In which MetalJim reviews the boardgame that took Atlanta by storm…

So I just got back from four days of boardgaming goodness in Atlanta, at the Oasis of Fun.  I met up with some of my old Connecticut gamer buddies, and did nothing but hang out with 80 very friendly people and play all sorts of cool games.

Some games that I played: In the Year of the Dragon, Kingsburg, Cuba, Hamburgum, Mesopotamia, Fossil, Shark, Wie Verhext, Agricola, and Toledo.  My overall winning percentage was pretty good, given the number of four player games that I was involved in. 

However, there was no question that the game of the convention was a little something called Stone Age.  At any given time, you could walk around the main meeting room and see roughly three copies of Stone Age in use.  I played the game three times myself – two second place finishes (both close), and one last place train wreck.  The game did inspire some controversey – a few mathematical types at the Con went so far as to suggest that the game was “broken”.  So, what’s going on here?

Stone Age is a medium-weight game that has a lot of “Euro” hallmarks.  It has a pretty board, nice thick cardboard tiles, cute little caveman meeples, and a “primitive” leather dice cup.  The components certainly suck you in.

Each turn in Stone Age you send your little meeple dudes around to various locations on the board where they acquire resources, improve your technology, and buy cards that give you victory points and other bonuses.  The trick is that space can be limited, and if there is something that you need, you had better grab it before one of your opponents does.  Moreover, you have to feed your little villagers every turn, and sometimes you have to spend pretty much the whole turn just gathering food.

One location that you can visit is the “Whoopee Hut”.  I’m not sure what’s it really called in the rules, but there is a little hut on the board where you can send two of your villagers, only to get back an extra meeple from the supply at the end of the turn.  Get it?  It’s like they are making babies in there!  Of course, only one player per turn can go to the Whoopee Hut, and that’s still probably going to be the second thing that gets taken each round, because the space that adds permanent farmers is even more valuable. 

In order to collect resources (food, wood, clay, stone, gold), you have to roll some dice (one die per villager working that resource).  Let’s say I send three dudes out to harvest wood.  Wood has a value of three.  My three dudes roll 3d6.  Let’s say I get a total of 11.  Eleven divided by three means that I get three sticks of wood, unless I spend a +1 tool chip to bring my total to 12, in which case I get four sticks of wood.

So far, it probably sounds like Stone Age is just some random dice game.  It’s true that you can get screwed from time to time by bad dice rolls, and it will give you an edge over the other players if the dice work out well for you on your turn.  However, most of the probability math is pretty straightforward, and you make enough rolls over the course of the game that the dice tend to even out pretty well.  Most of the time a bad roll means that you get less of something than you wanted to get, but usually you still get something for your troubles.  In other words, dice rolling is not an all or nothing affair in this game.

Like other abstract Euro games, the whole point here is to use “actions” to compete for “resources” which are then converted into “victory points”.  Here, you roll dice to acquire tokens for wood, stone, gold, etc., so that your other dudes can claim cards and tiles that generate the victory points that will end the game.

Here’s where the math might be a little bit broken.  There’s a deck of cards in the game.  Each turn, four cards are available for purchase.  Sometimes only one or two cards get purchased in a round, meaning that the “new” cards will come out in very expensive slots where you need to pay three or four resources to buy the card.  Other times, lots of cards get purchased, meaning that you might be able to pick up a very good card from a very cheap slot assuming that circumstances work out favorably for you.

Not all bonus cards are created equal.  Each card has some minor “short term” bonus and the potential for more points at the end of the game.  You might be trying to collect different kinds of symbols on the cards, or icons that give you certain bonus multipliers for having certain things, like lots of tools or lots of huts.  The card that gives you a triple bonus for huts is so good that you should probably buy it on first sight even if you are not on a hut building strategy.  A few of the other cards are unbalanced, and are even more unbalanced if the player who is focusing in a certain area just happens to have the right card fall into his lap.

There are also bonus cards with a “wheel of fortune” effect.  The player who buys the card rolls four dice, and then uses one of the dice to buy a “goodie” as specified on the card.  If the person to your right buys such a card, you will get the second best die and thus a pretty sweet resource token for free.  If, on the other hand, the person to your left buys the fortune card, you will get the last die on the table, which is probably a one, which gives you a stick of wood (very weak compared to what the other players got).  This is a “directional effect” that some game snobs have a problem with.

Stone Age is actually a fun game to play, although it runs just a little long (two hours) for what it is.  It is really designed as a four player game.  There are rules for a three player game, but I didn’t really see anyone playing it as a three player at the Con — the seats always filled as soon as someone set up the game.  Eurogamers seem to really enjoy the tough decisions that come with trying out different strategies and deciding where to send the villager dudes each turn.

Stone Age might be a game where the illusion of meaningful choice and the sensation of fun actually hides the fact that the game is a little bit unbalanced.  Compare this to Toledo, which is a game by a famous game designer with a good theme and fantastic bits.  Despite this, Toledo turns out to be less and less interesting the more that you look beneath the surface, and the more that you discover that your decisions aren’t really that meaningful.  In the end, the game plays you.  I wanted to like Toledo, but couldn’t.  Stone Age, on the other hand, is the sort of game that seems to keep sucking you back in even if you realize that it does have a few faults. 

There’s a very good chance that Stone Age will be the Spiel Des Jahres winner this year (it is already nominated).  If you like medium weight Eurogames and don’t mind a bit of luck in your games, then Stone Age gets a strong recommendation, if only for the pretty bits and the fancy leather dice cup.  In other words, Stone Age might be just the sort of game for you to put on the table when you want to explain to your friends what a Euro boardgame is all about.