The Tao of Gaming

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.

Last night I played (and taught) a game of Through the Ages. Did it change my opinion of the game? Not really.

One troubling aspect when discussing this game — so many 'official' ways to play. We played the 3 epoch full game (so no wars, no removing population at the end of the age). And since it was a two player game, no pacts. And a few rules were of the "Oh, we should have done that" variety.

Still, I had a fun time. Despite being militarily ahead for the second half of the game (and twice playing the "Steal 7 VP" aggression), I managed to almost go coast-to-coast while losing. (I was ahead for one turn).

So anyway, there's a copy down here, which probably means my next 100 games of Race will take longer than the last hundred.

Update: Oh, may as well mention that the components a) an improvement and b) still annoying. The area for card drafting is too small (that may have been true in the original ... was I playing with a modified set?). The wooden discs are easier to manipulate, but the see=through beads made reading costs easier. And there should just be more player markers. The rules looked cleaned up a bit, too.

The ideal set would use a cribbage style board for scoring (actually a four-player cribbage board would work well) to avoid bumping VPs around.