Through the Ages - demo game and rules explanation

[rho21]

Round 15



So. Weakest again. I'm 8 strength down on CH, 10 on chumchu. I don't have the resources to improve military much directly (given the need for happiness first), but I do at least have a couple of bonus cards for defence. I could try to ride it out for a round while getting computers into play in order to maximise my points from First Space Flight.

My plan was to turn science into defence though: I picked up Military Theory and played it, with the help of Revolutionary Idea and the ongoing Scientific Cooperation. Expensive, both in civil actions and science, but 5 extra strength to secure my borders looks vital. That was most of my turn; the remaining two actions were used to build a religion, temporarily fixing my happiness problem, and with no useful yellow cards to take in the 1-cost section, increasing population.

CH finally popped the event we've been waiting for for a while, and it's a colony: Wealthy Territory II.


A pretty reasonable colony: I could really use 9 extra resources here (less whatever I have to pay to rebuild military, anyway) to let me do more than just build First Space Flight before the end of the game. It might also be valuable if someone seeds Impact of Colonies. CH also likes the look of it and opens the bidding at 7, which chumchu passes. This isn't the ideal turn for a colony, again: if I bid for it, I will be very weak until I have the chance to rebuild, and will almost certainly get attacked by chumchu. There's one difference this time though: after my military card draw, I am now holding three bonus cards. If I sacrifice my air force, losing 12 strength, I will only be 17 behind chumchu, which can be defended with those bonus cards. (Sacrificing any of the other units costs more strength because I lose the entire doubled army bonus.)
Combined with my colonization bonus from Navigation, an air force provides a sacrifice of value 8, so that was my bid. If CH had bid any higher, I would have had to give up. Thankfully, this didn't happen and the colony was mine.

CH discovered Computers, upgraded a philosopher, then elected Gates. Production galore. Another arena fixed the happiness problem, then CH built a stage of the Kremlin and picked up Reserves and Movies. With Napoleon superseded, CH's strength is now down to 31.

chumchu attacked me (as expected) and was repulsed, then picked up the Internet. Aha, the plan is revealed: Sid will score lots of points to propel chumchu into the lead, and the Internet will be worth enough points to hopefully hold off my gains from First Space Flight. Before electing Sid (in order to take advantage of Newton's special power), chumchu took and played Satellites. Picking up reserves, increasing population and building another scientific method (for more points with Sid) took up the rest of chumchu's turn.

So, that means chumchu now produces 11 culture a turn compared to my 4, and at the end of the turn goes into a 3-point lead: it's currently chumchu 40, me 37, CH 28.

[rho21]

How the Game Ends

I said no more interludes, but I forgot that I haven't told you how the game ends. It's pretty simple: when the civil deck for Age III runs out, you perform a normal End of Age phase, then play to the end of the next round. More precisely, everyone has at least one more turn, and everyone ends up having had the same number of turns. So if Age III were to end at the end of chumchu's turn, we would all have one more turn; if it finished after my turn, CH and chumchu would have two more turns while I would have only one more.

When that's done, all the Age III events remaining in the current and future events decks are resolved and Bill Gates scores. And that's it.

[rho21]

Round 16



So, with the age about to end, I know for certain that I have just two more turns. Both the impacts I've drawn are potentially pretty good for me, so I bite the bullet and seed Impact of Wonders. Assuming the wonders under construction are completed, this will score 11 for me, 7 for CH and 6 for chumchu. Add the 3 culture I'm getting for playing it, and that's a reasonable swing. On the minus side, some very bad things could come out of the events deck while I'm weakest. Admittedly the Age II events are generally a bit less focused on that, but it's still a risk. Even worse, Iconoclasm (the event I seeded) could come out: Robespierre would die, fairly irrelevantly, but far more importantly Sid would survive the Iconoclasm and go on to score more points for chumchu.

What actually came out was Popularization of Science, scoring 6 points for me and chumchu and 8 for CH. Not ideal, as I'm just about to increase my science production a fair way, but I'll take it gladly.


Architecture, and more importantly Engineering Genius will be discarded if I don't use them this turn, so I built two stages of the First Space Flight by hand and then employed the Genius to build the third stage free. The remaining stage should wait until next turn for maximum benefit.

At this point I knew I would have 22 resources more to spend before the end of the game. 9 of these were earmarked for finishing the wonder, and of course I used 7 immediately to rebuild my Air Forces. How best to use the remaining 6?

I eventually decided to take and elect Einstein: I should be able to get two more techs out, so he'll be worth six culture. I then discovered Computers and did one upgrade for 3 resources. I increased population, and my final three resources went on a swordsman, mostly to bring myself within 6 strength of chumchu. This means I can definitely defend against an aggression, despite having just spent lots of bonus cards. There's also a chance it will be relevant when scoring the impacts, though I'm not holding out much hope there. Maybe I would have been better using those resources on an extra religion for a point (I was out of civil actions to build one this turn) and a better score if Impact of Happiness has been played, but this way feels safer, and it doesn't looks as if either of the others has been prioritising happiness.

I did consider taking one more card from the row, in order that the age would finish immediately rather than on CH's turn. This would have caused the Kremlin to be discarded, painfully for CH. It would also have obsoleted our Scientific Cooperation pact, saving me a science. I probably would have done if I hadn't had more important calls for my civil actions.

CH duly completed the Kremlin, played Strategy, upgraded the second philosopher to Computers and picked up a couple of yellow cards.

chumchu seeded an event, producing International Agreement:

chumchu was still strongest and accepted the opportunity, picking up Engineering, Efficient Upgrade, Urban Growth and Movies. Quite a boon as chumchu could immediately make use of all of those cards, discovering the two techs, building a movie and efficiently upgrading a drama to another movie. Wow, that's an insanely good turn, and chumchu also had the spare actions to pick up Engineering Genius. +17 culture now, and this game looks to be swinging to chumchu.

[rho21]

Round 17

Final turn! Time for a final look around.

Cheater Hater:


CH has lovely resource production, but is falling well behind on culture. The military game hasn't really panned out this time. Endowment for the Arts and Movies will provide a little culture, but it doesn't look to be enough to catch up. Has seeded one impact so far.

---

chumchu:


The second half of Age III has been really nice to chumchu. Currently strongest and most culture and with most culture income by a long way. Enough resources to finish the Internet and upgrade the final dramatist to Movies. Assuming this, the score for the internet will be 24. Also one impact seeded; international agreement means no political action this turn so that'll be the only one.

---

And me:


Things haven't really worked out quite right. Far too much scrambling for military position, not enough generation of culture. The big plus point was getting hold of First Space Flight which will be worth 25 points, but that's about it here. Impact of Wonders will produce a few relative points, but there's no big swing (that I know about) awaiting me in the deck.

---

So, first off, let's consider the events I'm holding and their current points value:


Technology: me 12, CH 4, chumchu 16
Balance: me 8, CH 6, chumchu 4
Government: me 21, CH 20, chumchu 18

All of these are worth seeding (remembering that I can play a technology, and will get 3 points for playing the event). Balance would normally be my choice, but I have the science on hand to play Civil Service, which will make Government 4 points better for me than it is now. Moreover, I really want Iconoclasm to come out before the end of the game. It will take 6 off chumchu's culture income for the turn and 3 more off the Internet's value. If it appears right away, the loss of Einstein will cost me 3 points, but you can't have everything.

In fact, the event that appears is Prosperity, providing us all extra food according to our happiness. This gives me enough food to increase population, which will be worth a couple of points if Impact of Population is in the deck.

Anyway, there's not much to my turn: take and discover civil service, finish First Space Flight and increase population. I would normally try to guess the impacts my opponents might have seeded but I'm out of resources so there's nothing more I can do to influence the result. I finished the turn on 88 culture.

Happily CH chose to play a second impact, so Iconoclasm appears at the perfect moment for me.
CH can build two movies for 11 culture income, finishing on 65.

chumchu upgraded the Drama and built the Internet, as expected, to finish on 100 culture.

So... there are just 5 impacts left to score. 3 unknown, plus Wonders and Government.
Accounting for the two events I've played, the totals are:
124 me
124 chumchu
92 CH

This could go either way, it all depends on how good chumchu's event is, and whether CH's two events help me or chumchu more.

[rho21]

Final Score, Review & Conclusion

The results are in. chumchu had played Impact of Happiness, while CH had seeded Variety and Competition.


All of which bring the total scores to...

159 Me
158 chumchu
132 Cheater Hater

......

Wow, I wasn't expecting to win that one, and certainly not by such a small margin. It was likely that chumchu would have had a good event to seed (Impact of Happiness was largely neutral), and it was always going to be a toss up whether CH's impacts would help chumchu more than me.

Whenever a game is this close, there are invariably many things that might have turned out slightly differently and changed the result by far more than the margin of victory. Iconoclasm appearing one turn earlier (a 3-point swing to chumchu) stands out as an obvious possibility, but there are many others.


Review

This was Cheater Hater's first game, and it was played very well for a beginner. It's always easy to underestimate the competition for key cards or to fall down a military hole that's hard to drag yourself out of. CH avoided these pitfalls, but it all went wrong in converting from economy to culture in the late game, which I think is the trickiest thing to get right when you're just starting out. The plan appeared to be to turn production into military strength and use attacks to steal enough culture for victory, but CH just couldn't put together a military advantage for long enough to bring it to bear effectively. Again, a tough thing to do correctly. The only other major mistake was the Kremlin, which blocked the wonder-under-construction slot for all of Age III.

I'm looking forward to playing more games with CH, who I'm sure will be a force to be reckoned with given a bit more experience.

chumchu's and my civilizations didn't quite work out as we intended. We both wanted to get culture flowing much earlier but things didn't quite click. In this context, chumchu's late push into culture was very nearly enough to win the game, and was only defeated by some lucky event draws for me. The clash of science against production (by which I mean how our civilizations were specialised towards the start of the game) was an interesting one. Given the result of the game, I don't feel we can draw any strong conclusions one way or the other!

Overall a relatively low-scoring game, as things go: I've seen winning scores range anywhere from 90 to 300. This isn't particularly surprising as it was also a turn shorter than normal, driven by all of us having extra civil actions early on with which to take more cards.


Conclusion

Through the Ages is a game I love, full of flavour yet with very deep, solid and strategic mechanics. It manages to distill the core of Civilization into a board game without losing the parts which draw many players to the series. I feel strongly that the game design is worthy of the attention of designers of future installments of the Civilization franchise. Not that I think that the computer game can ditch the map, more that the meaningful strategic choices, the feeling of progress as your civilization develops and the careful pacing that draws the game to a conclusion at the perfect time combine to demonstrate the key features a Civilization game should strive to encompass.

The skill of the game lies in your ability to respond to the hand it deals you. You must adapt your strategy frequently to keep up with the changing military situation and key cards not showing up when you want them. Of course this means there's an element of luck, but first appearances are a bit deceiving on how large an element that is. A strong player will be able to mitigate bad fortune and take advantage of good fortune to come out on top most of the time.

My thanks to chumchu and Cheater Hater for making this a memorable game with a very tight finish. My thanks also to Vlaada Chvátil for such a masterpiece of game design.

Lastly, my thanks to everyone who has read this far. I very much hope some of you will join us for a game in the future.

[Cheater Hater]

Yeah, I ended up in the military game, but I couldn't take advantage of it, mostly since I underestimated Air Forces (I didn't want to take it for 3, but the two cards I did take (Rockets and Fundamentalism) I didn't even play). I also don't remember getting much military in Age III--I drew two wars in Age II, but no Age III Aggressions/Wars.

Of course, my "fall greatly behind on military" game appears to be this one--I'm sure we'll have a great deconstruction of it once it is over.