Aug 15, 2018  Through the Ages — the official adaptation of the eponymous strategy under the genre of the board game, which has no analogs for the richness of the actions and the sharpness of the gameplay. This game is noted (by some critics) as the best in the genre at all times and has one of the biggest game stories in the genre as a whole.

Through the Ages marks the highest ranked BGG to receive an app port (take that Twilight Struggle, slacking at #3!), but it also marks a new bar in complexity for a digital port. The game carries a hefty weight rating on BGG, with Mage Knight being the only other top 20 to come close. As far as ports go, was the previous heaviest game to hit mobile devices. All of this is to say that CGE Digital had their work cut out for them and I’m not going to be able to come close to describing the more intricate parts of this game in this review. I hope to provide a brief overview of the game and then go a little further into some specifics on why this is such a beloved game. A turn in Through the Ages has a player carrying out three phases: Politics, Action, and Production.

Hot wheels crash free download. Presently right snap the.compress record and snap on ‘Concentrate to Crash Wheels’.

There is an optional discard phase which is triggered if you have too many Politics cards in your hand. Politics allow you to do things like declare war, offer peace treaties, or queue up an event to be played later (this also reveals a previously queued event).

Politics is the phase in which you interact with other civilizations, while the Action phase is where you build your own civilization. The bulk of the game is spent in the Action phase, which is where you draft new cards, create/assign workers, develop new technologies, build military, and so on. The Action phase is fueled by Civil and Military action points. Military actions can be spent on creating new troops, starting with simple foot soldiers, later advancing as far as fighter jets and rockets.

Civil actions are used to do everything else. Each time to take an action, you must spend an action point to do so. You can gain or lose the amount of action points you get every turn throughout the game, primarily by changing your government. The final phase is Production, which simply delivers the goods your civilization produces for that turn. The game ends following a brief, one round Age IV after Age III’s cards are depleted.

After Age IV a few political cards are scored and the player with the highest culture total wins. Goods are broken down into: food, resources, science, and culture.

Food is used to create new workers, resources are used to build just about everything, science is used to generate new technologies, and culture act as victory points. Ultimately, the game comes down to what cards you are able to take from the card row. The currency used to acquire new cards are your civil action points, cards to the left are cheaper than cards to the right and cards on the left also age out every turn. These cards will fit under a few different categories: action cards, technologies (with a few different sub-categories), leaders, and wonders.

Action cards give you goods or discounts, technologies allow you to unlock the ability to build better buildings, leaders provide special bonuses to your civilization during the current age, and wonders take a while to build but can provide substantial instantaneous or ongoing bonuses. Buildings are what, generally, generate your goods. You start with the basic buildings to produce a single food, resource, etc and must upgrade throughout the game to produce enough to build the newest technologies to earn more culture.

A classic engine building experience. Basically, it’s absolutely fantastic. The thing Through the Ages does that so many other engine building games don’t, in my opinion, is force you to leave behind certain aspects. I REALLY want to slowly and steadily build up all four good productions in my civilization, this results in a constant stream of losses. I take a look at the AI or online player that wiped the floor with me, and they’re still on the initial farm building, generating very few resources per turn. They circumvented the need to develop that particular technology with some combination of action cards, colonizations, wonders, or leaders. The game does a great job of providing numerous ways to earn culture, and therefore win the game.

Some of the largest generators of culture are Age III wonders which provide immediate culture when they are finalized, the amount of which are based on aspects of your civilization. Play the game enough and you will know what wonders are coming and you can play to them. Be a newbie and don’t pay attention to things like that and you’ll become very familiar with losing. Same goes with the post-game political scoring cards which can make or break a game for you. The tutorial is excellent.

It is a ten part series which takes you from the start of the game through a little under half of a full game. Each part adds key pieces of the game, building with each step. The tutorial is very good, but the best part might be the humor added. There are jokes and you get a digital Vlaada Chvatil guiding you through the first age as your leader. It is a nice touch to add light moments while teaching, it works well to keep you engaged. The tutorial is quite long, thankfully you can stop and come back to the same point at any time.

Like any complex game, the tutorial won’t leave you 100% comfortable with knowing the ins and outs of the game. If this is your first experience with Through the Ages, you will still be quite lost heading into your first game, which is simply unavoidable. What the tutorial succeeds in doing is giving you a strong base of the main components of the game. New players will fumble their way through an AI game after completing the tutorial, but will likely feel much more comfortable pretty quickly. Then they will slowly build up some strategy over the course of more games.

The point being, the tutorial gave me enough knowledge to slog through my first game, and the first game started teaching me about play strategies. My next game taught me more, and so on. Through the Ages is a game that requires multiple playthroughs, there is simply too much going on and too many options to expect to put together a strong strategy without experience. As such, the barrier to entry to being a competent player is high, but the app does as good of a job as can be hoped in setting you on that path. The graphics do the job.

The focus was clearly on fitting the abundance of information on the screen and the game does a fantastic job there, but the graphics won’t jump off the screen. The controls and interface are handled amazingly well. There is so much going on in this game, it is a minor miracle they manage to effectively convey all of the information to you when you need it. You can perform most actions with drag and drop once you are comfortable, or you can click on areas of the screen to see the full cards and perform actions that way. It is great to have an option to move faster once you understand the game a little better.

Through the Ages offers a robust online game, allowing players to play a handful of different game lengths from real-time to unlimited asynchronous play. Games are created in a lobby, you can start your own game or join an existing one, then leave to go play another game or exit the app entirely. When the game fills up or, optionally, when the creator starts the game, the game begins.

The only minor improvement suggestion here is an option to “join a game of length.” This would avoid having to scroll through the large games list by simply matching you automatically.The online game defaults to a Digital Rules option which was created to speed up async games. It shifts the timing of some of the group decisions so you don’t have to wait on a response as often. Some actions still necessitate a wait, but this rule variant speeds things up where possible.

You can also play the traditional tabletop rules if you prefer. The asynchronous games have working, detailed system notifications (apparently that isn’t a given at this point, see some of our recent reviews). You will get to see what game is ready, what age that game is in and what action you need to take all from the notification. A very tiny detail that really adds to the usability of the app. Rounding things are are a nice game chat feature. I started games with some followers and enjoyed brief chats throughout. Also of note, unlike many online games, Through the Ages doesn’t appear to be blocked by corporate/school networks by default.The rating system for online play will be familiar to players; you earn points for completing and winning games, points move you to higher ranks.

A player’s rank is easily visible when choosing games, so you can avoid higher ranked players if you’re just getting started.There is a local pass and play option as well. There a few options unique to pass and play which affect how the game is presented, but they are listed as “Coming Soon.” For now, you get a blacked out screen with the current player’s name so your opponent holding the device can’t see your cards.

Single player in Through the Ages contains two options: Custom Game and Challenges. A Custom Game is simply an AI game against one to three AI opponents.

AI opponents can be Easy, Medium, or Hard. It took me four full games (and many partial games) to be able to beat the Easy AI one on one. Then a handful more to be able to defeat multiple Easy AI opponents. I would say Easy is a great learning tool for new players like myself, it isn’t a cakewalk even after you start to develop some sense of strategy. I currently play, and mostly lose to Medium AI. I can’t comment on how Medium or Hard stack up to seasoned TTA players, but I imagine they hold their own quite well.The other solo play mode is through Challenges. These are a series of 29 games you can play with specific rule variations.

The first, and easiest, is simply to defeat a single Easy AI opponent. If you beat that, you unlock the next challenge in that row which is defeat two Medium AI opponents. The next row, as an example, gives everything in the game a 20% discount. These challenges are varied and rated on their difficulty, there are nine rows, each with their own rule variant theme.

I haven’t made it very far, but it’s clear this mode will provide a lot of unique wrinkles to the game which should keep players busy for a while. Should you happen to win a challenge, you receive a Dominance score equal to your winning margin. ​Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization was released only a couple of years ago as essentially a second edition of the original Through the Ages. It streamlines some aspects and provides a major overhaul of the military system.

There are no expansions for the physical game, so there are no in-app purchases to be found here.There is an extensive achievement system in the game, with 86 to unlock at the time of launch. They range from a number of simple actions which you will likely achieve unintentionally simply by playing the game, to very specific tasks which you will likely need to purposely set out to accomplish. Through the Ages is an incredibly complex game that should have no business in app form. It should be too large of a task to port it in a way that is usable, let alone intuitive. CGE Digital has taken on this massive challenge and delivered a stunning app that exceeded our sky high expectations. ​The only reason we wouldn’t recommend this app is if you are concerned Through the Ages is too complex of a game, this game certainly won’t have the mass appeal of some other ports.

The learning curve to be even remotely competitive is huge, let alone competing with the higher level AIs or against experienced players online. This is of no fault of the app, of course, but is worth the warning for would-be players. If the underlying game grabs you, then you are in for a fantastic experience in the app. I personally have been addicted to this one since it released and have played more games than I care to admit.

Review Through the Ages: A New Story of CivilizationMuch like the classic Sid Meier video game that it is unofficially linked to (but clearly emulates,) Through the Ages: a New Story of Civilization is initially quite a daunting beast to get to grips with.It must do something well though, because, having evolved throughout several cosmetic iterations, this newest instalment is currently ranked as the second best board game overall on BoardGameGeek. The previous, original version is still eighteenth, and at one point in time both games occupied top ten spots simultaneously. The new version has some rules amendments and a much higher overall quality, but it is effectively the same game.The manual is dense, and the number of individual board pieces, cards and resource counters gave me pause. Thankfully, there is also a quick start guide that helps accelerate progress, and by skipping straight to the back of it (to the handy storage guide) I was able to quickly understand how to divide the cards for each age and separate out those that are not needed in two and three player games.With that done, I began to follow the basic instructions. Setting up each player board is a straightforward matter of placing counters in four different colours onto the appropriate spaces. A number of cards are then drawn from the Age of Antiquity deck and placed onto the central board, with the rest being placed alongside.

By this point, the game was already beginning to look a lot more logical and straightforward, and the quick start guide walks players through a couple of simplified turns.Explaining the way Through the Ages works in detail would probably require a full manual, and indeed, a quick start guide, so I’ll try to describe it more briefly at a high level. Players take it in turns to complete a series of civil and military actions, the number of which is determined by their government type and any cards they have activated that offer a bonus. Using these actions, players can draw cards from the timeline, play cards they hold such as leaders, wonders and technologies and take actions that affect their production such as upgrading buildings.Military and politics actions in Through the Ages are fairly hard to explain briefly. Basically, a Politics Phase occurs during every turn after the first, and during that phase, players may play event, aggression, war and pact cards from their hand of military cards by spending military points.

These cards are obtained from the military deck at the end of each turn, depending on remaining military actions. This balance of deciding when to use cards and when to draw them is quite important in Through the Ages, and it works a bit like the idea of one army over stretching itself in combat.Each of the card types world differently, with events being added to an active deck on the tactics board that can be drawn from later, leading to wars of colonization or other, similarly interesting situations. Wars (unlike aggressions, which resolve immediately) are resolved at the beginning of the next turn, with the winner receiving bonuses as specified. Pacts have the opposite effect, with both players receive a benefit as specified, should an agreement to unite be reached. War is expensive but valuable in Through the Ages, whilst pacts won’t usually yield the return that you would hope for, and they strengthen your rivals. Deciding when to fight and when not to is a critical factor in succeeding at Through the Ages.At the end of each turn, a number of cards (determined by player count) leave the edge of the board, and all remaining cards sweep down to fill any gaps. New cards are then drawn from the current age deck.

With the exception of the Age of Antiquity (which ends after two full turns) each age ends when the final card is drawn, and the subsequent age then begins. As the timeline advances, so too does the technology available to players, and in turn production of science, culture, food and resources is hastened.Culture is ultimately what wins the game, with the player that has amassed most at the end of the game being declared the winner. Games of Through the Ages can last three or four hours at least, and a four player game can legitimately take five hours. I honestly have no idea how the advertised play time of year hours can be achieved, as even with only two players, my games commonly took as long as three. I can understand the fanatical support on BGG though, because playing Through the Ages is totally worth your time.Most of the gameplay is focussed – unsurprisingly – on developing your fledging civilization. The starting position for every player is symmetrical, and a limitation on the number of available civil actions (based on player order) in the first turn ensures a fair start for everyone.

Through the Ages is a game in which you can fall behind quickly and without any possibility of clawing your way back, so it’s essential to invest four or five turns investing knowledge into new opponents instead of trouncing them.Drawing cards from the left of the timeline costs just one civil action, whilst those further right will cost two or three. Taking the right cards at the right time is important. Developing your production is important. Drafting the right leader to support your chosen strategy is crucial, and picking up a choice wonder, technology or action is also useful.

Knowing when to produce and when to invest is another factor, as overproduction leads to wastage, whilst failure to develop happiness can result in revolution. Failure to develop a sufficient military can cost you dearly against an aggressive opponent.All of these subtle movements in tokens and cards happen on the player card, and can have big effects on the following turns and how your civilization pans out.

In many ways, the cards represent snapshots of current civilisation health and progress, even though victory points are tracked elsewhere on a separate board. Matches between experienced foes are close fought, fraught with danger and brimming with strategy.There are many, many moments of both direct and indirect conflict in Through the Ages, including the use of the military system and political actions, and also because there will always be some level of contention for the most sought after cards on the timeline.

This is not a game to play if you feel uncomfortable about seizing upon a weakness in your opponents guard, and having a significantly weaker military strength can be a fairly punitive situation to find yourself in.Overall quality in Through the Ages is high, without feeling as if it breaks new ground. The cards are well made and nicely drawn, with lots of colour and detail. The box and insert are really well done, and there are separate trenches for cards of each age, including separation within the trenches for civil, military and three or four player cards.

The manuals are both exceptionally detailed and very well written, with the quick start guide being very useful, alongside some of the very good tutorial videos already available. If I was nitpicking, which I suppose I am, then I would probably have liked to see indentation on the player boards to prevent resource cubes from moving, although that is a relatively new addition to certain games only.Whilst I don’t rate Through the Ages quite as highly as the BGG community, I still think it is exceptional. Each time I played, I felt as if I was really building something as my civilization came together. Not only that, but each game is materially different due to which cards are drawn, when they are drawn, and where on the timeline they end up. Sometimes, war and politics become a major focus, whilst in other games peaceful development and mutually agreeable trade seems more practical. It’s really, really interesting to see how new players approach the game, and whilst there is a downside to falling behind early, Through the Ages does reward players for genuine long term thinking. It’s cheap, it’s well made, and if you’re looking for something deep and engaging these winter months, then Through the Ages might be the game for you.A copy of Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilisation was provided for review purposes and can be purchased via or through one of the shops found in this handy.