Fraser McHarg: First impressions of Stone Age

Over the weekend we cracked the shrink on the copy of Stone Age that we bought during the closing hour of the Australian Games Expo.  I did a quick read through the rules on Saturday night and on Sunday morning we played it two player twice in a row.  The first game I won, to quote Melissa “by less than a hundred” but my undefeated record did not last long as Melissa won the second.

At a cost of ten victory points a turn and no particular idea of how many turns the game was likely to last neither us thought that the starvation strategy was the way to go.  I concentrated on Civilisation cards, particularly the different culture symbols and also the tools bonus.  Actually not only did we reject the starvation strategy, we ended up opting for the bountiful harvest strategy.  This was mainly a combination of fear of losing points combined with not realising how many turns were likely to be left and meant that we both had quite a surfeit of food at the end of the game.  With big bonuses for culture symbols, tools (which I had maxed out on) and buildings I romped it in.

In the second game Melissa was collecting the bonuses for both people (which had seen absolutely none of in the first game) and for fields.  This meant that bumping both her food production and population up not only gave her more actions it also gave her two end game multipliers.  Note to self, do not let her do that again as she got over one hundred points for the pair of them.  There was much less of a bountiful harvest strategy in our second game, our people were more lean.

Later that day we played a three player on BSW.  It plays very differently than two player, for starters the civilisation cards ran out, we had not even been close to running out in the our two player games.  BSW also implements the rule I missed about resolving your actions.  Each player resolves all their actions and then it moves to the next player, we had been playing around the board in the same order that you do the set up, i.e. all players resolve the village, then all players resolve the hunting grounds etc.  I think hope that is the only rule we I got wrong.

I have heard this described as Pillars of the Earth with dice.  My gut feel is that it is overall a simpler game than Pillars of the Earth and also it felt faster or my dynamic.  I’d like to try it out with four players to see how different that is from two players.  I can see that the culture symbols strategy would become more difficult with extra players.

© 2008 Fraser McHarg

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Comments:

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I think I remember discovering that we did something else wrong as well - one of the joys of playing on BSW is finding all the mistakes we made in the rules :) Posted by Melissa Rogerson on Jun 24, 2008 at 03:02 AM | #

It’s a great game for casual gamers, but passionate players will perceive it as “Pillars light with dice rolling”. So for them it offers too few to remain interesting. As a passionate player myself and when I like to roll dice I prefer Kingsburg, otherwise I may play Pillars as well. Three years ago Stone Age would have been a big hit, but nowadays there are too many contenders. Posted by Dan Rosewater on Jun 24, 2008 at 06:25 AM | #

And here I thought Pillars was Caylus-lite ;). Posted by William Baldwin on Jun 24, 2008 at 07:08 AM | #

I was expecting a fun game and based on five plays, I got more than I expected.  I would contend that the dice rolls add little more, if any more, luck than the master builder bag does in Pillars.  The card distribution is more constrained in Pillars so it’s slightly less random (or has less replayability, depending on perspective). Posted by Scott Russell on Jun 24, 2008 at 08:38 AM | #

As to Scott’s second point, the Spielbox expansion or the big expansion (which includes the Spielbox expansion in the US) can add more card variability. I think the dice add a slight push-your-luck tension to Stone Age, much the way the initial ‘edict’ does in PotE. Posted by Jonathan Franklin on Jun 24, 2008 at 08:53 AM | #

This is one of those games that doesn’t just “scale” to different numbers of players. It plays completely differently with different numbers. You simply cannot use the same tactics in 2-players as with 3-player as with 4-player. I find the 4-player game to be the best as you have the most opportunities to perform a specific strategy. The limitations imposed by the 2 and 3 player rules remove some options. That reminds me, you did only play with two stacks of buildings in your 2-player games, right? I find it extremely odd that you ran out of cards each time. Posted by Dan Corban on Jun 24, 2008 at 01:28 PM | #

That reminds me, you did only play with two stacks of buildings in your 2-player games, right? I find it extremely odd that you ran out of cards each time. Yes we played with only two stacks of buildings and it was the buildings that triggered end of game in the two player.  We had heaps of cards left each time, it was in three player that the cards, or lack thereof, triggered the end of game. Posted by Fraser McHarg on Jun 24, 2008 at 04:06 PM | #

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