Thursday, October 1, 2009

Stone age: doing it dinosaur style

I love board games. I love the interaction. I love the components. Mostly, I love the fun my group has while playing them. The game I picked up the other day was stone age, and it has all the things I look for in a game.
The first thing I noticed, when I opened the box, was the quality of the components. Unlike many euro games I played, this had wood that looked like wood, stone that looked like stone, gold and brick--you get the picture. it looked good. It came with a leather dice cup, wooden dice, caveman shaped meeples, a 1st player marker that stood up, and a beautifully illustrated game board and player boards. The only problem I could find with the components was the stinky smell the dice cup exuded and the cardboard food tokens when everything else was made of wood.
The game play was simple. It composed worker placement with a light amount of dice rolling. With the dice luck was a component early on, but the tool mechanic helps take that away by nudging the total of the dice. The rules were pretty straight forward. Everything was self explanatory after we had the rules and didn’t ever need to reference the rule book once during game play.
I am not going into depth into the rules but I have to say the selling point for me was the breeding hut. I mean, what’s better then making the cave people go dinosaur style. It was my girlfriend’s favorite place to place her meeples. She would lay the “newly born” meeple down with the two “parents” over it. “Proud parents,” She’d comment. I’d laugh, she’d laugh, and I am sure the meeples died a little inside.
The only problem I had with the game play was that we kept running out of resources. Luckily, this can be fixed with a set from mayday that will provide more resources and wooden tokens to replace those silly food tokens.
All and all this is a great game. It’s heavy enough for my gamer friends to like but not too heavy for my girlfriend to hate. I would give it a 8/10. Include the extra token set 9/10.