|
Stone Age by Bernd Brunnhofer and Michael Tummelhofer
It being the summer holidays for teachers Phil is off over the hills and far away to downtown Bingley to visit Tom and the chaps. It has been a while and changes have taken place. Instead of squashing large numbers of boardgamers around the kitchen table, it’s over the road, round the back and in at the door of the local Conservative club. “You’ve no problems with that have you?” It has a bar, so why should it be a problem?? Besides, the Ragnars were forged in the dank, beer-smelling depths of the disused Magnet pub in Kingston back in the early-80s so it is almost a case of returning to the womb. Any thoughts Phil has, though, of being surrounded by well-heeled city executive types, sipping their Pimms and G&Ts, knocking over pieces and asking pointed questions about middle aged men playing Snakes and Ladders are rapidly dispelled: quiet is overstating it, and the old lady who goes past at one point is too busy managing her walking frame. Still, the barmaid is very accommodating, even to the extent of making cups of tea for those who’ve used up their alcohol quota for the evening.
The chaps spilt into two threes: Mordred is hammered through several times on the other table, followed by the slightly complicated-looking but rather intriguing Pandemic. But Phil, Tom and Neil settle down to a run at Stone Age.
This is one of those games that makes you think of rock family trees (you know, the ones where if there was such a one the renowned Simon Ellis could be traced through his various incarnations as Beau Blonde, Simon Snakke and the Amputated Leg Band, the Jerks, etc etc). In this case, it has a feel of lots of games - Pillars of the Earth but without the random pawn draw, Leonardo without the complicated placement system, Premiere without the silly names, Tinners’ Trail without the water.
Basically you begin by placing your five cavemen onto the board to try to control various capabilities: permanent ones such as growing food, making tools or producing more cavemen (and - one assumes - cavewomen); obtaining resources (wood, bricks, stone and gold, although the second seems slightly questionable when you start thinking about it, talk about a Neolithic property chain); obtaining victory points (either by constructing up to five buildings or by buying victory cards with resources). And that’s pretty much it.
The first turn kicks off. Phil goes first and decides tool building is the way to go (this lets you add one to one of your dice rolls), Tom grabs one of the victory cards and Neil elects to improve on his food production (this means he will only need four food counters to feed his five men). The second round of placements sees Phil moving heavily into wood and the others going for the more up market items (during the post mortem it was agreed that there wasn’t a lot of point going for anything but wood during the early part of the game). Stone Age plays quickly and easily with massed dice rolling taking place on a regular basis (for instance, if you have three cavemen hunting food you roll three dice, add them together and divide by two to determine how many food tokens you add to your stock. You need to pay one food token per man, otherwise you start paying with resources – not a good idea).
Phil readjusts his strategy and starts building up his tribe. This was probably a mistake: the extra men seem to spend most of their time hunting food to keep themselves alive. Neil is meanwhile rolling dice from the Gods, Tom from the depths of the Outermost Pit of Hell. They both start grabbing buildings in the manner of early property speculators, but Phil again readjusts (there is quite a learning curve playing this game for the first time). The victory cards are clever, providing two benefits – one short term such as gaining an extra resource, the other long term providing a multiplier (for instance, a card showing two toolmakers at game end provides Victory Points at a rate of the number of tools owned by that player times two). And – hey! no-one else seems especially interested, so let’s do it.
As it turns out, Phil runs away with the game. Everyone ends up with just under a hundred points from collecting buildings, but when the cards are revealed, Phil slaps down 48 for his massed tools and another 54 for his Shamen and the size of his tribe. Scores: Phil 221, Neil 173, Tom 162.
A curious game. The rules are pleasantly straightforward (they were read from the book there and then, as is the way with the Bingley boys), but all told it took over 2½ hours – a very long time for what is a simple game. Maybe the four-player game plays quicker, I don’t know – the fact that no victory cards were removed with three players felt a little odd. There was also a sense that, certainly in the short term, the luck of the dice was important. It does have a good atmosphere, though, and would be well worth trying again.
Back next week, possibly for a dash of Napoleonics – memories of the Magnet already stirring.
Return to top
|
