Today we picked up Stone Age - I'd asked Andy at Battlequest to keep a copy behind as as quickly as it is reprinted, it goes out of stock and I'd heard so many good things about this game - but the problem was that it was 4 players max and we are a family of 5. Checking out the game, we found that the strategy may have been a little over Mayas head, so we opted to go for the game with Maya playing alongside someone else, or rolling the dice.
We had a play of the game after I had a go through the rules and played a few demo rounds. The artwork is beautiful and the components look and feel great. The game comes with a number of dice and a snazzy leather cup to give it a authentic Stone Age feel - all we need now was scraps of clothes and shaggy hair (and a beard for me!).
Although the artwork is beautiful, and therefore giving the game an air of complexity, the actual game is not complex at all, even though there is a lot to it. The basis of the game is to keep your family alive in the Tribe whilst harvesting resources like stone, gold, wood, bricks to trade in for scoring Building cards - which score immediately - and Civilisation cards - which score at the end of the game. The player has a set number of meeples to decide on each turn what they are going to do with them; send some for hunting for food, making tools to make the task of resource and food gathering easier, go looking for resources, attempt to make a new scoring house etc. Each one of these locations on the board has a set number of free spaces (from unlimited for food, to one for Tool Making) to place your meeples per round - a round being a choice of placing your meeples before passing to the next player and around all the players until the last meeples are placed.
Therefore you as a player have some tough decisions to make as it is not possible to cover all the bases per turn - do you go and gather food (you start with some food to live on at the start but this starts to dwindle per turn), or advance your knowledge of agriculture, or make new tools or go for a Civilisation card etc. There is even the possibility of increasing the size of your "family" of meeples by using the "woohoo baby maker" hut as we came to call it :) And so at the end of the round, all of the meeples are placed then everyone takes turns to complete the actions of their meeples depending where they have been placed - pick up a house card, gather resources, take a new tool etc.
At the heart of the resource gathering is a dice based mechanism. The more people you have place on a particular resource, the more dice you get to throw. The numbers are added and then the total is divided by an amount, depending on how rare the resource is - gold is harder to find than say wood. For example, if finding wood, a a player with 4 meeples would throw for dice and divide it by 3. A throw of 12 would equal 4 pieces of wood etc.
The only downside to this is what if people fail to purchase civilisation and building cards as we were doing; we were gathering and surviving and not really advancing. What happens there is that the resources on the table start to be used up - it's not necessarily a flaw in the game, but a question maybe not answered by the designers "Of course people won't hoard resources". The result of this is that items can run out - the rules answer to this is to add to the resources with matchsticks for example. But I guess this will happen less with time.
All in all this is a fantastic game with lots to see, lots going on and lots to do. The game does look complicated but in fact is quite easy to play and everyone knew what was going on.
