Through the Ages - demo game and rules explanation

[rho21]

Index

• Introduction
  
• Round 1
  
• Actions
  
• Round 2
  
• The Political Action
  
• Round 3
  
• Civil Cards
  
• Round 4
  
• Urban Buildings
  
• Round 5
  
• Colonization
  
• Round 6
  
• The End of an Age
  
• Round 7
  
• Tactics
  
• Round 8
  
• Civics
  
• Round 9
  
• Governments
  
• Round 10
  
• Aggressions & Wars
  
• Round 11
  
• Quitting the Game
  
• Round 12
  
• Age III wonders and leaders
  
• Round 13
  
• Age III Events (Impacts)
  
• Round 14
  
• Cultural Development
  
• Round 15
  
• How the Game Ends
  
• Round 16
  
• Round 17
  
• Final Score, Review & Conclusion
  

Introduction

chumchu, Cheater Hater and I are playing a teaching game of Through the Ages online, with discussion on these forums. The discussion is more about strategy than explaining the rules though, so I thought I might take the time to explain the game, and hopefully convince a few other people to give it a whirl. It's one of the best boardgames ever made, and it's completely free to play asynchronously online, so what is there to lose?

I will aim to alternate description of the game as it progresses with rules explanations so you can see each in the context of the other. If you want to read the full rules rather than get them piecemeal, they're available direct from the publisher.

I'm going to have to start with a bit of a rules dump, for obvious reasons. Please feel free to ask questions, especially where things aren't clear.

So, what is Through the Ages?

It's a board game inspired by Civilization. There are quite a few of those (not to mention a board game that inspired the computer game in the first place), but this one's special, mostly because they removed the map! In practice, this means the designer (the legendary Vlaada Chvátil) has been able to squeeze much more strategic depth into the game without having to worry about all the tactical considerations of moving armies around, choosing settling locations etc. These things can be great for a computer game, but they really dilute the experience if you have to squeeze them into the length of a board game. You may think this all makes it nothing much like Civ, but there's a surprising amount of flavour in there.

What site are we playing on?

The rather strangely named (TtA is the only game it provides) http://www.boardgaming-online.com, aka BGO. The interface is good, if not particularly pretty, and it's largely stable. It's all browser-based so can be used on a mobile. There are one or two bugs floating around, but not much in the way of game-breakers.

Right, it's time for a picture of the interface:


So, what's going on here? Let's start at the bottom right with the area that represents your civilization:

Agriculture, Bronze, Philosophy, Religion and Warrior are your starting techs. They produce nothing by themselves though, you need people to work on them. Accordingly, you start with two people each working on your farms and mines, one philosopher and a warrior. You also start with one unemployed citizen, who is up in the worker pool. (In the real-life boardgame version, all of these are represented by yellow cylinders, but the website gives you little graphics instead.)

Let's look at how the economy works.

Your employed citizens [representing both population and the infrastructure and buildings to support their work] produce something determined by the technology card they are standing on. Your citizens on agriculture produce 1 food each per turn, your bronze miners 1 resource each per turn and your philosopher 1 science per turn. The warrior provides 1 military strength (this is a constant thing, not per turn). There isn't have a worker in religion, but if there were it would produce 1 culture per turn and 1 happy face (again, a constant thing). Later in the game, you will be able to discover more advanced technologies which will make your citizens much more productive.

• Food is solely used, unsurprisingly, to generate new citizens.
  
• Resources are mainly spent to turn your unemployed workers into productive citizens. They can also be used to build wonders.
  
• Science is used to pay for new technologies.
  
• Culture is victory points.
  
• Happy faces are used to entertain your population (more on this in a moment).
  
• Military strength is used for, well, size comparisons with other players (but not for a bit yet).
  

At the top of the civilization section is the bank of blue tokens (aka the blue bank). While science and culture are stored off on their own tracks, your food and resources are represented by blue tokens. At the end of the turn, these are taken from the bank and placed onto the farm and mine cards, one per worker on the card. They will return to the blue bank when spent. You can't just save up indefinitely though: at the end of the turn, before producing anything, you need to check for corruption. The blue bank is divided into sections: you lose the amount of resources depicted to the left of the rightmost empty section, effectively 2 resources per empty section. You income is only 2 resources per turn right now though, so that's a pretty big deal. As long as you spend most of your food and resources each turn, you won't have a problem.

Later farm and mine technologies produce more food and resources, but these are still represented by one blue token, it's just that a blue token on those cards is worth more. Hence later farms and mines are extremely valuable just for the ability to store up some resources without going corrupt.


Looking below the blue bank, just above the technologies, we have the bank of yellow tokens (aka the yellow bank). This represents territory you can expand into, which you do by spending food to increase your population. This moves a yellow token from the right of the bank to the pool of unused workers. The food cost is listed below the column of tokens; this goes up gradually. [You can think of this as the first new cities going in lovely sites with abundant food, while later ones fit into increasingly more marginal locations.]

Also in the yellow bank area is your entertainment meter. When a section of the box is empty, your population has grown enough to need entertainment. Once the first two spots are empty, you need to provide one happy face, after four more, another, then one for every two places emptied beyond that. For each happy face you don't supply, you have a discontent worker who refuses to work. If they reside in the unused worker pool, this isn't a major problem. If you attempt to put them to work anyway, there are very nasty effects. The little orange cube is on the zero space of the entertainment meter as we have no happy faces yet. It will move to the left as we gain them.

Finally in the yellow bank, there is consumption. This works much like corruption except that it is paid from your new production rather than taken from what's left at the end of the turn. It starts at 0, but when the first section of yellow tokens is empty, you start having to pay one food per turn, just to keep them fed (again, if you can't afford this, very bad things happen). And the consumption continues to increase the larger your population.

So it's easy enough to expand population early on, but before too long food costs go up, net food production goes down, and you need to invest into entertaining your new citizens too. This is all really expensive, but you're not going to be able to play a one-city challenge here! The thing to take away from this is that population is a very limited resource, so you're going to have to make what population you do have much more efficient through advanced technology.

Right, that's the economy covered, and if the word snowball has come to mind, you're very much on the right track, though there are lots of brakes and bottlenecks to stop you running away too hard. On to round 1 and the card row. Well, it should be Turn 0 really, but the game refers to it as 1, so it'll only get confusing later if I don't do the same.

[rho21]

Round 1


This is the card row. It is shared between all players. On your turn, one of the things you can do is take cards from the row. These cards represent wonders, technologies, leaders and special bonuses [great people, goody huts, events, that sort of thing]. You will see they all have an A at the top. This is because they come from the Ancient age, which is the time of game setup. There are three ages in the game proper, imaginatively named Ages I, II and III, plus Age IV which is the end of days, presaging final scoring. Age I roughly corresponds to the mediaeval and renaissance, Age II to the enlightenment and industrial age, Age III to modern times.

The card row is divided into three sections, split 5:4:4. Cards in the leftmost section cost 1 action to take, in the middle section 2, in the right section 3. We'll get back to actions in a bit, but suffice to say that Round 1 is special: the first player is given one action to spend, the second player two and the third player three. All these actions must be used to take cards. This gives us a little differentiation between our initial civilizations, and helps to balance the advantage of acting first in player order.
(Only the left-most section of the card row has action costs in this picture because I have been drawn as first player, so I only have one action available. The other two sections are hence greyed out.)

In this game, I chose to take Engineering Genius, CH took Moses and chumchu took Aristotle. CH and chumchu could have taken more cards from cheaper parts of the card row had they desired, but they both preferred to grab a strong leader.


I don't have a wonder to build yet, but I'll try to grab one soon, and this card will decrease its cost significantly. [I'm not going to go through what all the cards are, what options I was considering and why I decided what I did, as that's outside the scope of this thread. I will highlight a few key cards though.]

Once all the players have taken their initial cards, cards remaining in the places marked with an X (the left two spots in a 3-player game) are removed, all cards are moved as far as possible to the left and new cards are dealt from the Age A deck to fill up the empty space.

Finally, we throw away any undealt Age A cards (another special rule just for round 1), and the game proper begins.

[rho21]

Actions

So, now I can explain how you actually go about playing the game.


This area represents your government and leader, plus gives you a summary of what's going on in the civilization area.
You can see that at the end of last turn we produced no culture, but 2 food, 2 resources and 1 science to add to the 0 we started with, and this is the amount we currently expect to get at the end of this turn too. We have 1 military strength due to our fearsome warrior. The other symbol is colonization bonus, we'll get to that much later.

Over to the right, we can see we have no current leader, and our government form is despotism. Despotism provides us with 4 civil actions (white) and 2 military actions (red) on each turn. These cannot be stocked up, use them or lose them. It also has an urban building limit of 2, more on this later.

So, what can we do with civil actions? We already know about taking cards from the card row, the only limitation on doing this is your hand size limit, which is the same as the number of civil actions you have each turn. You won't be able to afford to take as many cards as you might like anyway, though, as civil actions are also used for essentially everything else you do in the game. It costs one action to do each of these:

• Spend food to increase your population.
  
• Spend resources to move an unused worker onto a non-military technology card [building a building]
  
• Spend resources (equal to the difference in cost) to upgrade a worker already on a non-military technology to a higher level technology of the same type (the types we start with are Farm, Mine, Lab, Temple).
  
• Return a worker from a non-military technology to the unused worker pool (no refund - avoid doing this!).
  
• Play a card from your hand, paying its technology cost if appropriate.
  

Military actions have far fewer uses during the turn:

• Spend resources to move an unused worker onto a military technology card [recruiting a military unit].
  
• Spend resources (equal to the difference in cost) to upgrade a military unit to a higher level technology of the same type (the only type we start with is Infantry).
  
• Return a worker from a military technology to the unused worker pool (no refund - avoid doing this too!).
  
• Play a military tactic card (again, more on this later).
  

Up to three unspent military actions are automatically used at the end of the turn to draw military cards. I'll show you these in a bit.

You'll have guessed by now that actions are very limiting most of the time. There are lots of exciting cards that will be coming down the card row, and you won't be able to take many of them at all. If you want to grab one right after it appears, you'll have to pay even more actions for it. Once we have technology cards, you'll discover that they cost quite a bit of science, so that's also a bottleneck. In fact, that is the nature of the game: all of your various currencies are very limited. You can invest in improving each of them, but not all of them at once, and whatever you don't have will be a serious drag on your progress. And at some point you're going to have to invest in some culture too, as that's how you win the game.

[rho21]

Round 2

Time to step through another round. Here's what I see at the start of my turn:


This turn, I chose to take the Pyramids from the row for 3 actions.


They have no effect as yet. I will have to invest 6 resources over three actions (3 for the base, then 2 for the middle and 1 for the top) to build them, at which point they provide me with a civil action in every turn from then on. Yep, civil actions are so limiting that I'm investing an awful lot of them over several turns into getting just one more.

There's another wonder in the row, which would have cost just 1 action to take:

I decided the Pyramids would better suit my strategy. But it's definitely time for the first possible warning. That's a lot of actions to spend that I could have used elsewhere.
For my final action, I built another bronze mine, to increase my resource production. This will take a couple of turns to pay for itself, after which it's pure profit. I might have skipped this for two turns to be able to finish the Pyramids a turn sooner.

Now that we're into the game proper, the card row does its shuffling thing (discard any cards remaining in the first two slots, move all cards as far left as possible, fill up with new cards from the civil deck) between every turn, not just at the end of a round.

You can see how your opponents' civilizations are coming along (including what civil cards they are holding - the only hidden information is which military cards people have) using the tabs at the top of the interface. For now though, I'll show you the journal view, which summarises all the actions in the game:


As you can see, CH elected Moses, who gives you a lot of food (and hence population) early on. This is really strong, but you have to make sure you have the resources to turn that population into productive citizens, including some that produce happiness. Consequently, CH also built a bronze, and then used Moses' power twice.


chumchu had a very standard turn 2: increase population, build a bronze, elect his leader from hand, and use the final action to take a card from the row. In this case Frugality A, which will provide an extra food later.

[Jkaen]

Find this overview thread easier to follow than the other if you have plans to update this further that would be nice

[rho21]

I do, I've just been away for a few days. I'll catch up as soon as I have a moment. Glad to hear you're enjoying it.

[Mardoc]

Glad to hear you're enjoying it.

Me too

This thread changed my take on the game from 'glad they're having fun' to 'I wonder if I can find the time to join the next one'.

[rho21]

The Political Action



New turn, new rule to explain. Now we've had a chance to draw military cards (there are no military actions to draw them with in turn 1 because it's special), I can tell you about the political action.

At the start of your turn, before you can do anything else, you have one political action. This is how most of the military cards are used. You can:

• Play an event or colony (khaki green cards)
  
• Launch an aggression (brown)
  
• Declare a war (black)
  
• Offer a pact (royal blue)
  
• Cancel an active pact
  

By far the most common of these is to play an event or colony. When you do this, the event or colony you have selected goes (face down) into the future events deck and you score a number of culture equal to the age of the card you have played. Then the top card is revealed from the current events deck and has some form of effect. The game starts with a current events deck of 5 (number of players + 2) Age A events chosen randomly from 10 possible options. These are all positive for all players and give everyone a bit of a leg up in the early game. Later events are not so friendly, particularly if you are behind in strength. When the current events deck runs out, the future events deck is shuffled and becomes a new current events deck.
Seeding an event, then, is really nice. Not only do you get a little culture, you also have some idea of what will be coming up later in the game.

Aggressions and wars require you to play an appropriate card and expend a number of your military actions for the turn. I'll get back to what they do when one comes up; suffice to say they require a bit of strength difference to have any effect.

Pacts are also a type of military card. They are offered by one player to another and provide (mostly) positive effects for both if accepted.

The other two types of military card are:

• Tactics (red)
  
• Defense / Colonization (dark teal or whatever you call that colour)
  

I'll look at both of these when they happen in the game.

[rho21]

Round 3



In my military hand I have an aggression (useless at the moment) and a tactic, so I pass my political action. I probably wouldn't have seeded an event here anyway, as two of the possible Age A events require you to have an unused worker to make use of them, so it's a very good idea to have one available when these events might be coming out.


This face at the top of the gonvernment area is the interface's way of telling me I'm in danger of suffering corruption at the end of the turn. I haven't spent much yet, and I'd better get going.


I start by taking and playing Hammurabi. Hammy's special power is to be able to spend one military action per turn as a civil action. Between this and the pyramids, I'm going heavily into civil actions here, hopefully I can make this pay by grabbing more (or more expensive) cards from the row.

I increase population so as to have one spare, and to spend enough to have just avoided corruption. Lastly I grab the Engineering Genius from the row for two actions. This will make the pyramids almost free in terms of resources, and hopefully let me use those resources to build do something else useful. All the one action yellow cards are from Age A, so don't offer as much. I've deliberately avoided increasing population again because I don't need the population right now, I can afford to do so without going corrupt, and it lets me avoid any food consumption this turn.
My one spare military action draws me... another tactics card. Damn.

Heading down the card row (I couldn't afford to take them) are two excellent ways of increasing science output: Alchemy (the Age I lab) and the wonder Universitas Carolinas.Unsurprisingly, these are both grabbed for two actions, between CH and chumchu. Aristotle is now starting to come into his own, providing two extra science for chumchu this turn (who picked up Alchemy and Code of Laws).


Also of note is the first event of the game, triggered by chumchu's political action:

That's really bolstered my position, as I've not invested anything into science yet. Now I have 5, which is enough for a tech.

[rho21]

Civil Cards



It's about time I talked about the different colours of civil card (the ones you take from the card row). They work fairly similarly, but most have a special rule.

• Yellow cards are special actions. They generally provide you with a bit of extra stuff of one sort or another when you play them. Special rule: they can't be played on the turn they are picked up.
  
• Purple cards are wonders. Special rules: they go to a special wonder under construction spot rather than into your hand; you can only have one wonder under construction at a time; it costs one extra action to take a new wonder per completed wonder you have.
  
• Green cards are leaders. Special rule: you may only take one leader per age, no matter what.
  

The remaining cards are all technology cards (i.e. they cost science). You may never take a second copy of a technology card you have already drawn (so no stealing all of a good card).

• Brown cards are farming and mining tech.
  
• Grey cards are urban building techs: labs, libraries, temples, arenas and theatres. Special rule: you're not allowed more than your urban building limit (determined by your government, ranges from 2-4) of citizens working each type.
  
• Red cards are military techs: infantry, cavalry (from age I on), artillery (from age II on) and air forces (age III only).
  
• Blue cards are civics: civil (more civil actions), military (more military actions and some strength), construction (cheaper buildings, quicker wonders) and exploration (colonization bonus and a little strength). Special rule: playing a new one of a type you already have removes the old one of that type from play.
  
• Orange cards are governments. Special rules: they replace the current government when played; they have two science values, one for normal play, the other if you declare a revolution. A revolution spends all of your civil actions for the turn.
  

There are 4 wonders and 6 leaders in each age, but it's important to note that there aren't as many copies of the technologies as there are players in the game, in fact there's only one of many of them. A definite incentive to grab something you want while you have the chance.

You can look at the distribution of cards using the civilopedia or the poorly named discard pile (depicted below, this one's from a different game). This shows all the civil cards, with those remaining in the card row and deck highlighted.
(spoiled for size)