Through the Ages is a game that takes you through the ages.
Also, it takes ages.
Through the Ages is a civilization building game. Each player attempts to build the best civilization through careful resource management, discovering new technologies, electing the right leaders, building wonders and maintaining a strong military. Weakness in any area can be exploited by your opponents. The game takes place throughout the ages beginning in the age of antiquity and ending in the modern age.
This game is all about the cubes… You have White cubes which are your actions, and Red for military actions…
Blue is for Food/Stone and Yellow for People/Buildings…
The entire game is all about using these wisely and efficiently…
Actions
You can use your actions to buy new cards to upgrade your Civ. These will let you get more cubes… it’s quite a cube-heavy game.
Apart from your Civ, you have a few tracks to move up. Below shows 2 tracks, the top one shows how much research you gain each round and you can spend these to buy cards. The bottom one shows your number of points and how many points you gain each turn.
Military
Below is another track, the war track. This shows each Civ’s respective army total which is affected by a few War cards.
Your Military cards determine your military strength…
At the end of your turn, you move your yellow and blue cubes up and down and all around and hopefully you don’t run out.
Through the Ages Summary
If you think I’m not selling it it’s because it really is a boring game to describe, and look at (although the Art is quite nice), but not boring to play.
It’s a very abstract resource management game really and clearly the Influence for Nations.
It’s cool to have an efficient system running that you built. I didn’t have the opportunity to add food production to my Civ so I ran out of steam towards the end. Lesson learned for next time. Although to add that I would have to cut corners elsewhere so I’m not sure how I would have ended up. I guess that’s running a civ in a nutshell!
It takes a few hours, but is a very good game.
Jesta ThaRogue