We’re currently re-arranging our daily schedules a bit so as to be able to play boardgames more often, perhaps making our CarcaSean visits a twice weekly rather than weekly affair. The highlight of last week’s sessions was Through the Ages: A Story of Civilization, which was kindly taught to us by Han. As its name implies, it’s a boardgame inspired by the PC-based Civilization series and attempts to abstractly simulate the competition between rival civilizations from ancient history to the modern age. Since this was our first game and due to time constraints, we only played up to Age 2, skipping the third and final age.

The keyword here is abstract as my first thought when all of the components were taken out of the box was “Where’s the map?” Indeed, there isn’t one. The main board basically serves only as a handy way to track the many different variables the game needs, including the Cultural Points that the players need to accumulate to determine victory. Without a map, any civilization is assumed to be able to attack any other when necessary. The only territory that the players fight over are the Colony cards that confer various advantages to the civilization that manages to win them.

The whole game relies heavily on cards. New technologies, possible military actions, Wonders, Leaders are all cards that players acquire and then spend resources to put into play. In addition, the game uses a large number of plastic beads of various colours to track not only resources and manpower but also the number of civil and military actions each civilization can perform each turn. I found them to be very fiddly to manipulate but apparently newer versions of the game have replaced the beads with wooden tokens which should be easier to use.

The surprising thing is that the game works, more or less, to simulate a Civilization game, albeit in a highly abstracted form. You build farms to produce food, which you spend to create available manpower. You spend resources to construct buildings, each of which must have free population available to man them. Military units are created in the same way. Laboratories produce Technology Points every turn which you accumulate and spend to buy new techs. You can even change your government type just like in the PC game. In our game, I gained an early lead in Culture by switching from the Despotic government that everyone starts with to a Theocratic one which automatically produces 1 point of Culture per turn.

I was also the most aggressive player in the game by far, beginning with getting Caesar as my first leader. It seems to me however that it’s hard to really put the hurt on another player through military action. My military strength certainly didn’t help me much in the competition for colonies since I never managed to draw the cards that give bonuses to colonization attempts. As expected, Han handily won the game by completing the Eiffel Tower Wonder that helped him produce an astonishing number of Cultural Points every turn.

Overall, I’d be interested in playing this game again, pushing for the full version next time, but my initial thoughts on it are very favourable. It does seem to me however that despite the potential for military conflict and the competition for cards, there’s actually relatively little player interaction. This means that I wouldn’t expect the game to vary a lot according to the number of players involved. It also looks to me that it’s impossible for a player to go into a game with a specific strategy in mind because most of the time you’ll be reacting based on which cards are available as the game progresses.

Finally, Sean showed us a quick game of Pandemic earlier that evening. We were sort of rushed through the game so I don’t feel like I was involved enough to form a solid opinion on it, but at first glance it feels like a quick playing game that doesn’t really need a full group to have fun with. I suspect that I could have very satisfying experience with just my wife and me playing two of characters apiece and taking our time to optimize our moves. This contrasts with our experiences with Arkham Horror which I think needs a good group to have fun, or at least commiserate together with.