Roll Through the Ages - Tips & Strategies

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.

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.

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!

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

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.