Stone Age is a worker placement game in which the players have to place their workers wisely in order to gain most victory points.
In Stone Age, the players have to hunt, collect wood, break stone, make tools or wash their gold from the river. In every turn you choose where your people gather the resources you’ll
need to build your civilization and win the game. Because you have up to 10 tribe members and also the spaces at each location are limited, you have to do it wisely.
There are three phases. In the first phase, players place their people on different locations on the board. In the 2nd phase, the players collect their resources and in the 3rd phase,
players must have enough food available to feed their population. If not, they will lose resources or victory points.
When a player send people to the hut, he can 'generate' more tribe members. This results that you have more to feed. For this, you can send people to hunt for food or send one to improve
your food production. Also useful, is to send people to the tool area to improve the future dice roll results.
Because you have to roll dice to gather resources, there is an element of luck. Know that the more people you place in a location, the more dice you can roll. That also means you will have
less people to send to other locations on the map.
The player can use the collected resources to build buildings or buy special cards to gain victory points.
When the game is over, all player scores points for different things like food production, tools, cards or buildings. These points are multiplied by the the number of civilization cards that
match with that value. This mechanic pushes players to specialize, but also to balance their play. Because all player's cards are facedown, you are never able to say who will win the game
until the game is over.
The civilization cards give you also bonuses that happen immediately like extra resources, tools and an advance on the agriculture track.
This board game is a great way to introduce new players to the worker placement genre, though newcomers should be aware that there is a small learning curve to overcome.
The game is not too demanding and this makes it a nice, light and entertaining game for rookie and experienced players. There is some math involved when rollong the dice to see how many
of each resources you get. The game is recommend 13+ but also younger kids are able to play it. They can even train their basic math skills.
Even for hardcore gamers, Stone Age still offers enough of strategies and tactics to be interesting. Stone Age balance well between strategy and luck and this makes it great for a
family board game.
Each game takes about 60 till 90 minutes and it can be played by 2-4 players. When it's played by four players, it's definitely more challenging and the best strategy is not as obvious as
when played by two players. Especially as last player, it's harder to gather your resources on that turn. Players have to adjust their strategy because of this.
Stone Age has a gorgeous look. All components are well made. The colorful main board, the wooden resources, and even the wooden dice add to the look and feel of this game.
