Stone Age - Introduction

Stone Age is a German board game for 2 to 4 players. It's reasonably short and plays in about an hour and a half with the full four players. The game is a worker placement style game with a large die rolling component so a lot of people feel the game is very random. I think the game has ways for the attentive player to negate a lot of that randomness and feel a strong player will beat a weaker player practically every time. The different actions are not all of equivalent power and the different ways to score points require drastically different amount of effort. I have my own ideas for which actions to take and will be sharing those in the next few posts.

This game is available for play on BSW and the screenshots used all come from the BSW client for the game.

Each player starts the game with 5 workers and 12 food. Every turn follows the same sequence of play. The starting player picks one of the squares on the board and puts workers on that square. Some squares have a mandatory number of workers and others can take a variable number. (The specific squares will be covered in detail later.) Then the next player does the same thing. Keep going around until everyone has all of their workers on the board. Then the starting player activates all of his workers on the board. He does not have to activate them in the order they were placed on the board; they can be activated in any order. Then after everyone has activated all of their workers the turn ends. Each player must pay 1 food for each of their workers or suffer a flat 10 point penalty regardless of the amount of the food shortfall. Pass the starting player marker clockwise and start over from the top. Eventually one of the game end conditions will be met and whoever has the most points wins.

In general the actions you can take fall into one of three categories. The action either provides immediate resources, or it allows you to invest in your infrastructure to increase your resource acquisition rate for the future, or it allows you to convert resources into victory points. Investing in the future tends to be very good but some of the scoring cards are much better than others and you need to know when it's right to 'first pick' one of those instead of just getting more infrastructure. And since the scoring cards take resources and you need food every turn you have to balance immediate resource acquisition in there as well.