Through The Ages Review

T hrough the Ages has the most entertaining tutorial I’ve seen yet in a game. Designer Vlaada Chvatil gets appointed leader to guide you through your first few millennia. And he proves as able a comedian as he is a game designer. With the wisecracks flowing like wine, you'll learn to throw wonders up and your opponent’s down in no time.Good job too, because Through the Ages isn't the easiest thing to learn.

Counterculture Through the Ages book. Read 18 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. As long as there has been culture, there has been c. 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.

As befits a civilization game, the rules are complex. The physical edition deserves some kind of record for the largest number of the smallest pieces ever in a board game. Putting it all at the mercy of a digital master is, therefore, quite a relief. Yet it's clear a lot of thought has gone into making this as accessible as possible.

There are tooltips and help icons everywhere, multiple ways to carry out most actions, and an intuitive drag and drop interface.This isn't your average civilization-builder. There is no map: it abstracts away almost all the military and exploration elements. You still have an army and you can still conquer territory, indeed managing both well is vital to success. There are a bunch of other things to manage too, in a more familiar style.

Food and economy, population and happiness, technology and research.They're all linked, so you'll want to advance them all at once, and you can't. Learning to triage the is one of the keys of good strategy. Working out how while your brain is being crushed by the cascade of competing demands is a sweet agony few games can match. In the press of priorities, it's easy to forget that troops and technology don't win the game: culture points do. By the time you remember, it's often too late.The card row is the back-bone of the whole endeavour. From this you select leaders, wonders, research goals and various one-shot bonus goodies. But there's a catch: each turn, the ones at the front of the row get discarded and new, more expensive ones get added to the end.

It costs one action to take a card from the front, three to take from the back. It's a conveyor belt of temptation, like something out of a 70's game show. You can grab the prize you want early and inefficiently, or risk seeing it fall into oblivion or, worse, swiped by a competitor along the way.The cards themselves lend a polite veneer of historicity to this raging cauldron of competing demands. Leaders are people of their respective age, like Aristotle in ancient times or Newton in the Renaissance. Wonders and technologies follow the same pattern. The town of light download full. Each play through thus tells a different, but plausible, story of civilization.

Dynamons world mod apk. Dynamons World (MOD, unlimited money) - An entertaining online game in which you will develop your little animals, climbing up the high scores table. You will need to collect new species and train them in new types of combat. You will not have an easy way from the very bottom to the top because your opponents will also develop and improve.

In this one can also see the varied paths to victory. You could install Napoleon and bury your foes in a sea of cavalry and cannon. Or elect Charlie Chaplin, build cinemas and ride to the win on a sea of pure cultural happiness. In truth you'll often have to switch and change your plans as the chaos seethes around you.With a game of this complexity, it's easy to presume the AI in the solo game isn't up to much. The toughest setting here won't challenge the most experience human players, but for everyone else, it's a good opponent.

Even if you're equal to it, a slew of challenge scenarios provides something difficult enough for anyone. These scenarios, many of which bend and break the basic rules in interesting ways, ensure solitaire play has a healthy shelf-life. To extend it further, there's also a ton of achievements to earn for your trophy cabinet.Like any good board game port, there is also online play. It's particularly welcome here, given the four-hour play time and fiddly pieces of the physical game.

Thankfully, the implementation is full of features and functionality. There are a variety of play modes from real-time to slow as you like. It does seem to have a short fuse for dropping un-started games that don't fill up fast. Whether that's a problem when the play community increases in size post-release remains to be seen.Through the Ages on PC is such a great experience that the only thing we can really pick fault with is the sound design. The music is repetitive and the sound clips that play with certain cards add little to proceedings. In every other respect it's an outstanding adaptation of an outstanding game.

The game features custom games, challenges, online matches against human opponents, and a tutorial. Despite being a port of the mobile game, the interface is modified to take advantage of a mouse; I also appreciate the ability to see the same information (how many workers are in each building, for example) or perform the same task (dragging workers, double-clicking cards) multiple ways. The goal is to accumulate the most culture points by the end of the game; this is accomplished by choosing cards from the card row and playing them by spending resources.

These can be new buildings or upgrades to existing buildings; structures will produce food, resources, science, or culture based on the card properties and how many workers are assigned to the structure. More advanced cards are gradually introduced as new ages arrive. Other actions include increasing population, playing a leader, developing a new technology, declaring a revolution to switch government types, playing an action card, building or upgrading military units, or playing a military tactic. In addition, a politics phase allows for preparing future game events, declaring war against another player, or forming a pact.

There are typically too many things to do each turn so you must make tough decisions on what to choose. You must also keep an eye on happiness (you need more food as you grow while staffing buildings that produce happiness) and corruption (stockpiling too many resources results in a penalty). Scouring the online forums for the board game version shows that there simply isn’t one viable strategy for the game, which is the hallmark of a well-balanced strategy title.

The AI plays the game very well and uses varied strategies to achieve victory. Through The Ages succeeds at the two important aspects of any digital board game adaptation: a user-friendly interface and AI competency.