Roll Through the Ages
1-4
8+
30+
The #1 "Winner of Best Family Game 2010”, and a nominee for the 2009 International Games Award for General Strategy, Roll Through the Ages is the hottest family game out this year!
Collect goods, assign workers to build cities and erect monuments, advance your civilization through cultural and scientific developments, but don't forget to harvest enough food to feed your growing population.
This game is perfect for those who appreciate high quality wooden components, medium-weight strategy and the chance to influence a society from the ground up.
Grab those dice and Roll Through the Ages in this awardwinning, addictive and strategic new civilization game!
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Roll through the Ages was one of the games I learned via Yucata.de – and the online play was so fun I bought the game for my gaming group.
The materials are top-notch. Wooden peg boards for record keeping, large wooden dice with a nice heft to them and wood-burned symbols on the sides, and a very thick pad of score sheets to use.
Gameplay is simple – each turn you roll a number of dice equal to the number of cities you own. (You start with three.) Dice will provide food, workers, coins, or goods for you. They can also cause disasters if you’re unlucky.
After you roll, you feed your cities. If you don’t have enough food, you lose a point per city that starves. Then you collect Goods, which can later be sold for coins.
Your workers can then be used to either build more cities, providing you with more dice to roll each turn (and more mouths to feed), or Monuments, which are basically straight up victory points.
Lastly, you can purchase “Developments” which give you both victory points and a special effect. Agriculture, for instance, will give you an extra food every time you roll food on a die, and Medicine will protect you from the “Pestilence” Disaster.
Coins are lost every round, whether you use them or not, but Goods can be saved to purchase larger, more expensive developments, to a point.
Combining Risk-and-roll mechanics with empire building, with resource management, Roll through the Ages is a quick game with a nice degree of interaction between players, as you compete for Monuments (the first to build each gets more points than anyone else) and can affect one another with disasters.
It has been mentioned already, but the expansion, available on the website at The Roll through the Ages website adds a few very nice new developments and other tricks to the game, and it’s a free download.
Pros:
Nice materials and design.
Quick gameplay.
Fun for 2-5 players.
Online play.
Free expansion.
Portable!
Cons:
Very luck-dependent.
Ever since discovering Sid Meier’s Civilization computer game as a child, I’ve loved Civ games. There’s just something about the exploration, planning, development and conflict that can keep me engaged for hours and hours. The search for the perfect Civ board game has been a personal quest ever since entering the hobby some 4 or 5 years ago.
Now there have been a lot of excellent Civ games out there over the years. From Avalon Hill’s original “Civilization” to “Through the Ages: A Story of Civilization”, many have attempted to capture the magic of human history in a game. Unfortunately almost every one of these great games has suffered from the same affliction: a looong play time. It’s a common problem because it’s tough to encapsulate the entirety of human civilization in a short play time. For me, as a time poor adult, this causes a problem.
Fortunately, this is where Matt Leacock’s “Roll Through the Ages: The Bronze Age” comes to the rescue with perhaps the most unique approach to the Civ game genre that’s been attempted. At it’s heart, Roll Through the Ages has a very Yahtzee like feel. The game uses 7 chunky wooden dice which will be rolled up to three times on a player’s turn to get a desirable combination of resources. The different faces of the dice each represent different resources including food, workers, trade goods and money which players will use to feed their populace, build cities and monuments and buy bonus-giving developments. One face of each die also has a disaster icon which can have dire consequences for both the player who rolled them and their opponent’s. Disasters offer a nice push-your-luck element to the game as increasing numbers of disaster dice (which you have to keep) may escalate the scale of the disaster or better yet shunt the trouble onto your opponents. The other aspect of disasters though is that they can also provide you with a significant number of goods.
Players will keep track of their acquired resources on a cribbage style wooden peg board while their developing civilizations are tracked on a printed play sheet which each player has a copy of. Players are going to take turns until either all the available monuments have been built or one player has bought their fifth development (which will usually take about 20 to 30 minutes).
So why does Roll Through the Ages work? The decision to only focus on our earliest period of history and the use of the simple and familiar Yahtzee make the game both short and accessible. However the inclusion of the various Developments and the different bonuses they give offers some simple strategic choices and keeps the game from being overly simplistic. The Developments also add to the game’s replay value as different combinations of Developments can lead to quite different victory strategies. The random chaos of the dice rolling and the push your luck nature of disasters also give the game a good level of engagement (so long as you don’t take your filler games too seriously). And finally, the quality of the wooden components is great and the box is jam packed. Gryphon Games are to be commended for not going for the larger box size (and price point).
Perhaps my only (somewhat ironic) gripe with the game out of the box is that it’s almost too short. The five Development end condition for the game has that frustrating feel of coming just when you were about to really get going. Fortunately the free “Late Bronze Age” expansion (available from rollthroughtheages.com) fixes this nicely with its slightly deeper play and longer play time.
All in all, Roll Through the Ages is a great game and an admirable take on the Civ genre in what is a well paced filler game with meat. It deserves all the accolades it has garnered so far and I for one look forward to anything else Matt Leacock does with the system in the future.
Build cities and monuments! Further scientific developments! Starve your citizens to death!(?)
Civ games meet lucky dice-rolling in Roll Through the Ages. Based on the board game, this game shortens play time dramatically but keeps the “I’m a *” feel of building a civilization YOUR way. A must play, it’s easy to learn and teach while keeping hardcore gamers’ attention. Playing equally well with 2, 3, or 4 players, games are lightning-quick. I rarely play for more than a half hour. Sometimes my friends want to play something a little more involved so we put this aside for a more in-depth game that takes 1-3 hours. Sadly, I don’t get to play this one much.
I gave this a low grade for components because in my set and at least one other I’ve seen the images on the dice rub off easily. You can touch them up with a sharpie, but for the cost I think Gryphon could make them more durable.
Dust Rating: 5
(My own rating system, 1-10, where low numbers are good.)
Take Yahtzee and Civilization, then throw them in a little box. Shake real hard for a few minutes, and Presto! You’ve got Roll through the Ages.
This is a nice little game that you can play with others or yourself. It works better with others, because it adds a little more interaction between players than Yahtzee ever did. You can affect other people with some of your Civilization advances and wonders, and you can end the game sooner on a certain condition.
It’s a small box, so that makes it a good game to travel.
So if you like Yahtzee, I bet you’ll like this even more. If you hate Yahtzee, well, you might want to give it a try.
I’ve only played this one a few times, but each time have found it to be more fun that I would expect. There’s an excellent spread of options that allows each person to try a different path to winning. That, paired with the dice-rolling aspect, makes for some definite replayability. It’s small size and fast play style makes it a good game for those who don’t have or want to spend a lot of time or space playing a game. Although, those same features could potentially be limiting for long term playability over the course of an evening. It also makes a nice game to show your mother-in-law that there are more interesting games than Scrabble.
This game is a great filler game for those small bits of time during game sessions when you are waiting for someone to show up or otherwise don’t want to start a longer game. Be sure to download The score sheet for “The Late Bronze Age” if you want a more challenging game without adding a significant amount of gametime to play.
I’ve really enjoyed the iPhone version of this versatile and quick-paced game. The great advantage is of course that you get a single-player version for all those times when you do not have co-players at hand. I play it on the train to work, at airports and often enough while watching something not quite good enough on TV.
Among the perks with the smartphone versions are also that your high scores are saved, so you always have those to compete against and try to break. On the downside is the fact that the achievements are soon fulfilled and Gryphon Games does not seem to be introducing more achievements, at least to date.
In sum, if you like RTtA and ever have dull moments with a smartphone at hand, try to play this game on the phone.
Roll the dice and choose your strategy. Do you build up your resources, create monuments or buy new abilities? Lots of action and plenty of variance. There is luck (i.e., it is dice), but the game moves along quickly and a good strategy can pay off with a few good rolls. It isn’t a deep thinking game, but it helps to pay close attention to your resources to maximize your buying potential.
Roll Through the Ages surprised me. I never played Yahtzee as a kid, so the mechanic was sort of new to me, but the game was easy to learn. At first glance, this game looks like a bunch of number crunching (and it is) and some weird dice mechanics (which it is) and seems complex. But after playing it a couple of times, it is oddly addicting. My wife, a non-gamer, played two games, won one of them, and wouldn’t let my gaming group go until we played again. After the first night we were hooked! If you haven’t given Roll Through the Ages a try, you need to as soon as possible.
Its a simple game about building your civilization through the Bronze Age. You roll dice to gain food, money, workers, and trade goods, while trying not to roll disasters. You can use your workers to build more cities (giving you more dice to roll) or build monuments (gaining victory points). With trade goods, you can purchase developments which will improve your civilization, making you more potent in the future.
The game ends when all the wonders have been built or when a player has 6 developments. Last, everyone counts up how many victory points they have earned, and a winner is declared. Its fast, fun, and exciting.
You definitely need to try this game. Three or four times, because it will only take about an hour. Enjoy!
After few plays, download The Late Bronze Age ‘expansion’ from offical site (www.rollthroughtheages.com). It makes game longer and more fun.