Work Those Meeples Hard: Stone Age Anniversary Ed.

By Christopher Guyton | May 2nd, 2019 | Categories: Board Game Reviews, Board Games, Product Review

Looking for a game that will get you into the worker placement genre? Check out Stone Age: Anniversary to get your feet wet!

Stone Age is a 2-4 player worker placement game designed by Bernd Brunnhofer and published by Z-Man Games. A typical game plays in 60-90 minutes.

Stone Age: $79.99

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Our earliest ancestors faced a constant battle for survival, struggling even to feed themselves with wooden plows and stone axes. But even in these bleak times, they discovered new tools and techniques to improve their lives and the lives of their descendants. Will you usher in a new era of human civilization?

This limited edition celebrates the 10th anniversary of Stone Age with a beautiful board, upgraded components, and new options for playing in the bitter cold of winter. It also includes new mini-expansions Igloos and Wild Animals.

Contents:
128 Premium Wooden Pieces
120 Detailed Tiles
40 Illustrated Cards
7 Dice
4 Player Boards
1 Leather Dice Cup
1 Game Board
1 Rulebook
1 Summary Sheet

Ages: 10+
Players: 2-4
Game Length: 60-90 minutes

Stone Age is celebrating its tenth anniversary with a beautiful brand new printing. With all new components and a double-sided board with winter features opposite the classic side.

Each player commands a tribe trying to survive and prosper as a civilization. The unique feature of this game combines strategy as well as luck from dice rolls. Everyone starts with only five tribe members at first. There are various actions you can take via the worker placement spaces on the board. Once everyone has used all their workers they activate each space in the order of their choosing. Then players gain bonus food based on the level of agriculture. The final phase is to feed your tribe. You must spend one food per villager or a resource for any food missed otherwise you lose ten victory points.

Three of the areas are part of the village actions. When playing less than four players only two of the three actions may be taken each round. The family hut lets you create more villagers by placing two of your workers there. The toolmaker’s hut creates and upgrades your tools to improve your dice rolls. The fields raise your agriculture level by one which earns you food for each point of agriculture you have.

The resource spaces are for gathering the different materials needed for buildings and civilization cards. Each area has room for seven workers. When you activate these, you roll as many dice as you have workers and divide the result by the ratio listed for each resource. The more valuable the resource the harder it is to gather. Wood is divided by three whereas gold is divided by six for example.

You May also place workers on buildings in order to construct them and earn victory points. Once you activate the building tile you must spend the resources listed in order to claim it.

Civilization cards are a really good source for end game scoring. Some have pictures of cultural icons such as music, pottery, or medicine. A full set of all the icons can gain quite a bit of points. Some cards have different members of the tribe such as shaman or builders. These gain points based on how many members are pictured among your card multiplied by different stats in your tribe.

The last action space lines up with helping to feed your tribe in the last phase. The hunting grounds are the only space with no worker limit and can be shared by the opponent’s workers. Again you roll a dice per worker and divide the result by two and gain that much food.

Gameplay will end immediately if the civilization deck runs out. Otherwise, the game will end after the round in which any one of the building tiles stacks runs out. The tribe with the most points wins

This anniversary edition of Stone Age features a harsh winter side that adds igloos and insulated building. Mostly this is a way for you to score more points. Anytime you build a building you can spend an extra stone for five bonus points. You can also spend a gold to gain six points when claiming a civilization card.

Overall the components are very nice, I really like the screen printing on the new tribe meeples. The dice cup feels and smells like leather. Apparently, the original cup smelled really bad, to which I cannot attest. So if anything the new cup doesn’t smell as bad.

I really enjoyed this game and was disappointed that I slept on this one for so long. It’s a fantastic gateway level worker placement game that doesn’t feel too fiddly or too long. If you haven’t checked this one out or own the original, I definitely would say to pick this game up and introduce it to your gaming group.