Technologies require that you spend science to activate them, and these expand your overall capabilities by unlocking new options for further development, such as mines that provide twice the production power per population assigned than their predecessors had. Military cards tend to offer new units (such as swordsman or tanks), and tactics (bonus strength added for having a specific composition in your military), that improve your strength rating, making it more effective when push comes to shove and you find yourself going head-to-head with another player. Leaders are powerful, but you’ll have to choose wisely as you can only select one from each era.
Leonardo da Vinci, for example, offers a science boost to your highest tier science building, while also giving a free productive resource each time that you acquire a new technology. Leaders allow you to appoint legendary figures from history as the leader of your civilization, and they tend to bring powerful bonuses and special abilities based upon their historic accomplishments (nice touch to see Sid Meier in there!). They offer an immediate benefit, such as reducing the cost of upgrading a mine or simply granting you a one-time bonus of resources for free. Actions only cost what it took for you to purchase them from the card row.
Your government will have a significant impact on your civilization’s capabilities.Ĭards come in a variety of flavors: action, leader, leader, military, technology, and wonder. Once an entire age deck has been depleted in this way, the next age begins, and more modern, powerful cards begin to trickle in.
Each round, new cards are added to the row, reducing the action cost requirement to acquire those that were previously there, while removing the oldest ones from the game entirely. You’ll spend at least one of your actions to take a card from this row and add it to your hand, though further resources and actions may be required to fully activate it. The deck is divided into a number of categories that populate each age, and players compete for these as they are drawn and placed onto the card row. There’s a lot of information on it, but you’ll pick it up quickly. This is the screen that you’ll do most of your ruling from. The game is fairly complex for a board game and may take some time to get the hang of, though the tutorial is one of the better ones that I’ve come across, and there’s nothing that the in-game rule book doesn’t answer. The big difference here is that your civilization is a concept everything is represented by cards and tokens, and there isn’t an actual map for you to observe your progress on. You’ll be leading a civilization from its early stages to modern greatness by managing its resource production and consumption, researching new technologies, engaging in hostile actions like war, and so on. Through the Ages captures a thematic feel reminiscent of Civilization, though as you might imagine from its tabletop origin, it’s a more casual experience. It succeeded in that, and I’m sure I’ll be returning for the occasional game in the future even if it didn’t quite blow me away like I’d been hoping. I decided to give it a shot in the hopes that it would be a thematically similar game that offered a familiar, but new, experience. Through the Ages caught my attention when I discovered it, and it gave me vibes of the popular Civilization franchise of computer games that I’ve put far, far too many hours into over the course of my life.
Whether they have a basis in history or they’re built from the ground up in fantasy, I can’t get enough of them and I’m always looking for more. I’ve been a fan of civilization-building games for as long as I can remember.