Review
Beautifully designed and wonderfully inventive board game set in the golden age of time before cars, queues and canteens. Suitable for family nights in and experienced board gamers alike this is real treat for all involved. It even comes with a genuine leather dice cup for that authentic hunter-gatherer feeling!
The Stone Age was a golden age. Tough, but golden...
These happy folk could get by just fine before the advent of bronze, iron, steel and aluminium - instead they had to utilise the best resources available to them for that time. This is where you come in - your key resources are (in order of difficulty to obtain) wood, brick, stone and gold. These are essential for gaining new building cards and civilisation cards. The more educated, artistic and ingenious your little pioneers are the more points you will accumulate (more on this in a bit) - and the player with the most points, wait for it, is the winner! What do you get for winning? Erm the player who wins gets to take a big sniff out of the leather dice cup...
The higher the population, the more mouths to feed
It’s crucial to breed and increase your population (and there is a special nooky hut for that) so that you can send them out to gather more resources, one ‘people’ piece grants you one dice roll for a chance at accumulating stuff, so the more the merrier. You’ll also need tools to help increase your chances of collecting more wood and stone etc and your ‘people' must be also be spent in order to build up your Stone Age tool rack. However, at the end of each round your tribe must be fed, one food unit per ‘people’ piece and you can gain food in two main ways. The first is by going out and hunting dinner, you and all your mates run around through the woods chucking spears and shooting arrows at the local wildlife - if you’re lucky you may even bag a hefty bear (worth 10 food units)! The second is to work all day in fields so you can bring in the harvest at the end of every round, to do this all you need to do stick one of your people on the harvest space, but there is only one space to do so and demand is high!
Too complicated for a simple Stone Age man?
It will take the top minds of your tribe to work out how many points you’ve got at the end of the game, so let’s hope there’s an abacus about! If not, quick - invent one! Your building and civilisation cards will be multiplied in various ways so be sure to collect them wisely, better combinations equal more points, a lot more points! The first time you read the rules and try to add up your score you may well find yourself saying things like ‘ugh?’ but in all fairness it’s actually fairly simple after your first attempt. This is pretty much how I found all of the rules: at first glance I think to myself ‘oh dear this looks like it’s going to be unnecessarily complicated’ and then after a few minutes I realised ‘oh wait, this is actually quite simple’, making this board game a very special game indeed. Simple to play, gorgeous to look at and bags of gameplay and depth - what more could you ask for?
Summary of the Stone Age
Absolutely fantastic, I can’t wait to play it again. Sure the dice cup really does smell bad but you don’t have to use it if you don’t want to. We found this be a very immersive game for all involved, be it a 2, 3 or 4 player game as the rounds are pretty quick and you’ll never feel like you’re waiting very long before you need to act again. Fans of Settlers of Catan will surely like this, personally I found this to better than Catan but that will depend on the player I suppose! Let’s see, marks out of 10 then? I’ll give this a sturdy 9 carved out of a big block of stone. Well done you clever little bearded people!
by David 14/06/2010
