Matt Carlson: Review Through the Ages

In a marked departure from my normal style of being several months behind the curve, I recently obtained a copy of Roll Through the Ages: The Bronze Age, and it hasn’t even been out for 6 months yet!  With the enthusiasm of a true “cult of the new” aficionado, I thought I’d share my thoughts on the game for this weeks column.  I like it.  It plays under an hour, has some buildup and strategy decisions with development trees to explore, and has just a dash of luck.  As a fan of the Welterweight class of games, I find Roll Through the Ages a very strong contender.

If we can have lightweight filler games, I assume there must be heavyweight game that last a long time.  Why can’t we have welterweight games that have some good strategic depth but also strive to keep the overall playing time down?  Since almost all my gaming time is limited to spans of 60 to 90 minutes at a time, I’m constantly on the lookout for games that can be played in an hour or less.  Taking rules explanations into account, any game much longer than an hour simply won’t get finished during my school’s boardgame club meetings.  I can only play one or two longer games per month, during our local biweekly game club meetings.  This wouldn’t be too bad, but I enjoy games with victory point engines and multiple victory paths.  I consider them equivalent to growing a garden, although a more popular metaphor is to call them snowball games.  When you try to pack a snowball game into less than 60 minutes, things can get pretty tight.  Thankfully, Roll Through the Ages succeeds in giving me a taste of the type of strategy game I prefer, without having to spend several hours to commit to a full meal.

The basic idea of the game is to develop one’s civilization through building cities, monuments, and buying developments.  Players roll a production die for every city they own.  These dice can provide workers (to build monuments for points or more cities for greater production/more dice), food (each city needs to be fed every round), goods, or money.  (Both goods and money can be spent to buy developments which give a player’s nation small advantages like immunity to disasters or more efficient production of goods in the future.) Players get three rolls of their dice to try to produce the combination of production they desire.  As a deterrent to over-zealous die rollers, one face of the dice shows a skull symbol.  Dice showing skulls may not be rerolled.  The number of skulls rolled determines what disaster befalls a player (usually lost victory points).  To help soften the blow of a poor skull roll, skulls also display TWO goods symbols which means a player who rolls a lot of skulls will probably end up with quite a few goods as well.

Goods accumulate over time, so it is best to save as many goods as possible, up to a maximum of six goods.  In addition, you may only purchase one development per turn and the game ends when someone purchases five developments.  (Thus one possible route to victory is revealed – buy lots of cheap developments and end the game early…) The game can also end if all possible monuments are built by the combined players.  Monument building is also under a bit of time pressure, as the first player to build each monument scores double the points of any subsequent player.  Players must balance several needs, whether to roll for workers to get more cities (or, later build monuments) or try to obtain goods to save up for the more expensive, and more powerful, developments.  The developments in particular are nicely balanced and a careful read through them will provide an experienced gamer with several possible fun combinations to try.  Some development choices seem to change in value when playing with different numbers of players.  Some developments seem to be invaluable in a four player game, but are less attractive in a two player game.  The game even has a reasonable solo game (set a high score taking only 10 turns) that provides players a chance to explore some development combinations on their own.

While the game itself is intriguing to me, I must also mention the wonderful tactile enjoyment of the game’s bits and pieces.  The game comes with a set of seven (7 cities maximum) wooden dice with (slightly) carved faces, and a wooden pegboard (think small cribbage board) for each player to keep track of their food and good reserves.  A player’s empire is contained on a single sheet of scorepad (torn from an ample stack) which serves as a handy way to record all a player’s purchases and penalties as well as a mini cheat sheet.  The game comes with two copies of a double-sided cardboard player aids, but the scorepad serves as such a good reference the player aids are rarely used.  The parts combine to make a game that is simple to explain, use, and remains in a small enough package to be quite portable.

So how does this all work together to make a decent game?  Yes, it does.  I’ve already admitted to a strong partiality to growth/development games and games of this medium-short length.  Roll Through the Ages is my current go-to game for this role.  It’s only challenger at the moment is Dominion, but the setup time, and rules explanations needed, and learning curve for Dominion is larger in each case.  In a short 20 minute activity period at school, I was able to explain Roll Through the Ages and get halfway through a four player game.  The game record sheets even provided a handy way to save the game state so we can finish up our game during our next activity period.  One student commented that he “wished this game would go on forever”, fairly high praise from a moderate high school jock.

Perhaps that is the weakest aspect of the game - It seems to end all too soon.  Just as you get your empire humming on all cylinders, the game ends.  I take that as a healthy limitation on game length, rather than a failure of design.  In nearly all of my favorite point-engine games, I’m ending with the conviction that just one or two more turns and I would have REALLY been churning out the victory points.  Of course, so would everyone else and thus the game could get unbalanced quite quickly.  The trick is to find that one path that gets you the most victory points just at the time the game comes to its conclusion.

The game does feature dice, and some may be put off by what they consider a luck factor, but it should more properly be considered a randomizing factor.  It is true that an occasional roll could be very poor, but that would be quite rare.  There are no truly bad faces of the dice (even the skulls give you extra goods) so it is a matter of risk of known results against the possibility of better results if the dice are rerolled.  Since nearly every face of a die is useful, it is rare to see an entirely busted turn.  I have played a fair number of games (less than a dozen, really) and can only think of a single game that may have been lost entirely by poor rolls of the dice.  Far more often, I finish the game thinking about what I might have done better – not how the dice were fickle.  That is a mark of a well designed game.

So, who would be interested in such a game?  Gamers looking for a meaty filler game will find much to like, as will fans of empire/economic engine building games who want something fast and easy to scratch their civilization-growing itch.  Gamers who dislike dice in their games shouldn’t write it off entirely as the game is based far more on making do with the resources provided rather than a dice fest where the best rolls win.  If you simply must have a solid early, mid, and late game feel to your development game, Roll Through the Ages may disappoint in its final stage, but I find it amazing that a civilization-building themed game can even produce all three phases in under an hour.  My highest praise for the game would be that it is my go-to game of choice as a gateway game to the vast array of excellent economic/victory point engine games.  It has all the hallmarks of a standard “snowball” game, but remains very friendly to understand and play for gaming neophytes.

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