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With the recent news that scientists now believe that Neolithic mankind dragged a 6 ton stone 700km from North East Scotland to be the Altar Stone at Stonehenge I thought we should have a look at what game designers thought would be occupying their minds 4 – 5,000 years ago.
Stone Age, Fire & Stone and Tribes are the three top titles with respect to the dawn of humanity. So knap that flint, chase that mammoth and here we go.
Stone Age
Stone Age from Bernd Brunnhofer via Z-Man games sees players compete for resources to feed and grow their tribe, build buildings and advance their civilization. The evocatively illustrated board depicts a typical Late Stone Age village surrounded, conveniently, by Hunting Grounds, Forests, Clay Pits,Stone Quarries and a river that can be panned for Gold. It’s the presence of Gold, incidentally, that sets the timeline as because of its malleability it was the only metal fashioned before smelting led to the Bronze Age.
Starting with 5 tribespeople each you can set them to various tasks. Either in the village to gain a tool, increase your agricultural ability or increase your tribe in the coyly named “Family Hut” where it will take 2 of your tribe to produce 1 more!
Otherwise they are depatched in numbers of your choosing to gather resources. Apart from food in the Hunting Grounds access to some resources may be restricted dependent on the other tribes. Resources are gained by rolling dice equal to the number of workers with the total divided by a number from 2 for food increasing to 6 for gold. Results are rounded down with any remainders being lost. This is where tools come in. Each tool adds 1 to your total and can be used once each round.
Once you have resources you can consider using them to build Buildings which score Immediate VPs or buying Civilization cards which provide an immediate bonus plus a final scoring effect. This can show your tribe has developed aesthetics such as Art, Music and Writing or practical skills such as Pottery, Weaving or Transport.
The game play is quick and easy to understand. You are subject to the luck of the dice but this can be ameliorated via tools. There are many routes to victory and enough blocking of others without getting too nasty.
There are a couple of opportunities missed, though: Civilization advances don’t change your abilities and the 4 different types of food depicted are just indicative of their values.
Gameplay: Great. You won’t regret playing this. A gateway game.
Stone Age feel: Art work only. Though this is first rate.
Mammoth Hunt: No
Fire & Stone
Fire & Stone travels the whole globe with its then one, centralised land mass. The design from Klaus-Jurgen Wrede published by Pegasus sees you explore 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.
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 out you uncover Discovery tiles generally food, forest or fire with occasional settlements the odd secret stash and 1 hidden cave.
Uncovering a settlement means building a hut for free. Anyone adding to the settlement, 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 Section 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 space 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. Also you may be unable to complete your secret task!
Most of the tiles show foraging fruits etc. If you collect 2 or 3 the same you get to take a card: An Invention card or a VP card. 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.
Strangely if you choose to take a VP card, ranging from 4 down to 2, you must cover one of your 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.
Gameplay: Great. Slow burn followed by population explosion.
Stone Age feel: Good. Inventions help your tribe perform better
Mammoth Hunt: No. Though hinted at through animal stacks
Tribes
Tribes from Swedish designer Rustan Hâkansson from Kosmos is both mammoth in scope, ranging from the late Palaeolithic 30,000 BCE through the Neolithic and into the Bronze Age up to 800 BCE, and has a mammoth!
The board has three epochs each containing 4 of the 5 possible Achievements. The earliest face up, with the other 2 rows hidden for now. There are also 8 Event Tiles for each era. (this is where the mammoth comes in!). Each player’s abilities are marked on the 4 Progress Tracks: Procreation; Moving; Exploration and Strength.
Players have Tribespeople and Shells and constuct a domain of three, randomly drawn, land tiles. These must be 3 different of the 5 types available and one of their tribe is placed on one of them. Above the board are lined the 6 Action tiles. Depicting: Procreate, Move and Explore either singularly or twinned with a Hand to show you can claim an achievement. Take an Action, the 1st for free with later ones costing shells, complete it andt move it to the back.
Achievements are claimed by having tribespeople on the appropriate land tile or tiles. You need just one in the Palaeolithic rising to 3 in the Bronze Age. As well as scoring VPs in the form of Bear’s teeth you will increase on one of the 4 Progress Tracks. These determine the quantity of your Procreate, Move and Explore actions to increase your Tribe, move through your domain or open up new land tiles.
Taking an Achievement opens up the Achievement in the row above and may spark an event tile which is added to the Action chain to be acted upon later. The game ends when there have been as many event tiles executed in the last epoch as the number of players.
Gameplay: Great. Tight race to be first to get civilized.
Stone Age feel: Good. Achievments develop you from Neolithic to Bronze Age
Mammoth Hunt: Yes. I killed a mammoth!
These are three great games. They’re all straight forward and fairly quick to play with quick turns. As a game, Stone Age is probably the best but Fire & Stone and Tribes both evoke the development of Stone Age civilization better.
The diaspora across the pangea of Fire & Stone is fascinating to see unfold and in Tribes you can actually bag a mammoth!