Stone Age
2-4
10+
60+
Each age has its special challenges. The stone age was shaped by the emergence of agriculture, the processing of useful resources, and by the building of simple huts. Trade begins and grows and civilization takes root and spreads. In addition, traditional abilities like skillful hunting are in demand, in order to be able to nourish the growing population.
The goal of the players is to master all these challenges. There are many ways to do so, so everyone can work to achieve his goal in his own way.
Find your own way and learn at the end whether it was the best way.
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Background
If you are somewhat new to boardgaming you either don’t think about the mechanics of the game (mechanisms that are used in a game) or think that the worker placement mechanic has always been around. The worker placement mechanic requires players to draft individual actions from a set that is available to all players (translation: you place one of your pieces on a certain place on the board to take a certain action linked to that place). This mechanic is found in popular games like Agricola, Le Havre, Carson City, Kingsburg and new games like Lords of Waterdeep and The Village. It actually did not become popular until Caylus in 2005, and there were only a handful of games before it that pioneered the mechanic. Today there are over 200 games that use the worker placement mechanic but one of the best is Stone Age which came out in 2008. Set in the Stone Age (appropriately), players control a tribe that competes for resources and ultimately points with the other players tribes.
Overview
Stone Age is medium to light worker placement game that has set collection and dice rolling. It appeals to variety of gamers and has a very high replay value. It is considered one of the best games in the family games category and work well for children 10 and up. Despite being easy to understand, experienced players can find deep and varying strategies to achieve victory.
Game Play
Players share in central game board that is simply one of the most beautiful boards in any boardgame (created by Michael Menzel). On this board are resources (food, wood, brick, stone, and gold), three huts (a tool hut for tools that modify dice roles, a love hut that makes another worker and a farming hut that increases food production), buildings (that require resources but produce points) and civilization cards (which cost resources but produce an immediate effect and end game scoring bonus).
Players also have individual player boards, that they keep their resources, cards, buildings and unused workers.
In clockwise order, players take turns playing workers into marked spots on the main board. Once all of the workers have been placed by all of the players, the first player resolves all of his workers actions. Resource spots require rolls of dice to determine the effectiveness of the resource gathering. The player rolls one dice for every worker placed in each area and divides it by the predetermined number for that area (example: Player 1 places 4 workers in the wood gathering area, so he rolls four dice getting 1 + 4 +5 + 3 = 13 divided by 3 for wood = 4 pieces of wood gathered). For huts the effect is applied immediately if a worker is placed in that area. For buildings a certain combinations of resources is turned in and victory points are gathered immediately. For cards a specific number of resources are turned in and there is an immediate effect and they are kept for a game end scoring bonus. After the first player resolves all of his workers, then the next player resolves all of his and so on until all players have resolved their workers.
Next all of the players must feed their workers. If a player does not have enough food, then they incur a ten point penalty. The first player marker then rotates one player clockwise and the board is refilled with cards and buildings.
The game ends when either the buildings or cards cannot be completely refilled. Players reveal end game scoring cards and scores are totaled to determine the winner.
Summary
I love this game. It plays in an hour and a half, is simple to teach, fun and contains enough strategy for every type of gamer. Setup will take 20 minutes but cleanup is much quicker. It also scales well and makes a great two player game with the two player rules provided in the game.
This game is great for:
• Worker placement fans. If you like his other with the worker placement mechanic (see background section for examples) you will most likely like this game.
• Player who like to have fun. Some worker placement games feel like work, this one does not.
• New players. You do not need a lot of experience to play this game.
• Family, Social, Avid, and some Strategy and Power Gamers.
This game probably won’t work for:
• Someone looking for a filler game. Playtime will be 1½ to 2 hours.
• People who suffer from analysis paralysis (translation: they take long turns analyzing the perfect move or freeze up with tough decisions). There are lots of choices
• Gamers who often complain about luck. This game does use dice and people often equate that to luck. I would argue against the luck factor in this game, but some would still complain.
• Power or strategy gamers who can’t stand dice.
Note:
There is an expansion called Stone Age: Style is the Goal which is not a stand alone game, it requires the base game to play.
I love the theme of Stone Age – build up a civilization and come out on top. It’s common and relatable, and the artwork beautifully captures what it may have been like back in the time of early civilization.
So what is worker placement? In worker placement games, workers or meeples (mini people) are your primary resource and you assign them to specific tasks within the game. Stone Age has tasks like hunting, collecting physical resources (wood, stone, etc.) making tools, and so on. Imagine yourself as a tribal leader telling your people what to do. Strategy in these games typically comes into play in that there are a limited number of available tasks (only one person can make tools or seven people can collect wood in a turn) so you take turns filling up the available tasks, or placing your workers, gaining the benefit of each task you place a worker at.
Worker placement games can get very involved and intricate in how the various tasks play off each other. Stone Age, however, is a great beginner’s game in the genre as the strategies are straight forward and dice rolling is a core feature. There are many worker placement games that do not use dice at all, so the random element reduces the complexities.
Replay: Replay is fun and you’ll get your money’s worth, but since it is not the most complex worker placement game out there, the available and effective strategies will eventually prove themselves. The dice element adds a little extra replay, but can be frustrating if you’re expecting your great strategy to work every time.
Components: The components really shine in this game. The board artwork is fantastic and you could start telling stories just by pouring over the details. It’s fun to look at the places where the cards and hut are usually kept as well. The meeple and collectable resources are also nice, easily distinguishable, wooden bits. While you won’t usually run out of the resource bits, the rules do allow you to substitute in more of a high demand resource – or you could up the difficulty a little and force a hard cap on the resources.
Learning Curve:Medium. The game is very easy to teach and the theme has a lot to relate to compared to some worker placement games. If you’re dealing with a casual game player, you should instruct new players as to some simple optimal placement options, otherwise you could easily run away with the game early on. It will generally take one to two complete games to get a strong grasp of your style of play and what your opponent may be trying to do.
Defense:
Stone Age hits a sweet spot between casual and strategic gamers, so I have yet to hear a ton of complaints. There will be folks who don’t like the dice (there always are). Most folks are happy to play a fun game of Stone Age and then “graduate” to other worker placement games when they feel they have exhausted it. I have yet to reach this point.
Personal:
I purchased this game because I loved the theme and wanted a worker placement game to teach my friends. We have yet to grow tired with it, but also confirmed that we generally like co-op games to the average worker placement game. Since the overall complexity keeps it approachable and keeps the game length within reason, I’d recommend this game to anyone looking to get into worker placement games.
Stone Age is an easy, entertaining game. You start up with a small tribe to go out to build huts, gather resources and even make a few babies! In turn you place your workers at the area you wish for. You have many choices; resources like wood, rock, clay and gold, food. You also have huts you build out of the resources you get hold of. Cards give you prizes, like extra food or resources. Houses on the board gives you the chance to store food, so you don`t need to hoard so much of it, one for making babies, which in turn gives you more workers for the following rounds, one house for making tools to use in order to recieve more resources. All in all, you have an abundance of choices.
After you have placed your worker, you can not go back in the same area to place more at a later time. Exept for the hunting field, where you require food, there is a limit to how many can occupy the area at the time. In the house for making babies, you need to place two of your own. Resources are resolved by rolling dice, one for each of your worker at that area; ie: if you have three workers at the area for wood, you roll three dice.
The game is played in rounds. Each player resolve their actions in turn, and they chose what to do at which time. This is important in order to get enough resources for what you wish to aquire. At the end of each round you will have to feed your tribe, so you need to make sure you have enough food by the end. You gather up your workers, and a new round starts. Then the game is played until either the deck of cards are spent, or one of the piles of huts are spent.
This game is fun and easy. Easy to learn, and then also easy to teach. It all depends on the luck of the dice, but you also have to work up a strategy as well. When do you need extra workers? Do you need more tools? Which cards will you go for? And so on. This is one of my favourite games, among other reasons because of its easy game mechanics. As soon as you have played through the first round, you know how the game is played.
Stone Age is really a well designed worker placement game. The artwork is beautiful (really some of the best). It’s a much simpler worker placement game compared to others in the same “genre” in some ways, yet requires a bit of math when determining the resources you get on spots. It’s a civilization style game as well as you grow your primitive tribe into a larger more advanced tribe.
PROS
Beautiful artwork and components
A little easier intro to worker placement
CONS
Too mathy for a gateway game or family with younger children
Theme kind of dull
Resource luck driven
GAMEPLAY
Each player places their workers on spots to take action. When gathering resources like stone or wood, you can place multiple workers, however, when taking actions like tool making or hut building allow only one worker. You continue to manage your tribe by gathering resources to grow and feed your tribe as well as purchasing huts and civilization cards.
It is important to keep your people fed or you could lose 10 points to cover your food deficit. The game ends when all the huts are gone or all the cards are gone from the supply. The person with the most points wins the game.
The game offers a variety of strategy through the use of huts and civ cards. There is luck involved with the die roll for resources, so if you don’t like dice, you may not like this game. I also don’t like that I have to do math particularly division to determine my resource amount which makes it hard to bring younger kids into the game.
CONCLUSION
Overall, our family preferred Agricola, and I think part of it is because of the theme appealed more to them. Having sheep, cows, fences, and a tidy home seemed to capture my family’s imagination more. Besides, in some ways the family version of Agricola is even easier than Stone Age if you’re trying to introduce someone to worker placement games. There’s no die rolling, but there is luck in the draw of action cards in Agricola. Stone Age is still a really good game with a lot of options, so don’t be afraid to try it.
This game felt like I was playing a combination of Settlers (resource gathering), Agricola (placing workers instead of orders), and Ticket to Ride (scoring). This game definitely ranks up there with the best family games (see note below). It didn’t take to long during the first game to get a grasp on “how” to play, and I was anxious to play again to test out new strategies.
It only takes about 10-15 minutes to teach new people how to play. I’d say that if you have friends that like Settlers of Catan, you would certainly be safe introducing them to Stone Age.
Note for Family Gamers: The game requires you to do quite a bit of easy multiplication and division (to figure out how many resources and points you get), so I’d say that the age recommendation could be based on whether a child can multiply. Other than that, it’s a pretty simple game to learn and teach.
My only wish is that the resources were made of the actual stuff they are supposed to represent. The gold bars could just be plated of course. 🙂
I have owned Stone Age for nearly a year, and I like it quite a bit. It may seem odd to write a review a year after the fact, but I just played it again last night with my wife and five year old daughter and wanted to say a few words. This was the first worker placement game I have introduced my daughter to, and I thought that this one would be a good intro.
The basic goal of Stone Age is to use your workers to gather materials to build things and hunt/gather to feed themselves. You gain victory points by spending the resources you gather to buy tiles and development cards. Players take turns placing one or more workers on spaces on the board. After all workers are placed, you check for earning resources by rolling a die for each worker plaed on a spot, and divide it by the number given. This makes food and wood relatively easy to gather, and stone and gold significantly harder. There are also action spaces where you may gain a new worker, create a food income, or buy a development card or a tile.
With my daughter, we chose to eliminate the cards and the tool tiles (tiles you may use to improve dice rolls). We explained the division by telling her to make sets of numbers. For instance, gathering wood has you divide by three, so we told her to make sets of three. This is much, much easier to explain than division! She caught on quick and enjoyed it quite a bit.
To sum up, I like the game. It is by far the simplest of the worker placement games (compare to Agricola, Caylus, Pillars of the Earth or Keythedral). A five year old is not quite ready to play it fully, but the fact that none of the play requires reading make this one to definitely try with the kids. For advice on teaching games to kids, my profile has a link to my family’s gaming blog where we explore that regularly.
Stone Age is a simplistic worker-placement type game where each round players take turns placing their meeples on the board to obtain various resources, food, huts, cards, or improving your village. At the end of each round, you need to feed your people at a cost of one food per meeple.
When acquiring resources, you roll dice equal to your number of meeples, and divide by some value which increases for rarer resources to see how many of a resource you get. Resources are spent to purchase cards or huts, which give you points. You can improve your village by acquiring an additional meeple (10 max), acquiring tools which you can add to your die roll for resources/food, or by increasing the count of how much food you automatically produce each turn for feeding your meeples.
The artwork of the game is great, and the components are pretty good. It comes with a soft dice cup for rolling the dice, which fits the theme of stone age well, but is really soft and a little flimsy.
Overall, it’s a good game. For a family game, it’s great. For more avid gamers, there are better worker-placement games out there that can replace this.
Pros:
-Simplistic rules for easy play
-Rules scale the game well for 2-4 players
-Great introduction to worker-placement style games
Cons:
-Requires doing math in your head when collecting resources and rolling dice (division and addition)
-Too simplistic for more avid gamers
Michael Tummelhofer’s Stone Age is a great worker placement/resource management game which comes with the twist of historical significance — one can actually learn by playing this game!
I would say this is great for kids. It’s an easy enough game to learn and play (the rule book is only 8 pages with many pictures and examples), plus it’s a good simulation about how peoples from this time period would actually have lived. Also it shows clearly how farming, rather than nomadic living, would have led to creating civilizations.
However, finding the best strategy to winning this game is not always the way to have the most fun with this game. I prefer to try something new every time I play.
For example: while agricultural farming is probably the best way to keep your people from dying, it makes the food tokens in this game virtually worthless, and also tends to make the game less exciting when all of your food needs are met without making an effort every turn.
Unlike many popular cooperative games, there are actually MANY ways to win in this game.
You could go for …
Civilization cards: just make certain that you watch the symbols on the bottom of the card. You should always go for the easily purchased card if you can nab it from the other players. Otherwise, match the cards to whatever end goal your striving for, be it tribesmen, huts, agriculture, etc. OR, attempt to get complete sets of 8 of the different icons (with the green backgrounds).
Tools: These are very helpful to increase the effectiveness of poor dice rolls.
People: If you can, place a couple of tribesmen in a hut. The more mature among us know what happens next (hint: at the end of your turn you’ll need to pay another food — wink wink).
Huts: While this ticks away towards the end (clearing out one of the piles of huts ends the game), this is a major way to add victory points during the game.
Summary: while this game can either be long or short (it’s possible for a single player to actually extend the game as long as they want by placing a worker on the last hut card, and “deciding” NOT to purchase it when resolving their turn, it’s a very easy, breezy quick-moving game that makes you very glad you’re not actually living during the STONE AGE.
Stone Age works really well for 2, 3 or 4 players. It’s a game that’s easy to explain, easy to set up, and easy to play through. With online play available (yucata.de) it’s even a great game to fill some time with when you’re sitting home alone.
A worker-placement resource-management game with a bit of randomness thrown in, in the form of different huts and cards to purchase, (and the dice rolls, naturally), there are a lot of options available within the seemingly limited board locations. There are a number of different, viable strategies you can use to win, and which you choose will often be influenced by how many players there are, and who you are playing with.
If you play with someone who purchases a ton of cards, you want to sit to their left, for example, since you’ll get second choice any time they purchase the “Everyone gets something for free” cards. If you play with someone who will throw one worker into an area just to block you, you’ll want to grab a lot of resources and use them as efficiently as possible.
With tools to help minimize the luck factor of the dice, extra workers to give you more gathering power every turn, and some fierce competition for powerful cards and valuable huts, the game can get very tense as you wait to see what your opponents choose to do.
Stone Age has been a group favorite in my play group since it was purchased a long while ago. It’s good fun for new and old gamers alike, and I highly recommend it to anyone who likes these sort of games.
Stone Age was the board game that introduced me and my family to worker placement. We love it. The game components are excellent. The rules are simple, yet provide multiple pathways to victory. There are enough random elements to make the game infinitely replayable.
In Stone Age, each player is developing a prehistoric village. It is 10,000 years ago and mankind is just learning the skills of agriculture. In the beginning of the game, much of your clan/tribe must forage or hunt for food, while slowly collecting resources to build up the village. As the game progresses, you can improve your knowledge of agriculture and lessen your dependence on foraging and hunting thus allowing more time on cultural development and resource collection.
Resources in the game are wood, brick, stone and gold. These resources are used to construct new buildings and develop cultural advances such as writing and medicine. Cultural advances score points during the final scoring while each building you construct scores points equal to the resources spent in its construction.
You begin with a clan/tribe of 5 and may increase this population by assigning 2 workers to the “love shack” on your turn. Only one player per turn may do this action or each of the other “village actions” which include increasing your agriculture and gaining tools. The tools are used to modify dice rolls which determine the amount of resources your workers produce.
I would give Stone Age a Moderate rating for complexity, but barely so. There are a lot of choices to be made each turn, but the mechanics are simple making it almost a Light game. One flaw I see is the Agriculture track. While improving your agriculture is an option, doing so is so essential that it becomes the automatic action for the first player. My family refers to it as the “Ag Tax.” It is rare that anyone chooses any other action when they are the first player (which rotates each turn.)
Overall, Stone Age is an awesome game and an excellent way to introduce new gamers to worker placement.
…for people that like to throw dice along with putting meeples out. This is the game that competes as a gateway against Lords of Waterdeeep in my gaming groups. The board is colorful, language independent and with the exception of one icon normally easy to understand. The dice chucking for resource management adds just the right amount of tension to make each turn a little more fun for most of my friends. I have yet to find someone that played this game that didn’t want to play it a second time.
There seem to be a few places where the first workers go all the time. I won’t say what they are and let you discover them for yourselves, but please don’t forget how the cards can really slingshot your points at the end of the game. Remind new players of this too. This is where some of the player interaction comes in, although there really isn’t much of it other than blocking off slots on the board.
Really a fun game that a 10 year old can understand but a 90 year old can enjoy.
This is hands down my wife’s favorite game. What she likes best is the the strategy of where you are going to place your meeples. That certain “resources” are only available at certain times, so if the tools shed, farming, or procreation station is open you have to jump on it while you have the chance. We also like that there is a limited amount of space on resources forcing people to make choices depending on what’s available at the time.
She likes that there is multiple ways to win. You can focus on buying huts or spending resources to buy cards that multiply your points from tools, or huts or meeples.
Each game can be different depending on what the other players strategies are. So the replay value is high. Your turns go fairly quickly so players can feel like they are apart of the game play the whole time.
The rules and mechanics also lend themselves to be learned at a high rate so the game doesn’t seem to bog down.
One thing that can be frustrating for people that are just learning the game and are playing with experienced Stone Agers is understanding the multiple ways to win. It’s easy for me anyways to get lazer focused one way to play, when what this game encourages is making adjustments.
I think this is by far my favorite worker placement game right now. I would rather play this over Agricola any day.
In Stone Age each player begins with 5 meeples and some food to get started. Each turn is played in a series of rounds. The first round is for placing your meeples on the different actions available on the board. You can go get resources, go get food, get more farms, more tools, go to the love hut and get another person, buy cards (mostly for points at the end of the game) or build some buildings that give you points for the resources you use to build them with. After everybody has placed their meeples the starting player in the round resolves all the actions in the order needed. So if they placed a meeple on a building, but still need a stone in order to build it, they could try and get that stone with the meeple(s) they placed to gather stone first. After resolving actions you have to pay one food for each meeple you have.
The biggest reason I like this better than Agricola is because it has more ways to actually win. While you can get blocked on what you need to do, it doesn’t happen too often. Also, while you need food, it isn’t so difficult to get that you feel like all you are doing is getting food.
I think Stone Age is a game I’ll play for a long time to come. I really think it should have been the Spiel des Jahres winner for 2008.
Stone Age is a beautifully illustrated, well-balanced game and a great choice if you’re new to resource management play. Your meeples are workers that claim resources and then those resources are collected and used to build huts, purchase civilization cards, and add points to your score.
This game is a great introduction to worker placement. It’s said that this is a gateway game, and you will get no argument from us. It’s fun, simple and easily expandable to add a bit more gameplay for when you want it.
What do we like about this game?
Most of us were new to resource management games and we’re really glad we started with this one. It’s easy to understand, and there is just enough strategy involved to be interesting but not so much to make it confusing and lengthy.
What don’t we like about this game?
You really need to play this once or twice to devise some sort of strategy for what to collect. Until you do, the scoring at the end of the game can really catch you off-guard and usually it’s not to your benefit.
Video Review
The instructions were not too hard to understand and once you get familiar with the scoring at the end, you’re good as gold. Or stone. Or clay. Or wood.
Check out our video review of this game: Gettin’ Higgy with Stone Age
A fellow gaming friend unexpectedly got this game for me for my birthday in 2011. He also got me a pack of “fancy bits” which are replacements for some of the tokens in this game. I’ve played it a few times now and I really like this game.
The production quality is incredible. Even the backs of the boards have great art. It comes with a real leather dice cup. I seriously would have expected this game to cost twice as much considering how high quality all of the included bits are.
The game play is “thinky” and can also be a bit “mathy”, but because there are dice rolls, you always have the option to take risks to get big returns. If you’d prefer to avoid risk, you can mitigate bad dice rolls by investing in tools which allow you to tweak rolls that just fell short. Each turn is fairly fast most of the time, but can occasionally get bogged down in AP.
The scoring is neat too, because it allows you to try and get synnergies by focusing on a specific strategy.
Overall there is a ton of choice and decision making in this game, and I highly recommend it to anyone who isn’t prone to analysis paralysis.
The first time I played this game I played with the wrong people. I didn’t like this game but the second time I played it was with friends and although I won the second time that was not what got me to like this game. It’s easy to learn and if you like worker placement type games then you’ll enjoy this game. The randomness of the cards and strategies of this game and other people you’ll never get bored playing it. My advice is to watch what others are doing and then adjust to that. If you don’t like to watch what others are doing when it’s not your turn then you’re in for a long game and disappointment at the end unless you’re lucky or not looking to win.
Stone Age is a great game, but it does take a long time and like many other worker placement games you really don’t know who wins until the final count. I taught my 9 year old how to play (even though he’s below the age threshold) and he loves it, but it gets long for him. It’s somewhat of a family game in our house, but stick with 12+ and you will enjoy it more.
The components are extremely high quality I have a first edition copy so I can’t speak to the later editions, but I am greatly impressed by the quality.
It’s not a quick play, but there is literally 12 ways to win which makes it a fun experience.
Stone Age is among the most sought-after games at my board game parties.
The game is incredibly well balanced, almost every strategy I’ve seen or tried has a decent chance of being competitive in the end. (That’s not to say you don’t need strategy — if you don’t think about or plan ahead, you certainly won’t win. But you’ll still have fun!)
It’s fun, it’s a great balance between wanting a game that doesn’t last for hours and wanting a game that is fun and requires thinking, planning, and some real investment.
It’s a great theme, a fun board, and casual enough that you can remain social while having a fun time on a board game.
I’d introduce new board game players to Stone Age. I’d also introduce Stone Age to veteran board game players.
I got this game a couple of weeks ago and have managed to play it twice since with my room mate. It is a very nice worker-placement game with a beautiful board. The addition of a leather dice cup is cool, but seems kinda useless. The only drawback I see here is how heavily the game relies on math. Granted, it’s basic addition, multiplication, and division, but having to add things up and divide for resources becomes a pain about halfway through the game, or about halfway through a case of beer. However, this isn’t enough to really deter me from the game, and I still enjoy it.
Agricola, Caylus, Endeavor, etc. are all to much game for my family. Stone Age is straightforward worker placement… limited number of workers… well laid out options for resources, and a relatively easy learning curve on how to win. The one thing new players neglect are the cards… and the cards are the key to winning this game. The card score compounds the more you get. This is important!
Stone Age is a must for families. I always suggest this game along with Carcassonne for tile placement.