Ages and Ages

A Friday evening had been pre-arranged to give three hardy gamers: Sam, Joe and myself, a decent chance to try Through The Ages, an epic of a game taking in the entire sweep of human history.

I got to Joe’s at 7.30 and the game was already set up. Sam talked us through the rules, due to a handy six-page crib sheet of all the salient points of the game. It’s a bit of a monster, and it involves expanding your population (yellow cubes) and your resources (blue cubes) in tandem so that your society never runs out or has too many of either. In order to do this, you can expand/upgrade your buildings which give you boosts in science or culture which, in turn, allows you to upgrade to more buildings. This happens across four stages: the short Antiquity stage followed by the main meat of the game: Ages 1, 2 and 3.

We began by weighing up our options with leaders (“Homer looks nice.”) which would give us special abilities. Sam and I made a pact, allowing Sam to turn one resource in a food and me to turn a food into a resource. Joe discovered iron early on, but fell behind on sciences.

I came up with a tactic, in which I worked out that two soldiers were better than one. Then Sam thought of a better tactic that had three soldiers in it.

As we moved through the first age, I fell behind in military so I invented knights. Couldn’t come up with a tactic that involved them, though. I guess they just went into battle willy-nilly. Joe came up with the scientific method while Sam’s population were very happy with their Hanging Gardens and Great Wall.

Time was ticking on, though, and as the second age dawned it was almost ten o’clock. We decided to finish at half past, since the game hadn’t grabbed us and show no signs of picking up speed the more we went on. Luckily for me, my leader was Christopher Columbus who allowed me to discover an island I had in my hand of cards. This “Historic Island” (with electric lighting, if the illustration was anything to go by) got me 11 culture points, putting me in an unassailable lead. The final two rounds played out in a perfunctory manner, with the charms of the game never quite justifying it’s slow progress. Sam thought that Historia scratched a similar itch in half the time while Joe thought it had made the historical events a little too abstract for his liking. I think that’s what he meant, anyway.

We packed the game away, keen for something silly to finish off with. We chose Castle Crush as it’s a game that rarely gets the attention it deserves. It satisfies the desires to create and destroy. We built our little castles for our king and general.

Mine did so well in round one that I more or less kept the same design for the next two rounds, too. Almost worked, except one decisive blow at the end sent my king flying.

Sam’s third round edifice was his strongest, keeping his two meeples safely ensconced.

Meanwhile, Joe managed to put a level three block in his building for six bonus points at the end.

Nice to revisit this game after so long.

Joe 75
Andrew 66
Sam 63

Finally, we introduced Sam to the game of Wordsy. With Sam’s fondness for Boggle, we were expecting it to be a hit, but instead Sam found it rather stressful. Perhaps it was the late hour and he was too fatigued after Through The Ages. He still did well, though.

Andrew 116 (best word “Friendship,” 25 points)
Sam 109 (“Requesting,” 23 points)
Joe 105 (“Masquerading,” 23 points)

And so, we were done. What an experience. It’s hard to see when we’ll find the time for a full game of Through The Ages, but it was nice to give it a try. Thanks all.