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Tips & Strategies (20)

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6
I play orange
Miniature Painter
Veteran Grader
Intermediate Reviewer
31 of 35 gamers found this helpful
“Complete the wonders strategy”

1. Build up your cities but don’t get overly focused on them if you you get some goods to pop up. I.e., don’t get overly fixated on completing that 7th city since you’ll be riding the line on food for a while.
2. Research agriculture for the +1 food. This is almost always a given.
3. Once you have 6 or 7 cities and a few goods, either try to rack up a serious coinage or goods turn of rolling, gun straight for masonry which will require ~30pts of coin/goods to research. Masonry grants +1 worker to each worker dice.
4. Once masonry and agriculture are up and running, just start building wonders like crazy.
Bypassing agriculture will speed this up if you’re willing to take a few skulls for starving, but try and limit your self induced skulls to less than 5.

It’s possible to speed build the top wonders before someone triggers another game end. This should grant you ~25-35 points easy.

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8
Senior
Critic - Level 3
Junior Reporter
Explorer - Level 4
30 of 35 gamers found this helpful
“Set a timer to limit AP”

Roll Through the Ages is supposed to be a fast game but it can suffer AP (analysis paralysis) if a player calculates every possible permutation of builds, buys, and roll probabilities during his/her turn. This is much more likely to occur when playing with the Bronze Age Expansion.

If this problem occurs, agree before starting that the group can set a timer to stop AP in order to help move the game along and keep things light and fun for everyone. Be nice though and let people finish & score, the timer is only to force them to complete things immediately once time runs out.

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8
Senior
Critic - Level 3
Junior Reporter
Explorer - Level 4
25 of 29 gamers found this helpful
“Leadership and the Great Wall”

Leadership and the Great Wall work very well together to maximize your chances of buying lots of big ticket developments.

You’ll need 7 cities but once you have the Great Wall, roll for Pestilence (3 skulls) or Invasion (4 skulls). You’ll collect lots of resources and your opponents will feel the pain each time you connect.

Watch your food and use Leadership to protect you from Drought (2 skulls).

I’d only play this strategy, if you can get 7 cities and get a quick start on the Great Wall. If you’re lagging behind in building, this is unlikely to be a winning strategy — the game will be over before you can hit your stride.

On the iOS version, you probably want to pick up Medicine to protect yourself.

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6
I'm Completely Obsessed
Viscount / Viscountess
Champion
BoardGaming.com Beta 1.0 Tester
17 of 20 gamers found this helpful
“Online Play.”

This is playable online, at http://yucata.abplesk05.de/en/

Great implementation.

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1
Rated My First Game
24 of 29 gamers found this helpful
“Laminate the player cards.”

My friend did this, and I plan to with my set. Print off 4 of the late bronze age cards and laminate them back-to-back with the base set cards. Laminate them and keep track with dry-erase markers. This makes the game more portable and eco-friendly! It’s win-win!

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8
El Dorado
I'm a Gamin' Fiend!
Rated 100 Games
Paladin
52 of 65 gamers found this helpful
“Build those Wonders”

Don’t get caught up in the tech tree so much that you forget to build at least one wonder. I sometimes find myself falling behind because eveyrone else started building wonders early.

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6
Gamer - Level 6
Veteran Grader
BoardGaming.com Beta 1.0 Tester
I'm a Gamin' Fiend!
18 of 22 gamers found this helpful
“Get The Late Bronze Age Expansion!”

This game becomes a lot more strategic when you add the Roll Through the Ages: The Late Bronze Age expansion. It’s available for free download at the following link:

http://rollthroughtheages.com/late_bronze_age_07.pdf

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7
Cooperative Game Explorer
Novice Grader
Knight-errant
19 of 25 gamers found this helpful
“Want More of A Challenge”

I kind of stumbled across this when I missed a small part of the rules the first time I played. But, if you want to start off with a bit of a challenge, try starting the game with no food in reserves.

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9
Gamer - Level 9
Lookout
Explorer - Level 6
Guardian Angel
20 of 27 gamers found this helpful
“Let Them Eat Stone!”

This strategy is best used in the Late Bronze Age variant but can be used in the base game too. Simply put- during the dice rolling phase always re-roll food results. During Development phase purchase quarrying, masonry and engineering. Leadership is also very useful. Your plan is to acquire as many people as you can, as fast as you can. You will with any luck also be able to purchase the 2 lower cost bonuses. This strategy depends on finishing the game as quickly as possible. After acquiring the 3 basic developments the others you buy will depend on the game situation. I usually get Medicine(I’m taking enough negatives already) and leadership(the re-roll helps my plans).

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3
BoardGaming.com Beta 1.0 Tester
Sophomore
Professional Grader
17 of 23 gamers found this helpful
“Masonic Attack.....”

The best way I have found to win is to get ‘Quarrying’ and ‘Engineering’ as quickly as possible, then build monuments till they are all completed, thus ending the game. You may take a few starvation hits, but the monument bonuses should easily cover that. Also, the other players will see the monuments going fast and hopefully abandon their original plans.

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6
Arrowhead
Knight-errant
Time Well Spent - Games
17 of 23 gamers found this helpful
“Safe Start”

When I play, especially with 4+ people, it feels like cheating when someone gets hit with a huge penalty from Pestilance before they even take a turn. When we play, we use a “safe start” variant, which states that you can not take negative points before you have had a turn in the game. It makes for a more enjoyable start to the game, with fewer hard feelings.

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8
Gamer - Level 8
Expert Recruiter
Count / Countess
BoardGaming.com Beta 1.0 Tester
18 of 25 gamers found this helpful
“The iPhone app is great for on-th-go play!”

My wife and I have had this game since it was released, and picked up the iPhone app as soon as it was available. The app is great for killing time at a coffee shop or in a movie line when a physical game would be impractical. The app also has the Late Bronze Age expansion.

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4
Gamer - Level 3
Zealot
13 of 18 gamers found this helpful
“House Rule - Drop the 5 Advancements win scenerio”

My family loves this game but it seems to end way too quickly if you play with the 5 Advancements as an ending option. We like to play with only Complete All Monuments as the end trigger. The game isn’t really that long to begin with. We find that this increases game play maybe 5 to 10 minutes tops.

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6
Arrowhead
Knight-errant
Time Well Spent - Games
12 of 17 gamers found this helpful
“5-6 player game”

When I have a game night, I almost always have 6 or more players at the table. To show off my new game, I had to figure out a way to play Roll Through the Ages with 6 people, so we made fake boards. We photocopied the game board and used some beads as sliders along the different paths. As we started to play, we found the game worked great! It was essential that everyone buy medicine so that they can avoid the -3 penalty on 5 other players turns and the wonders tended to go very quickly, but otherwise it was the same game. We played with the “safe start” variant, and it cleaned up the pestilence problem at the beginning of the game. Give it a try!

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6
Novice Reviewer
Knight-errant
Gamer - Level 6
18 of 27 gamers found this helpful
“The Perfect Start”

For me the perfect first round roll is: Workers, Disaster & Coin. This gets you your fourth city and a development on the first turn which will get you off to a flyer.

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3
BoardGaming.com Beta 1.0 Tester
Sophomore
Professional Grader
16 of 25 gamers found this helpful
“Chess Timer...”

When we play this at my house each player has 60 seconds to complete their turn, or they suffer one ‘disaster’. We use a chess timer to measure this. It works REALLY well at both keeping the pace of the game at a nice clip, and adds an element of stress/pressure to each turn. I wouldn’t play it any other way, now.

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8
Senior
Critic - Level 3
Junior Reporter
Explorer - Level 4
19 of 30 gamers found this helpful
“iPhone Game to hone your skills”

The iPhone game is a lot of fun and very quick to play. It’s a solitaire game so the rules/gameplay have been adjusted a little, but it’s still a lot of fun. The game supports both the basic and the expanded version. It looks fine on the iPad as well.

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3
15 of 24 gamers found this helpful
“Bui;d the Great Wall First”

As the one monument that also gives you a tech-up like bonus, the Great Wall is the clear choice for which monument to build first. Even if another player has a head start on you building it, it may still be worth it even at second-player credit.

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5
BoardGaming.com Beta 2.0 Tester
Knight
Noble
16 of 27 gamers found this helpful
“Don't build the 7th city”

Don’t bother building the 7th city. Those 6 workers are better spent early on a monument. Plus you save because don’t need to collect an extra wheat to feed the city.

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10
Watchtower
Movie Lover
Book Lover
I play blue
“Extending a two player game.”

Roll Through The Ages is a fun dice game, but it goes almost too quickly with two players. Our two player house rules include not crossing out the two monuments (the Temple and the Great Pyramid). And we play until someone has completed seven developments instead of five. The games are just a little longer with these tweaks, and scores are increased for each player.

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