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new (to us) game: Seven Ages
This is a long game if you play it all the way through. A review that Dani read put it roughly like this: there are the games where you invite some people over for an afternoon. And then there are the games where you plan a month in advance for a long day, playing through lunch and dinner. Seven Ages isn't like that; for it you plan half a year in advance for a long weekend and begin accumulating spousal karma points.
Needless to say, we played a subset of the game. (This was true for Dani at Origins as well.) Fortunately, there are ways to partition it reasonably. We ended up playing one age, more or less.
We spent probably the first two hours on teaching the rules. By the end of this I was contemplating bailing because it sounded too complicated for my tastes, but it wasn't actually as complex as it sounded. There are some seldom-used rules and some unnecessary complications to the game, so there wasn't quite as much to internalize as I had feared. I'm glad I played.
The game is vaguely reminiscent of History of the World. History is divided into seven ages, and each empire can be played in a subset of those ages. There are about a hundred empires in the game, and it appears that empires are meant to be somewhat disposable -- play them for as long as they're scoring reasonably and then dump them for new ones. (Part of the trick is figuring out when to make this call.)
The mechanism for doing this is cards. Each player starts with half a dozen cards. Each card can be played in (only) one of several ways: it can be used to start an empire; it can be used to build an artifact, or it can be used to cause an event. Each card has a specific empire, a specific artifact, and a specific effect. So, for example, you might have a card that can be used to play the Vikings (ages 3-5), or create the hanging gardens (ages 1-2), or cause another player to lose part of his turn. Some uses will not be available, for example empires starting in the wrong ages. Cards are not automatically replaced when you play them.
In any given turn, you can perform one action per empire you have in play (most people will have two empires at a time), and one additional action. There are several possible actions: start an empire, build units, move, trade with another empire, "civilize" an empire (cities, leaders, artifacts), replace cards, and disband an empire. (The game is token-limited so you usually have to disband one to start another.)
So, in a way that reminds me a bit of Puerto Rico, while there are many things you would like to do, you can only do one at a time -- build units this turn and move them next turn, for instance. Unlike Puerto Rico, not everyone is doing the same things; the method for implementing this is that you secretly determine your actions and then take them in order -- everyone starting an empire does, and then everyone producing units does, and so on until everyone's been accounted for.
Each empire has a set of scoring criteria; these vary by empire. For example, the early Egyptians might get points for dominating Africa, for dominating the world, and for having artifacts. The Mongols, on the other hand, might get points for world domination and for conquering other empires. ("Domination" is an overstatement; you dominate an area if you have more territories than anyone else. I got the world-domination points for Macedonia with about half of Europe; meanwhile, there was lots of action in India, China, and even the new world, but it's plurality, not majority.)
The first player starts his empire at the beginning of the relevant age. (The first player can choose any age, so you could have a short game that occurs only in age seven.) Everyone else starts on the "progress track" relative to the leader. The delta varies; I saw -1 through -7. An age consists of seven positions, so you can end up with empires in different ages concurrently. That's ok; the game is considered to be in the age of the most-advanced empire (and that's what determines which empires can start), but your particular empire is in whatever age is represented by your progress marker. Typically, you advance one position per turn, except for several dark ages that require more effort to get out of.
Progress is tied to empires; your score, however, is tied to "glory points". When your empire gets points for dominating the world or whatever, those are glory points. It's possible to lose glory points, though we didn't see much of that.
There are 15 sets of tokens, so in a seven-player game everyone gets two and the first player to be able to use it gets the last one. In a six-player game, you'd probably have half the people playing two and half playing three, though an aggressive player might be able to grab four. I suepect that grabbing extra empires is akin to painting a target on your forehead, though it wasn't as severe in our game as I thought it would be. (I was the first person to have the opportunity to start a third empire, but I chose not to for that reason. That might have been a mistake.)
We declared that the game would start in one of the first two ages; we
wanted to play a simpler game and saw no need to jump straight to bombers,
submarines, and nuclear weapons. The first player started with Persia,
at the beginning of age 2, so everyone else ended up being partway through
age 1 at the beginning. I started with Macedonia. (I had been planning
to start with Egypt, but the Persians made a beeline for the Nile and I
decided to hold off.) I didn't note all the starting empires; we had
one in India, one in China, one in North America (some flavor of early
natives), at least one more in the middle east, and the last one was either
in the middle east or in eastern Asia.
My second empire was Egypt (when I perceived Persia to be less of a threat). Another empire started in north Africa but didn't seem interested in conquering either of mine; one started in southern Africa and looked like it would be some trouble for Egypt. The middle east was, well, the middle east. I wasn't paying a lot of attention to Asia and the new world.
The Macedonians managed to build up and spread out. Unfortunately, they got no points for dominating Europe; they instead got points for dominating Asia. Which was far enough away that that never happened. (Yeah, historically sure. But it didn't play out.) I did, however, get points for dominating the world almost every round, but it wasn't worth a lot of points.
I had high hopes for Egypt, but I got hosed by a couple of disasters (sent by other players) before it really got off the ground, so I ended up getting a few points but not being able to take over eastern Africa and part of the Saudi peninsula like I thought I would. I was getting ready to bring in the Vikings when the game ended.
Over the course of the age we saw one empire abandoned, one wiped out by disaster, a couple thrown into disorder, and almost no combat. I don't know how typical that is. I assume you get more combat in later ages when units can move farther.
We had agreed that we would pause at the end of the age or a certain time (whichever came first) and then decide how far to play. When we hit the age condition an hour before the time condition, we decided that stopping there made more sense than playing part of an age. So this meant we probably played for about five hours, not counting the teaching, and in that time one player advanced one age (seven positions on the progress tracker). The lead player on that tracker was not the winner, though; we saw a lot of card play (events) in the last round that really changed a lot of stuff.
The game was fun and I would definitely play again unders similar circumstances (one age or a reasonable time limit). I do not forsee having the stamina or interest to play a game running through all seven ages.
The game producers made some decisions that I would have made differently
were it my call.
First off, physically the game is put together badly. The board is very flimsy (glorified paper); I think we'll need to mount it on pieces of posterboard (or similar) before playing again. It wasn't lying flat due to the folds and it was way too easy to bump with unfortunate effects. The board is also huge; it occupied most of our dining-room table, meaning that we needed to use supplementary tray tables and chairs to hold the myriad small units.
You also have to be very careful when punching out the bazillions of cardboard pieces. We had a few that peeled apart in the process and had to be glued.
The art on some of the pieces is hard to understand. Fortunately, pieces are also numbered and you eventually learn that spearmen are 1s and archers are 3s and chariots are 8s and so on. (These numbers, by the way, specify your minimum position on the progress chart before you can bring them in. So if the game starts at age 2 (position 8) and your empire starts at -5, you're kind of limited. You always get spearmen and archers, though.)
The game has some unnecessary "variation for the sake of variation". Each of the 15 sets of playing pieces contains a slightly different mix of unit types. You always play the same pieces (once you start), though, so it's not like you can choose the chariot-heavy group for Egypt and then switch to the boat-heavy group for the Vikings and so on. We chose colors randomly, but I assume that people who play a lot would learn which colors have what make-ups and play accordingly. This adds nothing positive to the game in my opinion.
We found ourselves having to consult multi-page cheat sheets several times per round. These were cheat sheets that Dani printed out from somewhere; they didn't come with the game. Perhaps some better playing aids could have alleviated some of this need.
On the positive side, the rules, while long and sometimes too complicated, were not hard to understand. We did not find ourselves having to guess about what was meant.