Now that I've played three times, some thoughts. I'm not going to bother with a full review, because you can just read the one by Moses.
I disagree with Larry here and there ... much of the design ideas seem ripped straight from the Civ computer game. Still, if someone dissed me by saying I "wrote like The Bard" I wouldn't issue a fatwa. But many of the mechanics have a direct component (unhappiness, 'entertainers', ideas, population, resources, food, leaders, wonders, technologies). Through the Ages is novel, yet familiar.
The Showmanager-esque card drafting works, but also leads to the easily noticed flaw — it shouldn't be played with four. It's a fixed fun game. With three, you have your turn (fun!), the player after you (analyze your general problems ... "I need better production"), and the player before you ("I can get X, Y and Z to do my production"). Excepting the odd aggression or colony auction, you sit around when others play. And you can't really start to plan your turn (beyond generalities) until you see what cards the player before you has grabbed (and left behind) for your turn. So the 4th player adds 1.5 dead hours.
Through the Ages is about scarcity, but each player will be scarce in different areas — food, ore, happiness, military strength, or something else.
I thoroughly enjoyed my last game, when we played with 3 (and did the full game in 3.5 hours).
The game's other lurking flaw — You play for 3 (or 5) hours. and win or lose on a simple card draw. If you are weak in military and Gandhi shows up early, great! Late? Not so much. (Chris alluded to this in his comment to my earlier post). At heart, Through the Ages is not strategic, but tactical and reactive. You plan in generalities, but spend half (or more) your time just grabbing 'the good stuff.' (The stuff you've been neglecting earlier ... which leads you to neglect something now, which makes other things 'good').
Decisions about how to grab, management issues, and the like all play a part, but my suspicion is that after 10 games, I'd pitch this out like Age of Renaissance — games where the card deal determines a lot should be short, not long. And then there's the issue of piling on the leader (tough if the leader has a strong military, but that's often not the case ... and in any event, you can take some indirect shots).
But I'd probably enjoy the trip to 10 plays.
One other note: awkward graphical design. In particular, you read right (without crossing a line) to find the corruption or food loss during production. You read right, but cross a line, to read off happiness required. This alone took me three hours to really grasp. And moving the tiny pieces around is annoying. [I'm told someone went to kinkos, magnified the player mats, and used bigger glass beads. Good idea, albeit expensive].
If I can snag a copy at retail (or trade), I will. The mechanisms (once you grasp them) do convey the core of Civ (the computer game), and with the large number of cards there's plenty of combinations to try out. It's an enjoyable experience ... but I like economic games, experience games, and long games. I'm a little surprised it's gotten such acclaim from people who don't normally like those categories.
Related Posts (on one page):
- Back Through the Ages
- Through the Ages
It's easy to say, "switch your strategy to military", but everything revolves around being able to produce people and rocks. Those are the two core resources without which nothing is possible. And of the two, people are far more important. If you don't get the agriculture tech upgrades, increasing your population is painful as you run into fairly hard limits (due to the grain drain), so you can't increase your military to pursue that strategy (because you don't have people to put in the armies), you get behind the 8-ball on research (because you don't have people to man labs), etc. It's certainly possible to succeed with x1 agriculture if you can make everything else really efficient, but it's a very tough row to hoe. x1 resource production until late in the game makes things quite hard too, but it's not so much of a constraint.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the game, and it's on my list to buy when it gets reprinted. But I liked it in sort of the same way I liked Antiquity or Roads and Boats, as a fun activity more than as a real, functioning game. I think its serious audience is ultimately going to be fairly limited.
I've won several games and always been competitive with a minimal investment in agriculture. A couple of times I made a late investment in Agri to keep my economy going or to score VP, but it wasn't until late Age II at the earliest.
I should say though that I've only played the 2-epoch game with four players. I can see things might be quite different if you played the full 3 epochs or played with 3 players.
But the basic problem is the same if Ore is more important ... someone is getting shafted and will have to react.
I've pulled a two player win without ever upgrading farms or mines. Admittedly it was early in our play experience so it may be an outlier. Still, there's enough ways to get bonuses to food and resources that I think it isn't as desperately bad a situation as it's being painted. If farms, mines and civil actions aren't improved, limiting the number of yellow cards or Wonders you can take, then you are hosed.
To me the greater randomness in the game comes with the Age III Wonder timing. Those can generate close to 40 Culture a pop while not interrupting the flow of Age III Culture Event play, unlike Military strategies which make it tough to control the Event deck. If one player gets an Age III Wonder completed when the others don't they'll probably win.
I saw you said something like this in your Geek rating, Chris, and it puzzled me then, too. It sounds like you consider TtA, R&B, and Antiquity to be "experience" games, and I just don't see it. All these games are very hard (Antiquity might be too hard), but they're very much games to me (as opposed to something like New World or Lords of the Sierra Madre). In the two Splotter games, you have complete control and clear objectives. There's more luck in TtA, but it's situation luck, which I much prefer to resolution luck. Besides, I'll have to play the game a lot more and get a lot better before I come to feel that the most important element is who gets lucky with the cards.
I get the same feeling from Through the Ages. There is so much going on, and your resource pipeline stretches so far into the future, and it takes so many steps to get anything done, you have to be willing just to try stuff and see what happens for the game to be fun. You could theoretically calculate everything out, but then the game would be not fun (and your fellow-players might threaten you with bodily injury). So you do the best you can with the plan you've got and a reasonable amount of analysis, and enjoy the ride.
And let me turn your other question around: what would be the point of introducing dice (or any other randomizing factor) into the combat system? All the other actions in the game are resolved deterministically; why this mania for needlessly introducing randomness? Remember: situation luck, good; resolution luck, bad!
Fortunately more of the yellow cards provide rock discounts than food, so that even if you miss the Age II ore upgrade you can compensate with some extra yellow actions. Although I agree that without the Act II or III ore upgrade you are going to have a big problem due to corruption.
I loved TtA, although I do have a few concerns, all in act three. As Mark noted the timing of the Act III wonders (and, I feel, leaders) can cause huge swings. By Act III it isn't unlikely to have >6 civil actions, so it becomes practical to pounce on a card that just flipped from the top of the deck. I'm also concerned about the balance of a aggressive military strategy. It seems like it can be very effective at beating someone down, but it seems like it doesn't do a good job raising you up at the same time. I look forward to trying again and exploring military power more.
All things considered I do agree with Brian that TtA has a similar fun/skill/luck mix to Age of Renissance...but that's fine with me! I love AoR, but it's a 4-6 player game and TtA is 2-4...seems like they complement each other well.