LogFAQs > #938879707

7. Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization (2015)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Resource management, card-drafting, tableau-building, action-point allocation
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 7
Game length: 180-240 minutes
Experience: 10ish plays with 2, 3 players (plus 10+ solo games on app)
Previous ranks: NR/100 (2016), 7/80 (2018)

Description - Each player leads a civilization from the beginnings of written history to the twentieth century in an effort to amass the most Culture points. On your turn, you draft technology cards, develop them with science, grow your workers, and send those workers to run those technologies. Each round, you produce resources and food and science and victory points; while across rounds, you need to deal with feeding your population, leaders aging out, corruption from too many resources, maintaining internal stability, and military events from the courses of fate and from your opponents.

Experience - I got Through the Ages almost blindly to play with the ex, who didn't play many board games but did like Civilization. It's too long to play with many people realistically, but I did manage a three-player game at least once. It's to date also the only game for which I've paid for a digital version; for a time, I was unable to get enough of it and playedi t on my smartphone during commutes.

Design - Through the Ages is easily the most truly intricate game on my list. Unlike A Game of Thrones: TBG, TTA's myriad systems all link together. It's not always elegant; the player boards have tons and tons of cubes on them that can be pushed around a little too easily, and the action point allocation means that turns increase in length later in the game. But, nearly every single bit of it makes sense: The number of resources you have to manage is a bit overwhelming, but each of them is justifiable when you drill it into your head.

Pretty much the only way to get culture points, other than military ops, is to build up your tableau so that its engine starts to run. Your tableau has zones for farms, science labs, military units, mines, and temples. In order to build a structure/assign manpower there, you need both stone ("resources" produced by your mines, indicating that it's being constructed) and a free worker (operating it, essentially). You can upgrade any of these categories if you have the appropriate technology cards for it, but you need to spend science points to develop them, and after developing the techs, those new mines/temples/labs/whatever require an increasing amount of stone to construct. You also need to increase your population to get those workers, which requires you to pay food. The engine works, and somewhere in there, you'll want to build some extra buildings which provide culture points.

On top of all that, there are the non-"engine" pieces. You'll need to keep your population satisfied with happy faces; the more population you have, the more happy faces you'll need - thematically, you'll usually build sports arenas or temples to raise your civilization's happiness. You'll elect leaders which give you special powers, one per age - you'll find the likes of Genghis Khan or Napoleon Bonaparte, who can give you military strength; Michelangelo or Bach, who can leverage your libraries and transform them to Culture (VP); and Bill Gates, who lets you turn your technology (science) edge into a more concrete (resource) edge. You'll want to spend down whatever resources you have, since if you have too many, then you'll experience government corruption as people start to hoard them for themselves. And of course, you'll need to build your military, because being strongest protects you from your opponents' attacks and allows you to make abstract forays to them as well.

While the goal of the game is to build the best tableau to gain Culture, your turn is driven by cards and allocating your actions. The technologies and leaders you want all come from a sliding row of market cards, which cost actions to draft. The passing of the cards represents the passing of the ages; some cards slide down after each player's turn, and the longer a card is on the market, the fewer actions it takes to draft it. Certain cards will be more competitive to draft, but the less competitive ones will be cheaper. You can make up for a technology deficit by drafting an Action card; often these will allow you to gain food/stone/science for free, or increase your population/build steps in your buildings at discounted rates. This draft and cardplay introduces a tactical element to go with the massive strategic implications of such an epic engine-builder.

The actions you have each turn can be enhanced overall, but are primarily determined by your Government, a special type of technology. Your government will determine how many urban buildings technologies you can populate, but more importantly will also assign you Cultural and Military actions. Upgrade your government by drafting and developing the appropriate card, and you'll get more CA/MAs. Those military operations are what allow you to build up your linear military strength, useful if you want to start skirmishes or wars with other players.

The complexity of a civilization is usually a feature, and not a bug. In this case, it actually starts to make this giant spreadsheet cube-pusher feel thematic. Aside from the techs and leaders doing what you'd think they would do - see sports arenas, Napoleon, etc. - everything is represented by a chart of yellow and blue cubes and where they're placed on specific cards. The incredible array of things to consider (and hell, the length of the game, which is 20ish massive turns) contributes to your sense that you're handling something epic and complex.

After getting familiar with the game (around 7 to 10 in-person plays in just a few months), I managed to reduce TTA's playtime to a slim three hours in person. It's a game that rewards long-term planning massively and will therefore cause analysis paralysis. You have a tremendous amount of control over the course of your civilization, but you're still subject to a variable (but generally fair) market. I'd say the biggest strength of TTA is that after many games, if the level of competition is there, I wish it were just a turn or two longer, because you're so much more powerful at the end of the game, and you're scraping for last-turn advantages. The flipside of course is that it is possible to be absolutely demolished, especially with the more vicious military cards. I generally stray away from using these confrontational cards too much, since they can be expensive for the winner and devastating for the loser, but the element is present.

Future - Since the person with whom I'd play TTA is no longer in my life, it's hard to see this hitting the table in imminent months. But it's a masterpiece of design and one of those brain-burners that I still hold out hope for. Maybe someday gaming pal #1 will be interested, or I'll get it out at a 3-player night where people are happy to play quickly.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness