Harrowed Halls

This week during games we traveled back to the Stone Age. Evil Mike says I should know a lot about it since I was alive back then. Normally I would throw down the gauntlet and say something like “Let’s just see who wins this Stone Age!” It turns out that Mike was wrong; I really don’t know much about the Stone Age. Mike beat us by a substantial margin. But I get ahead of myself. Let’s talk a little about the game.

At first glance you might think Stone Age is just another resource management game: gather wood and bricks and use them to build the things you need. But it’s really more about managing your tribe and using each member to their best potential for scoring victory points. Each round you must make a decision where to place your tribe members. Will they be hunters, collectors, farmers, or tool makers? Some areas have a limit to the number of tribe members that you can place in them, so you almost never get to place them everywhere you want to. Add to that an ever changing set of huts and cards that produce victory points and give you extra resources–so each round to presents a new set of options. Oh, and at the end of each round you have to feed your tribe. If you don’t, you can lose a lot of victory points.

There are many strategies for getting victory points. This is one of the factors that makes the game fun to play. Also, you really don’t know how well you are doing until the end of the game when the points are tallied up. In our game, Mike was the clear leader by about 30 points, while only 4 points separated the rest of us. We all thought Ben was doing really well, and he end up in last place.

I’m sure we’ll be playing more of Stone Age.