesn't mean you can easily stay ahead in Age II (although you'll have a better chance). That part of the game works pretty well in my opinion. My much greater concern would be for the folks who don't quite manage to get ahead onto the power curve in Age I, who can then be kinda screwed, especially a) if their more well-off players take advantage of the military game, and b) since it can happen often enough due to bad luck.

back on the rules subject... i think a major cause of complexity in the rules is the division between Basic, Advanced and Full games. it was a clever way to slowly introduce the players to the complexities of the game, but it ended up confusing players due to the rules split. i.e. for the longest time i would put out four Age III score cards in play from the beginning of Age I. So, of course I've found out that this is incorrect -- though it actually may have increased our enjoyment of the game.

i think perhaps it would've been better to have the Full Game explanation first up... with ALL the rules. Then you could add sections in the end for a Basic and/or Advanced game.

anyhow... i really like the game still, so bully for me, eh?

Well, at some level it's hard to argue that people have different preferences. That's fine.

But I think there are a lot of us out there who share a preference to play games which don't go out of their way to punish people who have already had bad luck, or who have made an early mistake. That's my preference, and while it might not be an absolute rule, it is my opinion that this is something people might want to know about, and a large number of people will object to.

There is certainly no inviolate law that a game should give people who make poor choices a helping hand. Many games I consider amongst the best do not - Settlers, for example. I love San Juan and Race for the Galaxy, both basically economic games with no help for people who get behind. But those games are short, they make the good design decision to end just as it's becoming clear who has made the better choices. One could make the same comments about Phoenicia, another recent game I like a lot.

But I think we can say pretty much for sure that a game should not put you in the position of having no chance to win for 4 hours but being forced to continue playing. You can always find someone who won't mind, but I think it's fair to say that the vast majority of people will find that a problem.

Anyway, I find that I'm getting sucked down a route I'm not sure I want to go. As you can tell from the writeup, the military game was not a show-stopper for me personally. It was clear on game 1 that the military aspects of the game were troublesome for me (and were in fact show-stoppers for several people I played with), but that alone didn't keep me personally from playing games 2-5. It was the other issues - the repetitiveness, the length, the poor pacing, the lack of range - that finally did in Through the Ages for me.

Sure. I just think if you said, "This is why I didn't like this game," rather than, "This game doesn't work," you would get your point across more clearly, while being less contentious.



The vast majority of the 7 billion people on Earth probably aren't much interested in playing any 4-hour board game. So just counting heads doesn't seem like the right criterion.

I think there are plenty of people who have no problem with the idea that early decisions and events can control the outcome. If you want your decisions to matter, then this is the price that comes with it. Personally, I have little interest in playing a 4-hour game where I know that, whatever I do for the first 3 hours, I'm going to be in contention at the end. I'd rather just skip the first 3 hours, in that case, and play a 1 hour game.

Obviously, a key question is how often you will be in a hopeless position after 30 minutes, and, when that happens, whether it's because of bad decisions you made or purely the luck of the draw. Obviously, regarding TTA, we disagree on these two questions.

To be fair as well (to continue the chess analogy), the obvious answer if you are hopelessly behind 1 hour into the game is simply to resign your position.

I think a lot of gamers seem to have a problem with resigning. I understand why in part. Many gamers play games not for a "game" in the classic sense of a contest to determine a winner and a loser, but instead to play out some sort of story. Quitting part way through seems like quitting on the story to them. Likewise, I have heard in long games like A3R how it is "unfair" to resign as the Germans when you've gone off the rails, because you got to "beat on" the Allies while you were playing, and then you quit right before they get to beat on you.

But from a purist perspective, none of that really matters, as resigning establishes a winner and a loser as clearly as finishing out the game does. People resign in chess all the time, and they are not though of as weak or unreasonable simply for refusing to play out the last 15 moves that will lead to an obvious mate.

I see resignation in Advanced Squad Leader as well, for example. People want to get as much intense and contested play time in as possible. In a game that takes hours and hours to play, many that I know would rather just concede the game once 50% of their squads have been wiped out while the other side has lost next to nothing, rather than spend the next 3 hours playing it out. That way, they can just get a start on a new game where the end is not obvious.

It seems to me that if you have a problem that things can be obvious but the game still has a way to play out, you just resign and start anew (or go play something else).

EDIT: I should add that this is obviously applicable to two player contests much more than multiplayer games, where someone simply getting up and walking away often ends up just ruining the game for everyone else who is still in contention.

Clearly, resigning a position in Chess or Go or Rommel in the Desert or ASL is totally legitimate.

It's not clear to me whether resigning is an option in Through the Ages. I think it might be - the scaling rules aren't onerous, if the 4th resigned you could throw out all the "4+" player cards in the deck as they come out (although in the symbols are sadly easy to miss, so it's best to "scale" the game ahead of time if possible).

But what are you going to do then? Watch the other players play? Go home? It depends on what Through the Ages is, a tournament game or a social, themed game. I think it is or wants to be much more towards the social end, and have thought of it and evaluated it as such.

I suspect you already know the answer to this, Lou. Chris has some problems with the design and he does a good job of enumerating them, but that doesn't mean that these are shortcomings of the game. In fact, I'm almost certain that most of the people who've played TtA disagree with him on most of his points. A game doesn't get this many 9s and 10s from folks who feel it has significant flaws.

It's mostly a 2 or 3 player game. You said that yourself, in your review. The 4 player game is there for people who already know they are TTA enthusiasts. But everyone else should play with fewer players, at least until they are sure they like it (and maybe even beyond that).

If you're playing with 2, then obviously resigning is not a problem (I know my opponent did this in one game at BGG.CON, just because he thought it would be more fun to restart than to press on).

It would be a great service if someone would write up one "reference" set of rules to be used by people who already know the game and need to look something up. Maybe it could even be included in a future edition.