As people know I play board games as one of my hobbies. Over the years board games have come and gone, some made o very good impression on me – other not so much.

Playing chess got me into board games. When still living in Germany I was part of the YMCA and we had regular weekly/monthly board game evenings. In addition to this it was a weekly routine in our household to play the usual games like Uno, Skat, Cleudo, Monopoly and chess.

When playing with the YMCA members we were playing some other games like: Carcassonne, Catan, Ticket to Ride (Zug um Zug), Alhambra and many other games.

Over the years board games have become more complex (in a nutshell), more modern and there are games for everyone: Dungeon crawler, Deck building games, Euro games, abstract, Co-operative, Area control, Role-playing and dexterity – just to mention a few types.

The game I play the most over the last few years – apart from chess – is a game called Through the Ages: A New story of Civilization.

As the name suggest it’s a Civilization game and you start as a tribe and through resource management you are trying to advance your civilization with discovering new technology, elect leaders, change governments build wonders and – of course – have military.

Initially the theme of the game is what attracted me to the game. Having spent countless hours playing Sid Meier’s Civilization Franchise on the PC since my teens – I was familiar with this type of game.

The board game though is different from Sid Meier’s PC version although his PC version has been made into a different board game. I have one of the versions upstairs in our second bedroom which is great although needs more that 4 players ideally. To top that it’s a long game and coupled with the player count it rarely gets to the table.

In TtA you draft cards from a card row. The cost of the card depends on where you are taking it from in the card row. Taking cards from the card row cost civil actions (CA), playing cards cost CA, developing technologies cost CA, playing leaders cost CA (although you get them back for a straight swap), building wonders cost CA.

Creating military cost military actions (MA) which means everytime you build a military unit this cost MA instead of CA.

At the beginning of the game, you start with 4 CA and 2 MA as every civilization starts with the government Despotism. Throughout the game you – ideally – want to change this to a different form of government as this give you other bonuses – mostly more CA’s and MA’s.

If this isn’t demanding enough you need to keep your workforce happy because if not – UPRISING and you don’t produce anything and you fall behind.

At the beginning of each round you also have a political action where you seed events – not known to the other players – into an event deck. They then get randomly played whenever a player is seeding an event. Those card can either benefit all players or cause devastation to certain players. The event deck starts with cards and they are usually friendly to all players. As you progress through the game the events can become more and more devastating – usually to the player with the lowest military.

In essence you need to take card from the card row, improve technologies (so you are more efficient with your work force), have a better government, elect leader (as they give you temporarily different abilities), build wonders (they do give you ongoing bonuses) and get Cultures points every round.

The game has technically 5 ages – A (antiquity), Age I, Age II, Age III and Age IV. In essence Antiquity is the setup and first turn of the game. Age IV is the ending of the game and last usually the last or penultimate round.

Depending which cards have been seeded in the event deck players can score end game culture points which gets tallied to the current score.

After that the player with the most Culture points wins the game.

This Year I have entered the World Championships for this board game and currently round three is being played (out of 8) – and I am still in it although I don’t think I am making it into round 4. But it’s better than last year where I got eliminated in the first round.

The game can also be played via an app (which I used a lot) or via a Steam account (and you can link both the steam and App account together).

It’s a difficult game to get into (no doubt about that) however I find the problem-solving with every game quite intriguing.

The game is currently (time of writing) on sale (30% off) on steam and the App.

Great game and one of my favourite games of all time.