For one thing, there's virtually no player interaction. Since you get three or four rerolls (though you have to keep skulls), you'll have a chance to do something, even if it does end up being getting invaded and making an incredible number of clay pots. In fact, the luck is part of the game - you roll and make the best of what you get.
Poor planning at the beginning can sink you at the end, and a few bad rolls will ruin your day, but for the most part, the luck works out. It's a ton of luck, what with all the dice, but it's still fairly even. Everyone else gets to hit him with an orange in a sock for pretending to be King Tut.īy and large, I really enjoy Roll Through the Ages. The player who built the most impressive civilization, as shown by adding up all your good stuff and subtracting all your disasters, gets to pretend he's King Tut. When all the monuments have been built, or someone finishes five different developments, the game ends and everyone counts up their scores to see if they were the most impressive budding civilization. It doesn't do much good to develop masonry if everyone revolts before you even get to build a brick outhouse. You have to keep track of all these lost points, because at the end of the game, you subtract all those points from your achievements.
You'll roll too many skulls and wind up with drought, or invasion, or really itchy scalp way before anyone invents Selsun Blue. Let's face it - nobody goes to visit the other Machu Picchu.Īs the game progresses, bad stuff is going to happen. And all the while, you have to keep ahead of the Joneses, because it would be just like those damned Babylonians to go and build the Great Wall first, and leave the Chinese looking like copycats. You need workers to build more cities, and erect those gaudy monuments that must have seemed totally unnecessary at the time, but ended up being used by enterprising locals as tourist attractions for centuries (showing that the Bronze Age rulers had an incredible amount of vision). You need goods and coins to develop stuff like medicine and granaries and architecture. You need food to feed your cities, and the more cities you have, the more food you need. The skulls are the ones to watch for, though - roll a few of these, and you might get invaded by Huns or give all your opponents smallpox (OK, that's actually kind of fun).Įvery turn, you have several things to manage. The dice are all the same, but they have crazy stuff on every side, like one side will have three pieces of wheat, another has a jar of something-or-other, another has some people on it, and other sides have coins and skulls. You start off with three cities, and each city lets you roll a die. Roll Through the Ages makes the whole thing easy. Can you imagine how much more difficult it would have been if we had actually been required to hire slaves and make them drag big stone blocks around? God, the paperwork alone must have been a nightmare. I mean, when I played Roll Through the Ages, we managed to build cities, erect monuments, and develop irrigation in less than an hour. Now, if those ancient tribes of primitive leaders had just had a set of wooden dice, things might have been a lot easier. Between famine and pestilence and sex scandal in the White Palace, being in charge of an emerging civilization must have been harder than a job as Christian Bale's anger management coach. I mean, my day job is to make catalogs, and that can sometimes be tough, but taking a civilization from stone weapons to the Great Pyramids just seems like it would really be a bitch. Developing a new civilization has to be one hell of a tricky day job.
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