Through the Ages is magnificent, provided you’re willing to spend hours playing a game rife with tension and inevitable brutality. It’s an implementation of a civilization game that forgoes a common territory-acquiring board. Instead, you use action points to improve your tableau so that it generates culture (i.e., points), ore (i.e., building resources), and science (i.e., a resource to gain technologies), while also ensuring that you have military might to either ward off various forms of attacks or conduct your own onslaughts. You also need to obtain and spend food to recruit population for which you spend ore to create buildings that generate the various resources (i.e., culture, ore, science, food, or military).
You rarely have enough actions to accomplish all that you desire, and the game imposes restrictions on you in that you must have enough ore and science to build per your plan. Plus, buildings provide limits on how many workers they can accommodate, and you have a hand limit that corresponds to the number of action points you may spend on a turn. Adding to the complexity is that if you accumulate too many resources then you lose ore due to corruption (i.e., you acquire but do not spend the ore). Corruption can arise due to various reasons, but a common one is that you lack food to produce population and thus do not have a means of spending ore due to using ore to turn population into buildings is a primary way of spending ore. Altogether, you navigate numerous constraints while planning the current turn with a mind toward opportunities ahead.
These actions points may also be expended to draft cards from a flowing river of options that represents the passing of time, in that the faster cards are removed from the display the quicker the game advances through the four ages (i.e., a quasi-stand-in for rounds), such that cards serve as a timer and a representation of society’s evolution into more powerful versions of options that arose during prior ages of the game. Thus, you must continually decide whether to invest in an improvement that one age offers or wait for a successor age’s version of the card, forgoing benefits earlier in the game (that will continue to accrue during later ages) or save resources at the given moment to bump to an improved version of that card later. Given that you shuffle the cards for each age before you begin the game, you never quite know how many turns you might wait before you see what you want. Other players may want the same card, forcing you to gamble that you will be positioned to grab it before an opponent manages to do so.
Outside of a handful of situations, culture tends to not do much for you in terms of improving your game state. Various cards produce culture or earn you culture points, but culture itself does not provide any benefit other than being the goal of the game. For whomever has the most culture at the end of the game wins. When to start your means to generate culture remains a forefront quandary during any game, for the early you start it oftentimes means you’re forgoing or at least reducing your ability to generate some of integral engine-building component, which might cause your empire to stall out later in the game. If you wait too long to acquire culture, then you may never catch up to those that began to accrue culture earlier. It’s wonderful dynamic, which gets further complicated by how important military strength is for ensuring your opponents do not dominate you.
Cards you can draft—alongside additional “tactics cards,” that I won’t get into as well as certain leaders who boost your military—enable you to increase your military strength. At the start of each player’s turn the person can choose to seed and event that will arise later or conduct an aggression against another player who has a lower military strength. Even if you have more military strength, your card can play cards or sacrifice military units to increase their defense capabilities, resulting in many aggressions not necessarily being sure things. Events you seed run the gamut in terms of what they might do, but many reward or harm players depending on whether they have the most or least military might, so you generally want to ensure you’re not the weakest to avoid aggressions as well as events that target weakest civilizations. This produces another sort of resource (i.e., military) that plays out as a ranking mechanism across players and can provide benefits but may not do so, but lacking it raises the risk that you get hammered due to disregarding its importance. With military, along with culture, being things you need but not necessarily things you want to invest in at various times in the game, you’ll be negotiating your goals with the realities of the game state, thereby—along with the variability of the river that is cards figuratively passing through time—ensuring that each turn feels dynamic, for you cannot script future turns based on the moment due to how what others do on their turns will surely influence your next turn.
Without the military aspect, your turns may feel somewhat like navigating Excel spreadsheets to ferret out maximizations. This sort of thinking is admittedly fun for many gamers (me included). However, with the military aspect, you find yourself interested in what other players are doing, and how their actions might impact you forces you to move your focus from your Excel sheet to considerations of how others are conducting their own efficiency puzzles. That the cards coming down the options river are also limited and that Age III event cards provide culture based on who is ranked where for different tableau builds, you’ll oftentimes need to shore up your weaknesses even though you have no other intrinsic wish to do so. Thus, Through the Ages foremost has you care about your personal board state while also remaining ever mindful of what others are up to.
Through the Ages is one of my foundational games. Not that it represents the birth of my gaming hobby or necessarily is part of the first, nor second, phase of games that entered my life. Rather, it’s one of the games that saw ample play during my first dedicated gaming group. Prior to 2008, with 2010 being the banner year for consistent gaming, I would entice roommates and other friends to play various games, but nothing stuck in terms of being regular, and an experience like Through the Ages was not realistic if you’re not going to have repeat performances given its learning curve and length. Once a committed, consistent group of us arose, Power Grid, El Grande, and Through the Ages became our go-to options. With each of these gems, as the ending drew near, we would stand over the pieces, staring down, and immersed in conversation and planning as our final attempts to secure the winning position manifested. My desire to play El Grande and Power Grid have lessened, yet Through the Ages remains something I’d love to throw down, even though it’s not an option available for no one I know seems to play it. Consequently, I’ll play the AI in the app version during a long flight or other period where downtime persists, but otherwise it largely resides in nostalgia, prompting a smile for time spent amongst friends and laughter, tinged with ruthlessness.
I’ll add that I’m sort of terrible at the game, which is another facet that I love. Any game that beats me down, finds me inevitably losing, but retains is focus of my desire has some manner of cachet that warrants a prominent location on my game shelf.