Review Details

Stone Age

Product Rating:

Product Review (submitted on December 8, 2008):

Stone Age is an award nominated resource management game set in pre-historic times. Stone Age focuses on the use of worker placement to develop a player’s resource base and the addition of dice to increase unpredictability in the game. An elegant board game, Stone Age is certainly one of the best light to medium strategy games recently released.

Appearance: Stone Age comes in a large box that might be slightly over-packaged but not significantly so. In the box is the main game board, a series of building tiles and civilisation cards, tokens for players and resources and lastly, dice and the dice cup. Artwork on all tiles and cards conjure the same ‘pre-historic’ feel of the game, adding to the overall theme while the most important addition to this is the addition of the leather (pleather?) dice cup. It definitely adds to the feel and is the best part of the game’s presentation. Oh, and they are good enough to add a few small plastic bags to the game - a nice touch and one that Fantasy Flight should keep in mind. Also available is an insert that works well, though it seems geared for the inevitable expansion.

Rules / Ease of Learning: The rule book for Stone Age is well laid-out with the flow of rules seemingly logical and well thought out. It provides a great introduction and the rules themselves are easy enough to learn. The problems arise when the game is actually played - minor rule clarifications (how do you determine first player? How does the first player change from turn to turn?) are buried in text. The simple addition of bolds to the text would have helped answer these questions. Additionally, the fact that the civilisaton cards were placed in a secondary pull-out sheet was annoying for the group - we had to locate the sheet to go over those rules when it could have been as simply dealt with in the main rule book. These are all however quite minor complaints, with the overall rules and explanation quite well set-out.

Each round in Stone Age goes through three phases - worker placement, resolution of workers and thirdly feeding of your tribe. During worker placement, players take turns choosing which location on the board to allocate their initial 5 workers to. They may only choose to allocate workers to one location per turn - though the number of workers that may be allocated is variable (though most locations have a minimum/maximum number of workers). Once a player has allocated the workers, the turn passes to the player on his left and the phase continues till all players are done.

The major sections on the board can be divided into four parts - the village, resource gathering locatinos, civilisation cards and building tiles. The village consists of farms that provide permanent increases in food production, huts that provide an increase to your worker population (minimum allocation of 2 workers to create 1 additional worker who is sent into play the very next round, the slave drivers) and the tool maker who increases the number of tools owned by players. Resources must also be gathered to pay for civilisation, building and to feed your people from the hunt, the forest, the plains, the mountains and the river. Lastly, civilisaotin cards provide a direct bonus to players when acquired and in addition, add points during the final scoring. Building tiles however provide large increases in victory points during the game and can also, with the right civilisation cards, provide a large multiplier at end game.

In phase two, all workers are resolved by their own player in one round. As the order of resolution is up to the main player, it is possible to attempt to acquire building or civilisation cards tha at player may not have resources for at the present moment by resolving resource gathering workers first. The amount of resources gained is dependent upon dice rolls with a variable divisor - 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 for food, wood, clay, stone and gold respectively. Players may roll 1 die per worker allocated to the location on the board, with the final numbers adjustable by tools.

Lastly, during phase three players must feed their population. Food production occurs from farms in the village in the beginning, after which players must either feed their villagers or trade resources on a 1 food/resource per worker basis. At this point, the round ends and the first player moves to the left.

Stone Age has a variable end game with play ending either because all building tiles in a stack have been purchased or insufficient resource cards are available to fill the 4 spaces.

Gameplay: Stone Age plays extremely well, with each turn moving quickly and each round relatively fast. With variable ending conditions, it is possible to ‘slow’ a game down if necessary for players by increasing the number of rounds, but this is unlikely to occur on a significant basis.

As a light - medium strategy game, the number of potential routes to victory begin to appear very quickly with each particular space on the board particularly important. In addition, with only a limited number of spaces for each location (except the hunt) and players only able to allocate workers to one location at a time, it is often likely that players will have their ‘favoured’ option taken from them.

The village is particularly important for players and is often the first spots to be taken. The addition of workers to a players pool is particularly useful, with the concurrent increases in permanent food production from farms a close second in may games. In addition, through the use tools, players with bad luck can often adjust their rolls to provide them more resources - and can be used to play to certain worker allocation strategies for food production. A single worker with a large number of tools at his disposal could potentially feed his entire tribe, no matter the roll.

Both building tiles and civilisation cards call to different play styles - one providing an immediate increase in victory points, the other a longer-term but chancier increase in the final score. However, with only one worker required to each civilisation card or building tile, ‘blocking’ tactics are easy to use, forcing most players into a more balanced (or at least dual pronged) strategy.

Overall, Stone Age plays extremely well with numerous potential strategies available. With the randomised distribution of tiles and civilisation cards as well as the use of dice for resource production, each game is going to be different requiring initial plans to be changed. This provides for a refreshing and tense game, especially with the ‘unknown’ number of victory points available to a player through civilisation cards during final scoring.

Conclusion: Stone Age is definitely a great light to medium strategy game - it could potentially be introduced to advanced beginners and will scratch the vast majority of strategy player’s itches. While not as ‘heavy’ as other more intense resource management games like Princes of Florence or Puerto Rico, Stone Age’s elegant mechanics and great theme will mean it hit’s the table quite often. A definite ‘buy’ strategy game.