Average Joe reviews are aimed at the average gamer. You know who you are!

Those of us who:
1) Know what ‘Eurogame’ and ‘Ameritrash’ means.
2) Know that enjoying the game is more important than winning.
3) Don’t own more than 50 games.
4) Don’t consider their FLGS a second home (maybe a 3rd or 4th though).
5) Like to read a review without being overloaded with information.


Goal of Game:
Explore the new world, obtain trade goods, build and expand your empire by gaining new lands by any means necessary.

Components:
Very good. Very nice looking board with TONS of plastic figurines. The money consists of plastic coins of gold and silver. There are cool merchant ships, cardboard squares for trade goods and discovery pieces. The discovery cards are nicely designed on standard card stock.

The Rules:
Pretty good. Written in a way that everything makes sense as you read it, you won’t get too lost. Play can be done after one read through, but will most likely require frequent look ups for references during the first game.

The Game:
Terrific. Plenty of fun stuff going on to keep you thinking and busy. This is a worker-placement game, which is always interesting with plenty of options and decision making. You can focus on trade goods, increasing your population, exploring unknown territory, advancing your civilization, or doing battle with neighboring territories. Of course, just how much focus you put on each one is the trick of obtaining that victory. Once you play a few rounds, the game becomes quite easy to understand – and your goals will become more apparent. This game will satisfy many tastes – you like developing resources? You like collecting items? You like battles? You like screwing the other players? This game has all that and more!

This game is also a good hybrid of a eurogame and Ameritrash game. There is minimal luck involved (sometimes undiscovered territories have more natives than you were expecting), so the strategy is VERY high to satisfy the eurogamer in me – meanwhile, you have many detailed figurines instead of wooden cubes to satisfy the ameritrash gamer in me!

Downtime:
Minimal. You will have at least 5 workers to place and most likely more – each player putting one worker into one of 7 different locations on the board at a time, so around the table you go with very little delay. Only down time you will normally see is when calculating scores (3 times throughout the game) or when figuring out major wars (which are not as common).

Analysis Paralysis
Average. As with any high strategy games with many options, you will have some people looking and pondering their next move. Since the worker placement goes around the table fairly quick, players won’t have a lot of time between placements to think about their next move. Hopefully each player will have a general idea of what they WANT to do each round, and will do their best to pull it off – that or quickly change short-term goals that can still be pulled off for a win.

Game Length:
Decent. Depending on your point of view, this game will not end quick enough… OR it will not last long enough! You will find time running out just when you think you may be pulling off a win – then there will be those who think they have the win, and they need the game to end before others catch back up. Games do average about 2 hours, and time will go very fast.

Finish:
Good. There will be some surprise as to who will win, but it is a little hard to catch up if you are too far behind. If you plot correctly, you can pull off a successful war to pull out a last-minute victory.

Replay-ability:
Very good. This is a fun one to play, and fun to try different options. You will find yourself wanting to play again, and try that strategy the winning player used… which of course, won’t work the same way next time! But that is what makes future games all that more fun.

Pros:
Great fun and not only easy to play, but easy to teach newcomers
Many different strategies to victory
Lot of pieces to play with

Cons:
Figures can look very similar – probably will want to dab some paint to distinguish the different characters
As much as I hate to admit it, there is a such a thing as too many figurines
Score track around the edge of board is hard to see and use

Overall:
Very good game. It will appeal to most every style of player, and is a good family game – and yep, has some educational value as well (did America really look that weird way back then?).

I give Age of Empires III a 9/10