Stone Age - Immediate Resources

There are 5 different raw resources in Stone Age (Food, Wood, Brick, Stone, and Gold). These resources are obtained from the five spaces circles in red in the screenshot here. They're all acquired the exact same way. When you activate one of these spaces with guys on them you roll one six sided die per guy. Add up the total on the dice and divide by the value of the resource. Round down to the nearest whole number and that's how many you get. Food costs 2, wood costs 3, brick costs 4, stone costs 5 and gold costs 6. In the picture you can see that purple has 3 guys on wood and blue has two guys on brick.


We'll get to it in more detail when we discuss scoring but in general the value of the raw resources is equal to how much they cost. A wood is worth 3 points while a gold is worth 6 points, for example. Also at the start of the game you need to eat 5 food or lose 10 points and food costs 2 to pick up.

How much, then, is a guy worth? If you were able to receive partial resources then every turn every guy would be worth 3.5 points. Unfortunately any spillage is completely wasted so this is an upper bound on how much they're worth instead of an exact value. For example, the 3 guys above on wood are worth 3.1667 points each. The two guys on brick? Actually only worth 2.722 points each. A single guy on gold is only worth 1 point since he often returns nothing at all.

Remember how I said there were ways to negate a lot of the randomness in the dice? Not putting one guy on gold is a good start. In fact, while the first guy on gold is only worth 1 point every other guy on gold is worth the full 3.5. Not only does stacking guys on gold make it more likely to get the first gold which you presumably really need if you're rolling on gold at all but it increases the per guy value of the previous gold diggers.