7/4/2023 0 Comments Roll through the ages![]() Roll Dice and Collect Goods or Food - Roll 1 die for each city you possess. On your turn, you may perform all of the following steps, if your dice roll permits you:ġ. Iron Age is more for players who already know the original, who already like it, and want to inject some new elements.Game Play - The game is played over a series of rounds, with every player taking a turn each round. If you are new to the series, I would recommend starting with the original game, which is more straight-forward and plays more smoothly, but still has decent strategic depth. The basics are familiar, but the overall feel is a little different. If you like Roll Through the Ages, you should give Iron Age a try. I'm not sure whether it was more because we were unfamiliar with it, or the game is indeed more complex than the original and takes longer to play. You have more decisions to make than the original game. Iron Age felt more like a full-fledged boardgame than a filler-type dice game. You deal less with specific goods, and you have to manage the arms race more. In the Iron Age, a slightly different story is being told. How it uses a dice mechanism to tell the story of a growing civilisation is interesting. It is quite straight-forward, but it has some strategic depth. ![]() Roll Through the Ages is a filler, and can be completed in about half an hour to 45 minutes. Other than the fate die, the basic dice in the game have also changed. On the right side, the sun means a drought, and the food production on every die is reduced by one. On the left side of the die, the helmet icon means you have the option to initiate a conquest. ![]() In this photo, the smoking bones icon means a good omen - you can set this die to any face you want. It may allow you to initiate a conquest or demand tribute. This yellow fate die is new in the Iron Age. The game can end in three different ways - when a player discovers a specific number of techs, when a player scores a specific number of tribute points, or when all monuments are completed. The possible new phases are warfare and tribute. You may spend goods, gold and innovation points to discover a new technology. After rolling dice, you collect goods, workers and food, and then spend them to build ports, settle provinces, build ships, build armies and construct monuments. You get to roll up to three times, just that dice showing skulls (disasters) are locked and cannot be rerolled. The turn sequence is very similar to the base game. Provinces increase your military strength and award tribute points. Ports increase your rate of collecting goods too, and do not consume food. In the base game, the more cities you build, the more dice you roll. This is the player sheet used in Iron Age. The others don't lose points, but they can deny you points by paying you one good. One of the die rolls let you demand tribute, which is basically scoring points depending on how much stronger you are compared to every other player. You don't directly attack a fellow player, but your military strength difference does come into play because of the other new mechanism - the tribute. You win or lose points depending on how well you fare. Some die rolls let you decide to initiate a war of conquest, which lets you score points depending on how large your army is. You spend food and population to build armies, which are of course used for war. They are worth points, and can also be used for war. Once you discover the ship-building tech, you can build ships. You spend both gold and goods to discover new technologies. This is akin to investing and earning interest, because gold is worth more than the original goods it is converted from. ![]() You can convert goods to gold to be used on a future turn. If you expand your empire by settling more provinces, you will need more grain to feed your population every turn. ![]()
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