The Gaming Archivist: Session

23rd of October 2011 (Sunday)

Game(s) Played:
Through The Ages

Player(s):
Mo
Nitsuj

Session – Through The Ages
Mo came over last night to both have a look at my “new toy” as JR calls it and to ask for a game of Through The Ages which I happily pulled from my IKEA glass cupboard of treasures. As usual set-up for Through The Ages is always a pain with the itty-bitty little bits, for that kinda dough you’d think they could have made the player boards bigger with bigger bits.

Anyway, this was our first attempt to play the F-U-L-L Game (the upper-case font is meant to terrify all light-hearted gamers everywhere) so yes, we jumped from the Simple Game to the F-U-L-L Game, bypassing the Advanced Game entirely. Below is a summary of why you should never emulate our dare-devilism, I call it, “riding along the guided path and suddenly you’re barely keeping afloat”.

Like so

So we got off to an o-kay start, the Player Summary that comes with the game does help a lot but naturally we made some in your face errors right from the get-go, like playing as many Political Actions as you have Military Tokens. We also forgot to draw the ending Event Cards for end game scoring (we realized this right at the end). We had to rewind a bit on the second round because none of us did our production & maintenance for the first round. So if such a jittery start was considered o-kay I guess we didn’t do too badly.

So Mo leapt off with Aristotle (which let Mo run riot with his science) this time and went for an early culture lead by quickly building his first temple. I picked up Julius Caesar instead hoping to outmuscle Mo on the military front but never quite pulling it off because of all his Defense Bonus Cards. Despite not having any temples for a significant few turns, I managed to pull ahead of Mo with the “Work Of Art” Action Card. My focus was more on trying to maximize the number of Civil Tokens I could have through building the “Great Pyramid” Wonder and pulling off two revolutions for better government (although at one point I seemed to have an extra Civil Token by mistake as unhappily pointed out by Mo). Mo remained at Despotism throughout the game which is amazing actually. He shifted his focus to military and if the game had run its due course I think I would have been creamed in Age III.

As it is, I managed to stay ahead right up until the last two turns through having high culture Theatres (which I illegally upgraded from basic temples which Mo also did so we left it at that) then Mo pulled a “Work Of Art” Action to pull ahead for the victory. Surprisingly we were not very high tech resource wise, Mo still had his basic farms and mines and I only had two upgraded farms with basic mines.

I shot myself in the foot by playing the “Conquistadors” Tactic without the right military

Mo pulled a fast one on me when I wasn’t paying attention with three Wonders! But it was also illegal because he didn’t pay additional Civil Tokens for the second and third Wonder

As it was already getting very late, we called it a night when the Age II Civil Cards Deck ran out, only to realize our error right at the game set-up phase for end game scoring.

As we never finished the full game, I’m going to hold off the review until that happens but as it is, Mo and I are really enthusiastic about Through The Ages and look forward to many more plays in the future.