Like many gamers, my first few games of Settlers were a real watershed for me – a window into what games could be, a world beyond 32-page Avalon Hill rulebooks and marathon player elimination games like Risk. Settlers of Catan was easy enough to teach a 10-year old, but challenging enough to attract a whole passel of kibitzing hard core war gamers at our local game club. A little luck, a lot of player interaction, and multiple viable paths to victory.  I even remember buying my own copy during a long layover in London (no store in Seattle carried Settlers back in 1995).

 

These days, none of my gamer friends play Settlers any more, mainly because it is just about all we played for so long. And all my many expansions sit in my basement, collecting dust. Over these many years we have all been on the lookout for the next Settlers.  Some games, like Carcassone and Alhambra, Notre Dame and Pillars of the Earth, lacked the continuing challenge of Settlers. And while some wonderful games like Puerto Rico, Caylus and Le Havre (plus many Martin Wallace titles) surpassed Settlers in depth for real gamers, none of them matched its broad appeal. Not even Agricola - the family game is a tad too static, and the “real” game’s 14 opening cards are overly cumbersome for most non-gamers.

 

 

Stone Age is a quick worker placement and dice-rolling game with numerous paths to victory, a well-orchestrated theme, and enough challenge for hundreds of replays. It plays well – and quite differently - with 2, 3, or 4 players. Although Stone Age borrows some mechanics liberally - the worker placement of Leonardo Da Vinci, the resource collection of Pillars of the Earth - it is quite original in its own right.

 

Each player starts with five workers and twelve food. Each turn players place workers in sequence (much as in Leonardo Da Vinci) till all workers are placed, then each player resolves their workers in any order they like. At the end of each turn, each worker eats one food. If you don’t have enough food you may choose to spend any one resource for each food you are lacking. If you cannot or choose not to feed your workers, you lose 10 points.

 

 

First, there are seven worker spaces for each of four types of resources, and each worker you place on one type of resource rolls one six-sided die. Then, divide the total by 3 for wood, 4 for clay, 5 for stone, or 6 for gold, rounding down, and that’s how many of that resource you get. Any leftover workers can be sent to hunt for food. The number of hunting spaces is unlimited and you get one food for every 2 pips of the die.

 

Second, there are three places to visit in “town”: one gives you a farm (which produces one food per turn), one gives you a +1 die bump tool for your resource rolls (which may be used once per turn), and finally the “love hut” (which naturally requires two workers) gives you a new worker (up to a max of five extra for a total of ten). Note that “love hut” is just a nickname, and is distinct from actual huts.

 

Third, you may spend resources for huts. There is one stack of seven huts for each player in the game.  So in a three player game, you have a choice of three huts to build. Some huts require three specific resources (such as brick, stone & gold). Others require 4 or 5 resources of 1, 2, 3 or 4 types (such as 5 resources of any 2 types). There are four uber-huts, allowing you play between 1 to 7 of any type of resources.

 

You receive victory points exactly equal to the sum of the resources you put into the hut: 3 for wood, 4 for clay, 5 for stone, and 6 for gold (exactly the number each divides by in the resource areas). 

 

Fourth, and most interesting, are the cards. Each round there are exactly four cards available, one for any one resource (wood is best of course), one for any two resources, one for three, and one for four. Each card is divided into an upper and a lower part.

 

The lower section only gives you end of game victory points. These are divided into 16 end of game multipliers (1X or 2X your farms, tools, or people, and 1X, 2X or 3X your huts) and 16 civilization cards (2 each of 8 different types). Civ cards follow a common progression (similar to St. Petersburg’s nobles) for each unique civ: 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49 or 64. Unlike St. Petersburg, you can also score a second set of civ cards, so if you have 6 cards of 4 types you’ll get 16 points for four different cards and 4 more points for 2 different cards.

 

The upper section gives you immediate rewards: 3 victory points, a set amount of food (1 to 7), one or two specific resources, or two dice towards a specific resource (tools may be used just as on resource spaces). About half the cards have you roll one die for each player in the game, then gives each player a reward in turn order: 1=wood, 2=clay, 3=stone, 4=gold, 5=tool and 6=farm. Thus the player who buys the card will have the advantage of choosing first, which is obviously a much bigger deal in a 4-player game than in a two-player game!

 

The game continues until either the last hut in any one stack is built or there are not enough cards left to fill the card row. This means that the pace of game varies greatly depending on both how quickly players build huts and how quickly they buy cards. The latter is determined mainly by how willing players are to pay 3 or 4 resources for a particular card.

 

 

While Stone Age lacks the interesting map and wonderful trading of Settlers, it offers a world of interesting placement options, lots of simple but interesting probability challenges, and a delicious mix of balancing infrastructure building (farms, tools, workers), short term food needs, and end game victory points.

 

Placing Workers

 

Like numerous worker placement games, Stone Age offers indirect player interaction based on divining the perceived value of each area to other players. For example, if I am the only person who has a lot of tools, it is fairly likely that one of my opponents will take a 2X tools card if it only costs one resource (just to deprive me of the points). But how long can I leave it in the three-spot? The four spot? If I am going first next turn, I might even risk letting it go this whole turn, knowing that I can take it with my opening play the next turn when it will drop down from four resources to just one resource.

 

In general, the town is most popular early in the game, because farms, tools and people are more valuable the earlier you get them. The cards are valuable throughout, but especially in the middle game, as players take cards to maximize the infrastructure they have already started to build. And huts are especially valuable at the very end, because resources are worth just one point each at game end (food is worth nothing) instead of 3-6 points each on a hut.

 

The civ cards are challenging because they are most worthwhile only if you get at least five or six of them (25 or 36 points). Because there are only two of each, two players may collect them profitably. Added to this, most of the best rewards are on civ cards – seven food, a farm, a tool, two stone, your choice of any two resources. This last card is peculiarly powerful because you may choose the resources at any time – such as on the last turn to ensure that you won’t get shut out of the resources you need to build the hut you have just occupied. There is also one civ card that actually gives you another, secret civ card (bottom half only). The importance of these ultra-valuable immediate rewards is that it is often worthwhile for a player to take a particular civ card just for the reward, even if they are not collecting a big set. This of course puts more pressure on the players who are collecting civ sets.

 

Note that you can place as many workers as space allows in a resource area, but you can never return to place more workers there the same turn.

 

 

The dice aspect of Stone Age, like Settlers, is challenging but rarely grueling or tedious. For example, let’s say I need two wood to buy a card and five food to feed my workers this turn. How many workers do I place on the wood and how many on hunting?  How early in my turn do I need to lock up the wood before it is blocked? If have tools, I have more flexibility, because I can use tools to compensate for an unexpected bad roll.

 

There are also some interesting statistical issues. On average a game will last about 10 turns. Since food costs two pips apiece, a farm on turn one is worth about 20 pips. A tool on turn one is worth about 10 pips on turn one (though this is more complex, because sometimes you can’t use some of your tools, depending on what resources you choose, and sometimes a single resource will get you another gold, worth six pips). Each new worker is worth 1.5 pips per turn (3.5 average dice roll minus 2 for the food to feed him) – and it takes two workers to make a worker, but just one worker to make a tool. Of course, the later in the game, the less valuable each of these infrastructure items are – unless you have matching multipliers that is. If you accumulate all the tools multipliers (8X) and maximize your tools (at 12), you will end up with 96 points just on this bonus.

 

 

One of the most satisfying aspects of Stone Age is how you have to balance your short term food needs with both hut infrastructure and getting victory points. Getting a juicy 2X multiplier early helps set you out on a defined strategy, but is often at the cost of a farm that will feed one of your workers for the whole game.

 

 

One complaint I have about a lot of euros is that although there may be several viable paths to victory, they don’t really feel distinct. For example, in a lot of area control games, many placement decisions are really just about sorting out what area will net you the most points. Pillars of the Earth, a decent game, also tends to devolve into sorting out some fairly fiddly multipliers for squishing different resources into victory points.

 

One of the strengths of Settlers, by contrast, is that a road-building strategy feels different and plays different than a technology strategy. Stone Age builds on its great theme (it even comes with an ancient-looking leather dice-rolling cup) by nicely differentiating the various elements of the game. Tools make production less risky, while the sheer number of workers lets you block a whole type of resource by brute force. A hut strategy requires many distinct resources (plus a few hut multipliers), while a card-driven strategy instead requires lots and lots of wood. Note that the more hut multipliers you have, the more efficient it is to build small huts (letting you build more huts, each multiplied by say 5X or 6X). So you will likely use the 1-7 hut to crunch just one resource, just to maximize the power of the multiplier. By contrast, if you have no hut multipliers you want to just build a few really big huts, to maximize efficiency. Here you would want to use the 1-7 to crunch as many resources as you can.

 

The most controversial aspect of the game is the so-called “starvation strategy.” This entails procreating early and often and essentially ignoring food. You will soon be losing ten points a turn, but you can make it up if you build a lot of huts and procure several of the worker multipliers (and usually the hut multipliers as well). Critics complain that allowing a viable strategy without food denudes the game of its theme. I disagree and have my own fantasy about how the -10 points is simply the cost of “importing” food from a nearby village in exchange for future favors. Regardless, it is only a marginal strategy, successful primarily against weak opponents and/or conservative opponents who habitually ignore the love hut. It is marginal because it allows other players to have even more farms (since you will not be taking them), thus making it viable for them to visit the love hut earlier once their marginal food need per turn is lower, and because smart players can both block the love hut and speed up the game (usually by buying one hut per turn). Because the workers max out at 10, the starvation strategy is generally more viable the more turns you can play with all 10 workers.

 

 

Although Stone Age is a real favorite, I do have a couple of small quibbles. Although the four-player game is the most fun and challenging, there is a clear disadvantage to going fourth (second is generally agreed to be best, depending on what cards are out). In our games, we usually give the fourth player 2 extra food to make up for this. End game scoring is not difficult, but with scores often over 200, it is certainly not as elegant as Settlers’ race to 10 points. This is one small advantage of the online version.

 

Finally, while it is a fun game to play with younger players or non-gamers, it’s not great for a mix of non-gamers and a couple of hard core competitive gamers. This is because, like Puerto Rico, there is a huge advantage to sitting on the left of the newbie – mainly because weaker players will fail to take strong cards (or other spaces) when they should, allowing you to get cards (and sometimes farms, tools, etc.) that you would not get in a more evenly balanced game.

 

Nevertheless, with the right mind set, Stone Age is a great gateway game because it includes lots of fun dice rolls, comes through on a great theme, and because it’s not necessary to delve into all the deeper strategies in order to have fun building your own little ancient town. I particularly prefer it to Kingsburg because it is less mechanistic (Kingsburg has strict sequential building requirements) and especially because while there are lots of die rolls, they generally (but not always!) even out over the course of a game. Kingsburg’s relatively few monster rolls are annoyingly game-changing, especially at the end.

 

What makes Stone Age enjoyable after more than 500 plays (most of them online, though I do own a copy) is how important the order of cards is. There are just 32 cards in the game, and it’s pretty easy to track the more important cards after a few plays without much effort. This makes card order crucial – especially because you won’t see all the cards if players buy huts faster than they buy cards (or if one player drives down one hut stack relentlessly).

 

While Stone Age is not the most original game of the last few years, it has truly taken and perfected some of the most interesting mechanics of the last decade. The design is truly elegant and clean. The one real innovation – cards split between end game victory points and short term rewards – is brilliant.

 

Perhaps above all, Stone Age plays quite fast and is not usually the cause of analysis paralysis. So even if you get screwed by a dice roll or two, your tragic end won’t be far off!