Stone Age
This game stinks.
Wait, come back. It’s actually a great game, and the components are wonderful. There’s just one problem. The leather dice cup that comes with the game smells a little unpleasant. It’s not unbearably obnoxious, just the sort of whiff that will make you stick your nose inquisitively into the cup, curse at the pong, then will lure you back for another sniff, just to check it was as bad as you thought.
It’s not enough to mark the game down – in fact, that a leather dice cup is included with the game is a definite thematic plus – but just something to be aware of in case you’re overly sensitive to such things. For the rest of us, we’ll enjoy the cup, as it’s quite satisfying to use, tipping the dice again and again. Yes, this is a game with lots of dice rolling – but worry not, it’s not a game of pure random chance. Unlike, presumably, the red-in-tooth-and-claw of actual Stone Age life.
Stone Age casts you as the leader of a small tribe of little wooden cavemen, and it’s your job to grow your tribe, keep them fed, gather resources, build huts, and score more points before the Bronze Age dawns. Each round, the new starting player will begin by placing one or more cavemen on one area of the board for a certain action. Play then passes clockwise, until all tribesmen are on the board. Then, again beginning with the starting player that round, all actions are resolved one player at a time. All players then pay out food, and the token representing the starting player – which we call Brian thanks to his resemblance to bellowing actor Brian Blessed – passes clockwise. And so the game continues until one pile of huts have been bought, or almost all the civilisation cards are gone.
As you start with only five meeples in your tribe, it can be tough to decide where to place them. The most in-demand spaces are in the village, where you can work in the field and reduce the need to go hunting, or produce tools that help offset poor dice rolls, or spend two of your men (or presumably, one man and one woman – though who knows how modern they might have been in prehistoric times) and add one to your population at the ‘adoption hut’. Depending on how resistant to scandal you are, you may want to use a ruder name for this.
Outside of the village, you can gather resources, and this is where the dice-rolling comes into play. If you choose to gather food, wood, brick, stone or gold, you get one die for each tribesman you commit. There’s unlimited room to gather food, but space is tight everywhere else. Finally, you have civilisation cards and huts. Huts are simple, trading resources for points, while civilisation cards give you both an instant reward and points at the end. And it’s these cards that make the game deep, and are, to me, the game’s biggest drawback.
The cards have several different ways to score at the end of the game, such as points for huts, points for how many cavemen you have, how many tools, and so on. There’s also a set-collection aspect; some cards have symbols, the more you collect, the more points you’ll earn. It means that there are several different routes to victory, and you’re free to choose the path you think will win you the game. Therein can lie the danger; you can spend your time happily collecting resources and huts to find that your opponent, with their handful of cards, has gone on to beat you by 122 points. The problem is that this means the majority of points will be scored at the very end of the game, which can reduce the tension a little.
The good aspects of this game outweigh this relatively minor grumble, though. The game scales very well between two and four players with some minor rule adjustments. With the exception of dice cup odour, the components are brilliantly produced with lots of nice details. Gold is in the shape of the traditional gold bar, bricks are little oblongs, wood comes in satisfying little planks that stack up nicely in your resources collection, and your meeples look like little hairy ruffians. The main board manages to be full of interesting art without being cluttered, and each player has a board to organise huts, cards, and resources. It’s a lovely thing to behold.
It still stinks, though.
