Saturday Morning Gaming: Roll Through The Ages

We’ve got a new game in rotation for the nights that only four people show up. Roll Through the Ages: The Bronze Age.

This is a game for four players (though it has alternate rules for three or two) and it’s *FAST*. Like, maybe, 5 or 6 rounds fast. (Though I could see, maybe, the game going 8 or 9 turns if everybody had a temporary truce or something).

Everybody gets one of those little not-cribbage boards and puts the appropriate pegs in the appropriate holes.

Figure out who goes first and then start rolling dice.

You’ve got six symbols: The helmet guy represents 7 coins, 3 wheat, 3 laborers, 2 wheat *OR* 2 laborers, the trade jug, or two trade jugs and a disaster. You get two re-rolls.

At the end, you then move your pegs around. You need one food for each city. You can put checks into boxes on your worksheet for each laborer (you’ll probably want to buy an extra city or two so you can roll more dice). You place pegs for each jug you got. And you have to resolve your disasters.

A fun move is to get three disasters and those do damage to your opponents, not you.

When it comes to trade, you move one peg to the right for each jug you have (and you move up for each jug… so if you have two jugs, you get a wood and a stone rather than two wood).

Then you spend your money (from coins or from trading in your wood, stone, and so on) on developments. Irrigation makes it so that you can ignore if you roll two disasters. Medicine will protect you from the jerk who keeps rolling three disasters.

Then, at the end of your turn, you flush all your remaining money down the commode and move your pegs back until you only have six points shifted away from zero (so you’ll want to spend your trading gains if you’ve moved your pegs more than six points away from zero… if you don’t use it, you’ll lose it).

Since the game ends when someone gets five developments, the game ends *QUICKLY*. Then you’ll want to play it again.

Seriously, the game is a treat. It takes 3 minutes to explain in person and you’ll be laughing and yelling about a minute after that.

So… what are you playing?

(Featured image is the Roll Through the Ages box. All photos taken by the author.)