![]() Players will keep track of their acquired resources on a cribbage style wooden peg board while their developing civilizations are tracked on a printed play sheet which each player has a copy of. The other aspect of disasters though is that they can also provide you with a significant number of goods. Disasters offer a nice push-your-luck element to the game as increasing numbers of disaster dice (which you have to keep) may escalate the scale of the disaster or better yet shunt the trouble onto your opponents. One face of each die also has a disaster icon which can have dire consequences for both the player who rolled them and their opponent’s. ![]() The different faces of the dice each represent different resources including food, workers, trade goods and money which players will use to feed their populace, build cities and monuments and buy bonus-giving developments. ![]() The game uses 7 chunky wooden dice which will be rolled up to three times on a player’s turn to get a desirable combination of resources. At it’s heart, Roll Through the Ages has a very Yahtzee like feel. For me, as a time poor adult, this causes a problem.įortunately, this is where Matt Leacock’s “Roll Through the Ages: The Bronze Age” comes to the rescue with perhaps the most unique approach to the Civ game genre that’s been attempted. It’s a common problem because it’s tough to encapsulate the entirety of human civilization in a short play time. Unfortunately almost every one of these great games has suffered from the same affliction: a looong play time. From Avalon Hill’s original “Civilization” to “Through the Ages: A Story of Civilization”, many have attempted to capture the magic of human history in a game. Now there have been a lot of excellent Civ games out there over the years. The search for the perfect Civ board game has been a personal quest ever since entering the hobby some 4 or 5 years ago. There’s just something about the exploration, planning, development and conflict that can keep me engaged for hours and hours. ![]() It has been mentioned already, but the expansion, available on the website at The Roll through the Ages website adds a few very nice new developments and other tricks to the game, and it’s a free download.Įver since discovering Sid Meier’s Civilization computer game as a child, I’ve loved Civ games. Agriculture, for instance, will give you an extra food every time you roll food on a die, and Medicine will protect you from the “Pestilence” Disaster.Ĭoins are lost every round, whether you use them or not, but Goods can be saved to purchase larger, more expensive developments, to a point.Ĭombining Risk-and-roll mechanics with empire building, with resource management, Roll through the Ages is a quick game with a nice degree of interaction between players, as you compete for Monuments (the first to build each gets more points than anyone else) and can affect one another with disasters. Lastly, you can purchase “Developments” which give you both victory points and a special effect. Your workers can then be used to either build more cities, providing you with more dice to roll each turn (and more mouths to feed), or Monuments, which are basically straight up victory points. Then you collect Goods, which can later be sold for coins. If you don’t have enough food, you lose a point per city that starves. They can also cause disasters if you’re unlucky.Īfter you roll, you feed your cities. (You start with three.) Dice will provide food, workers, coins, or goods for you. Gameplay is simple – each turn you roll a number of dice equal to the number of cities you own. Wooden peg boards for record keeping, large wooden dice with a nice heft to them and wood-burned symbols on the sides, and a very thick pad of score sheets to use. Roll through the Ages was one of the games I learned via – and the online play was so fun I bought the game for my gaming group.
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