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.)
My newest acquisition that I have been able to get to the table at our game meetup is Heat: Pedal to the Metal. It’s a car racing game driven by cards. Each player has their own deck with cards that they play to determine their speed. The car’s gear determines how many cards they must play. You want to go fast on the straightaway, but if you take a corner too fast, you might spin out.
The unique mechanic with this game is the Heat mechanism. Your player mat has a spot representing the engine, and it starts with a certain number of heat cards. When you push your car to do something, such as taking a corner too fast or skipping a gear when shifting, you pay heat, moving it from the engine to the discard pile. Eventually, the heat ends up in your hand, reducing your options, until you are able to use cooldown to put it back to the engine (where it can be spent again.
The game is about managing heat to get the best position coming out of corners to stay ahead of everybody else. There is also a bit of a push-you-luck mechanism in the form of stress cards that give a random speed. The games I have played so far have been pretty close, and it’s entirely possible for somebody who falls behind to catch up and take the lead. There are some advanced mechanics, such as weather and a garage that lets you draft upgrade cards, but I am saving those for when I play with a group that has all played at least once.
I also got Boooop, which is a Halloween themed version of Boop. It’s a two-player game about placing kittens on a bed, trying to get three in a row to graduate them to cats, and ultimately get three cats in a row. The problem is, whenever you put down a kitten or cat, the ones adjacent to it get booped away one space, which can also knock them off of the bed. It’s a cute game with simple rules, but it really requires you to think. I got it to play with my wife, though we don’t normally do a lot of competitive games, but she had fun.Report
How does “Pedal To The Metal” compare to the old “Formula D” game? (similar mechanic in that your gear determines how many resources you take, and if you don’t spend them all you get a penalty, but in Formula D it’s dice rolls rather than card draws.)Report
I have not played Formula D, but I have seen some discussion on Boardgame Geek. If I am not mistaken, Formula D takes a little longer to play. I think it might also lean a little more to the simulation side where Heat leans a little more toward the game side, but I don’t think there is a wide gulf between the 2.Report
On topic in the sense of “fun with computers”…
I’ve recently resumed work on a series of cartoon drawings I started for my kids 30 years ago. This time it’s for the granddaughters, who seem fascinated with the idea that Grandpa can draw. My style has always been pencil-ink-erase. Being 30 years older, my vision’s not as good and my hand’s not as steady. My son the graphic designer has urged me to try working on a computer. This weekend I dug out the unused iPad, loaded the free version of Adobe Fresco on it, and spent quite a bit of time fooling with it. The results were encouraging enough I’m going to try doing the next panel this way.Report