Rick Played: Through the Ages

Friday night, Brian and I played Through The Ages, a boardgame where each player creates a civilization from its early days and sees it through to the modern era, competing with the other civs to score the most Culture Points and thus be named Bestest Civ of them All. 

It's a very highly ranked game on Boardgamegeek.com, and it's by one of my favorite designers Vlaada Chvátil (of Space Alert, Galaxy Trucker, and Mage Knight fame). I think it probably is a really good game, but it's also very finnicky. I've played it twice now, once the simple version and once the advanced (still haven't played the Full version). Brian and I enjoyed ourselves, but we kept thinking we must be doing something wrong.

In some cases, we totally were, but we figured those mistakes out mid-game. As we were packing up, we both talked about how it felt like we'd made some basic, fundamental error. I got online after he left, and discovered that, no, we'd gotten everything pretty much right (except obviously the mistakes we caught ourselves). I think then what we maybe got wrong was the strategy, especially in the early game. I don't think we were using out population as much as we should've been, maybe because neither of us upgraded our farms. There are a lot of moving pieces and mechanics to this game, but we both want to play again, with at least a third person, to see its full potential.