Era: Medieval Age is the roll and write experience that will keep your game night guests hands-on and working as a team!
Era: Medieval Age is a 1-4 player game that plays in about forty-five minutes to an hour. The designer for this game is Matt Leacock, best known for the pandemic series. The publisher is Eggertspiel one of the partners of Plan B games.
Era: Medieval Age: $69.99
Get It For Less At Miniature Market
Era: Medieval Age serves as the spiritual successor to Roll Through the Ages. While Roll Through the Ages was a pioneer for roll-and-write-style games, Era is a pioneer for roll-and-build!
In Era, your dice represent different classes of medieval society as players attempt to build the most prosperous city. The “build” comes into play as players actually build their cities on their boards. You will use beautifully modeled three-dimensional components such as walls, keeps, farms, and other structures. By the end of the game, each player will have a unique city of their very own!
Era: Medieval Age is made even more challenging as players interact with each other in ways such as extortion, scorched earth, and, of course, disease! Hey, this is the Medieval Age, right? Speaking of which, Era serves as the first of a new series of standalone roll-and-build games from Matt Leacock and eggertspiele!
Ages: 12+
Players: 1-4
Game Length: 45-60 minutes
Build Your City Strong With Era: Medieval Age
In Era: Medieval Age, you are a noble trying to build up your city and protect yourself from enemies. Each of your dice represents a member of Medieval society such as peasants and clergy. The overall goal is to build the most prosperous city.
Era is a roll and build style game and is the first of its kind. Its spiritual predecessor is Roll Through the Ages, which is a roll and write style game. I was drawn to this innovative new game style right away. Each of the buildings has an actual miniature that fits into your player board much like legos. You can rotate them to fit how you see best into your city.
There are several resources you can collect and use to build buildings. These range from stone, wood, and trade goods. You also need food to feed your dice with, which represent citizens.
Each player will start with a farm, three longhouses, a keep and three-four peg sections of wall. Some buildings provide dice for you. Longhouses give yellow peasant dice and keeps giving gray nobles. So based on initial setup, you receive three yellow and one gray dice. The other two dice you can gain later are the blue burgher and white clergy dice. These come from the townhouse and churches respectively.
There are six main tracks in Era that show different things. Four track your consumables; trade goods, stone, wood, and food. The other two tracks culture which gains you extra points and the disaster track causes you to lose points.
Each turn all players will secretly roll their dice and set aside any they want to keep. Each die can be rolled up to two more times before being set. The only exception is any face showing a skull. Skulls are what trigger disasters typically these are bad news for you or even your opponents. One skull will lose you a resource. Two means a disease which punishes you for clustering your building together. This can be offset somewhat with hospitals. Three skulls hurt your opponents by scorching their boards rendering parts uninhabitable. Four skulls cause a fire and you’ll lose one building. Five attacks your opponents’ unwalled building and six skulls being the worst, will have you lose all your resources.
You can also extort your opponents for their goods with the gray noble dice. For every opponent, you roll more swords or shields than you can steal one of their resources. If they don’t want or cannot pay you then that will advance them on the disaster track.
Many of the hard to build fancy buildings such as a guildhall or university can net a great deal of end game points. Basic buildings like farms are helpful since they generate food to help feed your dice. This comes in handy once you are sitting on nine or ten dice. That’s a lot of mouths to feed! White clergy dice are unique in the fact that the feathered face can allow you to re-roll it and one other dice after your three rolls. This can even re-roll a nasty skull die face.
Walls are useful for protecting your buildings. Once a section is walled in any buildings inside are worth double points. Also, any building inside walls are safe from enemy attacks.
Each time a specific type of building is depleted from the supply, one of the X markers are flipped. Once the limit of X markers are revealed the game immediately ends.
I really enjoy how unique Era: Medieval Age is. Roll and writes have become one of my top game mechanisms. This takes that and creates a more tactile experience. And I think that is pretty awesome. Definitely give this game a try, I guarantee it’ll be a hit at game night.
