Saturday Morning Gaming: Stone Age (the board game)
Stone Age is one of the best four-player board games I’ve stumbled across.
The general theme of the game is that you are a chieftain of a Stone Age tribe and your job is to make sure that your tribe gets the most points. Peacefully, I may add. Like, your cavepeople aren’t engaging in combat. They’re fishing or hunting or gathering resources or building stuff. They’re not fighting.
Anyway, you have your starting batch of cavepeople and you go around the circle doing some light worker placement. Do you want to do better with this newfangled “farming” thing? Do you want to develop tools? Do you want to, heh heh, make more cavepeople? Do you want to gather wood or brick or stone or gold? Do you want to build? Do you want to go fishing?
Well, place your dude(s) and it’s the next person’s turn.
Once everybody has been placed, you go around the board rolling dice for your guys using the authentic tanned leather cup (the first edition of the game got a lot of complaints because the cup smelled like urine had been involved in the tanning process and, seriously, it stunk up the room). Count the pips on the dice. You need 2 pips for a unit of food, 3 pips for wood, 4 pips for bricks, 5 pips for stone, 6 pips for gold. (And a tool will give you an extra pip, if you need one. You’re probably going to need 2 or 3, though.)
If I have a complaint about the game, it’s that the guy who goes first *ALWAYS* puts his guy in “farming”. The guy who goes second *ALWAYS* develops tools. Maybe the guy who goes third chooses to make more cavepeople but if the guy who goes third doesn’t do it, the guy who goes fourth will. And only *THEN* does the worker placement get interesting.
Also, going first in the game has benefits where the guy who goes first on turn one is in a better position on turn 5 than the guy who went first on turn 4, even though everybody has had an opportunity to go first. (That said, that benefit generally evaporates by turn 12 or 13.)
That said, the game has multiple ways to gather points and it’s not going to be perfectly clear who is winning after the game gets rolling. Is it the guy who is getting all of the hammers? Is it the guy who is getting all of the buildings? Is it the guy who spends all of his time going fishing?
I mean, odds are, it’s the guy getting all of the hammers.
But the game has so very many interesting dynamics and the worker placement is intuitive and the only downside is that you’re going to have to do a lot of math.
But it’s going to be coming out on Steam! Which means that the game will do the math *FOR* you?
And if you happen to find it difficult to get four people together for a board game (whether it be because six people always show up or because only two people do), it’ll be nice to be able to sit down and play this absolutely awesome board game whenever you want.
So… what are you playing?
(Featured image is a picture of the gameboard, the smelly dice cup, and the dice. All photos taken by the author.)
After not being able to get a new graphics card at a reasonable price during the last generation, and then just not getting around to it for a while, I finally replaced my 6-year-old desktop with a new one with a 4070 yesterday.
I didn’t want to deal with the hassle of building one myself again, so I went with a prebuilt. An annoyance I ran into is that almost all prebuilts skimp where it doesn’t really make sense to. In the case of the one I bought, it only came with a 1 TB SSD, even though a 2 TB SSD only costs like $30 more, and modern games are regularly coming with install sizes over 100 GB. And they were charging $150 to swap out the 1 TB for 2 TB! For half the price I could just buy a separate 2 TB drive, pop out in myself, and get 3 TB of SSD, which is what I’m doing.
I haven’t had a chance to take it for a spin yet. I’m thinking of starting with Skyrim VR, because it’s Skyrim, in VR! But I’ve heard that they really phoned it in and you have to install a bunch of mods to make it good. Maybe No Man’s Sky.
On a related note, I’m surprised that my $200 3 GB 1060 kept chugging along for six years. It wasn’t until last year that new games that it couldn’t run started coming out, although it did always have a lot of trouble with VR. I saw a lot of hot takes last year about how PC gaming is becoming unaffordable. But this is stupid: Developers basically never make games that need a new, high-end graphics card to run, because doing this would kill sales. People were freaking out over the mere availability of expensive high-end cards, despite the fact that perfectly serviceable cards were available for a fraction of the price.Report
I think it’s the whole Cyberpunk thing. Cyberpunk only ran on top-of-the-line boxes out of the box. It couldn’t run on previous generation consoles at all. People assumed that that was The Future instead of CD Projekt releasing a game that wasn’t ready to be released.
The whole crypto/NFT thing broke out into… well, not normie space, but normie adjacent space at the same time and that put a *HUGE* amount of pressure on video cards at the same time.
Now that the crypto/NFT bubble has popped, it almost feels like the market is flooded with cards. They’re almost cheap on Ebay… but I wouldn’t want to buy a card that was once part of a crypto mining bank.Report
“Cyberpunk only ran on top-of-the-line boxes out of the box.” Yeah, no. The box I ran Cyberpunk on was several years old, and when purchased was a tier or two below top. It had a decent graphics card and a goodly amount of RAM but was, at least, 4 years old. I rarely had problems with the game.Report
Oh… there were a ton of stories about how awful the game ran…
It didn’t occur to me that this would be an outcome of Discourse rather than an accurate representation of reality.
Well, without getting into politics, gaming journalism hasn’t demonstrated that it’s gotten significantly better since then.Report
If you turned all the sliders down it ran pretty good on older boxes.
It looked like something from 2015, but it ran…Report
Yep. First thing I used to do, playing newer games with an older box, was to turn off ray tracing, etc. But I had a lot of ram, relatively speaking, on that older box.Report
Fields in stoneage are, of course, quite important because they divert workers from needing to gather foot to more “productive” work. It is very interesting that your group prioritizes hammers over population because my own group considers tools the weakest village play.
Of course the cards play a major element in all this: the point multiplier can dictate what direction you should go. If you get a few population victory point multipliers then obviously you should prioritize that and if you get the tool ones, same. Field multipliers are useless because everyone gets fields whenever they can.
I’ve found that seating placement can be interesting. Some of our players obsessively persu the wild reward cards and if you have the fortune to sit one or even two seats downstream from such a player you benefit enormously at little cost. It’s almost a bit unfair really.
Have you played at all with the Stoneage expansion?Report
In the three games I’ve played… I don’t remember who won the first one because too much was going on.
But Hammers won #2 and #3 due to tool multipliers.
Haven’t touched the expansion! I didn’t know they had one!Report
There is! It adds some quite neat and powerful huts and an entire new resource: bones decorations and a trading system that comes with it. Leftists would despair- filthy capitalism invades Eden!
Interesting that tools seem to be so advantaged. How is your group dynamic around the wild reward cards?Report
I, generally, am the Wild Reward guy. I just love those cards so much. (I also have lost games #2 and #3 due to going for an artifact win… both times I got 7, I failed to get 8.)
I am very good at rolling something like 6,6,3,2. The guy who sits across from me (the hammer guy) bought two over our last two games and, both times, he rolled something like 3,2,2,1. The second time, he yelled something like “THIS IS WHY I NEVER BUY THOSE”.Report
Hahah, yeah I nab them if they’re super cheap but anything but bargain basement I avoid so long as I’m downstream of a devotee like you.Report
Well, I guess if it’s “if you play this card roll 5d6, if you score at least 22 you win, otherwise you lose” then why go to the trouble of a big fancy gameboard with lots of options?Report
It’s not that at all.
It’s that you roll 4 die.
1=wood
2=brick
3=stone
4=gold
5=tool
6=agriculture
Then you pick which of the four dice you want and you pass the remaining dice to the player on your left. They pick which of the 3 they want, then they pass to their left. Player 4 gets stuck with the last die.
Ideally, you roll 6,1,1,1. TAKE THAT!!!!
Odds are you’ll roll something where you get something good, the player to your left gets something pretty good, and players 3 and 4 get the dregs.Report