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Fire & Stone is set in a stylised version of Pangaea, the world covering, single land mass. Designed by Klaus-Jurgen Wrede from Pegasus Spiele, Fire & Stone sees you explore this world to set up settlements, gather nuts and fruits, uncover forests full of animals, build fires to cook and process them and even discover a secret cave.
To Boldly Go
The world is covered in Resource Areas that are grouped together in 3 zones that will become accessible as the game progresses: first Africa and Europe, Then Asia and Australasia and finally the Americas. These are covered by randomly drawn Discovery Tiles of the appropriate area number.
All players start with just one scout, on the same spot, the southern tip of Africa, not quite the cradle of humanity but close enough. Moving into an area you uncover a Discovery Tile which will often be a Gathering Tile with one of the 4 food types: Nuts, Mushrooms, Roots and Fruit.
Alternatively it can be a Forest tile which will unearth a stack of Animal Tiles which can be processed into food and storage bags by visiting a Fire tile. Area I also has a couple of Secret Stashes that give a small food and bag bonus and Area II contains a Hidden Cave revealing 1 of 24 random effect cards.
Finally there are the all-important Hut tiles which provide the means for scoring points, completing your bonus tasks and provide the timer for the game.
No Place Like Home
Uncovering a Hut tile means you can start a Settlement and place your first hut there for free. Anyone adding to the Settlement afterwards, including yourself, must pay 1 food for each hut there. The Hut tiles trigger further events: the 3rd opens Region II; after the 5th all players get a second scout: the 9th opens Region III and the 11th ends the game.
You get VPs for every hut you place, plus a bonus point for the majority of huts in a Settlement plus another point if you complete your task allocated at the start which will be to have a majority on a particular type of space. There are only 12 of these settlement spaces in the game and majorities will be keenly contested.
Note you can’t make settlements anywhere you like but only where a Hut tile has been drawn. This can be frustrating as, given the random placements, there may be no Settlements adjacent to the feature given on your bonus task card but then life was hard in the Stone Age!
Foraging Population
Half the Discovery tiles show foraging foods to gather. You can either leave the tile there and take 2 food for your store or you can pick up the tile and place it on your Tribe mat. Collecting 2 the same lets you take an Inventioncard or a VP card. A third of the same type gains you another card but then the 3 foraged tiles get discarded for you to start again.
The Invention cards are the technological advances of your civilisation and for obvious reasons you can only have 1 of each type. Inventions such as Hunting, Fishing, Pots etc. will give you more abilities and Sled and Sea Travel will speed up your movement. You do get the feel of really progressing with these inventions.
Alternatively you can take a VP card that gives you straight VPs decreasing from 4 VPs for the first two down to 4 each of 3 VPs, 2 VPs and 1 VP. Deciding whether to take a VP card rather than a gameplay enhancing benefit is one of the key decisions in Fire & Stone, particularly before all the good ones have gone.
Strangely if you do choose to take a VP card as well as not getting a new invention you must cover one of your existing inventions and no longer get its benefit. I found this hard to rationalise. Does it mean you’ve become decadent and forgotten how to make pots or travel by sea? Weird! Gameplay it makes sense though as these VPs can make all the difference in what is a low scoring game.
Final Frontier
Fire & Stone is an entertaining mid weight game with an enjoyable sense of exploration and discovery and development of your civilisation. There is enough player interaction to keep it interesting specially in the race at the end to fill up the settlements to gain majority.
It’s fairly quick to set up, it’s easy to learn and play and doesn’t take too long. Sadly you don’t get to hunt any mammoths but you can’t have everything!
