Disclaimer
This article represents one player’s highly questionable interpretation of board-game strategy and tournament survival. It is not official advice from Czech Games Edition, the tournament organisers, historians, military strategists, economists, Napoleon, James Watt or anyone sensible enough to analyse their turns properly. Tournament rules and formats should always be checked against the official current regulations. Any resemblance between my civilisation-management skills and competent government is entirely coincidental.
There are certain moments in life when you should probably ask yourself whether you have enough hobbies.
I play correspondence chess. I work. There is the occasional board game. There is family life. Our son appears to be competing in approximately seventeen different sporting disciplines at any given moment.
So naturally, I have entered the Through the Ages World Championship again.
For the third time.
Because apparently I have learned absolutely nothing.
For those unfamiliar with Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization, it is Vlaada Chvátil’s magnificent civilisation-building game in which you spend several hours developing agriculture, science, military strength, governments, wonders and culture before discovering that somebody else picked up James Watt three turns ago and has quietly constructed an industrial economy capable of buying Belgium.
There is no map.
There are no little armies marching across Europe.
Instead, you develop a civilisation through cards, resources and carefully balanced decisions while keeping one nervous eye on everyone else’s military strength.
The objective is ultimately simple: finish with the most culture.
Everything between the beginning and that sentence is somewhat less simple.
Gr33ny Goes to the World Championships. Again.
My online name is Gr33ny, and this is my third attempt at the World Championship.
The first year actually went reasonably well. I reached Round 4.
Last year was rather less glorious.
Round 2.
Progress, therefore, is currently moving backwards.
Another couple of tournaments and I should theoretically be eliminated before registration.
The format in those previous championships was relatively easy to understand. Players were divided into groups, normally consisting of four players. There was an upper bracket and a lower bracket, and generally only the winner of each group progressed.
Simple.
Brutal.
But simple.
You entered the game knowing exactly what needed to happen.
Win.
Coming second was essentially receiving a beautifully engraved certificate saying:“Congratulations. You nearly mattered.”
And Then They Changed Everything
This year the tournament has undergone a fairly substantial redesign.
Considering there are nearly 1,200 players, I can understand why.
Running a tournament involving more than a thousand people playing a game where an individual match can comfortably last several weeks probably requires slightly more administration than organising the village tombola.
Instead of small isolated qualification groups, players now compete within one enormous overall pool and accumulate points according to finishing position.
The standard scoring system is:
Two-player games:
Winner – 4 points
Loser – 0 points
Three-player games:
1st – 5 points
2nd – 2 points
3rd – 0 points
Four-player games:
1st – 6 points
2nd – 3 points
3rd – 1 point
4th – 0 points
If players finish with exactly the same culture score, the relevant tournament points are shared.
This immediately changes the psychology.
Previously, winning the group was everything.
Now, finishing second or even third can have value.
Not enormous value, admittedly.
One point for third in a four-player game is roughly the tournament equivalent of being given a biscuit after major surgery.
But it is a point.
And over several games, points accumulate.
Qualification: Where Most of Us Live
There are 48 seeded players and, importantly, the rules confirm that these are the best 48 players from the previous edition of the tournament.
The rest of us enter what can best be described as The Great Unwashed Through the Ages Population.
Including Gr33ny.
The Qualification Phase itself consists of two connected rounds: 1A and 1B.
Everyone outside those 48 seeds starts in Round 1A, competing in one enormous pool rather than traditional groups.
Across the complete Qualification Phase, a player can play up to 16 games, divided into seven batches of two-, three- and four-player matches.
Round 1A consists of nine games:
- two 2-player games;
- two 4-player games;
- three 3-player games;
- and then another two 2-player games.
Then everything stops.
The standings are checked.
And this is where life becomes interesting.
The top 720 players survive Round 1A, with one slight kindness: if several players are tied on points at the 720-player cutoff, everyone on that score qualifies rather than somebody being eliminated through an arbitrary tiebreak.
Even more interestingly, anyone scoring 39 points or more out of a possible 43 jumps directly into the Main Phase.
Which is an astonishingly good qualification performance.
Essentially the tournament organisers look at you and say:
“Fine. You clearly know what you’re doing. You may stop frightening the other qualifiers now.”
Everyone else within the top 720 continues into Round 1B.
Round 1B then adds another seven games:
- two 4-player games;
- three 3-player games;
- and two 2-player games.
The points from 1A and 1B are added together, and ultimately the top 294 qualifiers progress into the Main Phase.
So my initial interpretation that 720 players had reached the main tournament was slightly optimistic.
Reaching the top 720 means you have qualified…
…to continue qualifying.
There are magazines.
The coffee machine doesn’t work.
And there are still hundreds of people sitting ahead of you.
Round Two: Congratulations, Here Are Some Better Players
The actual Main Phase begins with Round 2.
This is where 42 of the 48 seeded players finally join.
Together with the 294 successful qualifiers, that produces a field of 336 players.
The other six seeds apparently look at all this and say:
“Still too many people.”
They wait until Round 3.
Each Main Phase round contains:
- two four-player games;
- three three-player games;
- and three two-player games.
Eight games in total.
But there is another delightful wrinkle.
After the four- and three-player games, the round stops and the bottom 25% are immediately eliminated.
Only the survivors get to play their two-player games.
Then there is another substantial elimination.
In Round 2, the original field of 336 becomes just 122 survivors.
Then the six highest seeds enter Round 3, producing 128 players.
Round 3 reduces 128 to 48.
Round 4 reduces 48 to 16.
Round 5 reduces 16 to six.
Those six then contest the World Championship Final.
This is less a tournament structure and more organised population control.
1,200 Games of Preparation
The slightly ridiculous thing is that I have actually played quite a lot of Through the Ages.
My Gr33ny account has now logged somewhere north of 1,200 games.
That sounds impressive until you discover how many games some of the genuinely elite players have completed.
Then it starts looking less like extensive experience and more like I have merely completed the tutorial.
Most of my games are played through the mobile app.
The account is linked to Steam, meaning exactly the same games can also be played on my laptop.
Historically, however, I have overwhelmingly used my phone.
And this may explain something.
My normal decision-making process takes approximately 30–60 seconds.
Look at card row.
Look at civilisation.
Have vague idea.
Press buttons.
Done.
This is perhaps not the optimal approach to a game frequently regarded as one of the deeper strategy board games available.
It is particularly embarrassing because I am a correspondence chess player.
In correspondence chess I can spend an absurd amount of time analysing one position, checking variations, considering strategic consequences and trying to understand what might happen several moves later.
In Through the Ages?
“Napoleon looks nice.”
Click.
There may be a lesson here.
This Year We Shall Occasionally Think
Therefore I have decided upon a revolutionary World Championship strategy.
I am going to use the laptop.
And perhaps actually look at the position.
I appreciate this is cutting-edge stuff.
Instead of making decisions while standing in the kitchen, sitting in a car park or waiting five minutes for something else to happen, I intend to approach tournament games slightly more like my chess.
Not completely like correspondence chess.
Nobody needs a seventeen-page analysis explaining whether developing Irrigation on Turn 4 produces a 0.17 culture advantage by Age III.
But perhaps spending several minutes considering:
- what my opponents need;
- what cards are likely to disappear;
- my military position;
- future resource requirements;
- civil-action efficiency;
- upcoming Age transitions;
- likely events;
- and whether that shiny wonder is actually useful rather than merely shiny.
Essentially: thinking ahead.
Revolutionary.
Two Players: There Is Nowhere to Hide
The different player counts are another important feature of this year’s format because Through the Ages changes character considerably depending upon how many civilisations are sitting around the imaginary geopolitical table.
The two-player game is probably the most unforgiving.
Everything is personal.
There is only one opponent.
If you take a card, you know exactly who doesn’t get it.
If you become militarily weak, there is only one civilisation looking across the border thinking:
“Interesting.”
Card denial becomes enormously important. Military strength is much more directly confrontational, and tempo matters because almost every advantage is effectively a disadvantage inflicted upon the other player.
There are also no pacts in two-player games, so there is considerably less diplomacy and considerably more staring suspiciously across the imaginary border.
It is probably the format closest to chess.
Which means I should theoretically be good at it.
We’ll move swiftly onwards.
Three Players: Welcome to Politics
hree-player Through the Ages introduces another problem:
the third person.
Military calculations become less straightforward because attacking one opponent can potentially benefit the other.
Card drafting becomes more complicated because denying something to Player B might simply allow Player C to collect something even better.
You need greater awareness of relative position rather than simply your own engine.
Being second militarily may be perfectly acceptable.
Being third militarily with two aggressive neighbours is less desirable.
Three-player games therefore require slightly more flexibility and political awareness.
Something resembling balance-of-power diplomacy begins to appear.
Not formally.
Nobody signs the Treaty of Westphalia.
But everyone understands that if Dave has 38 military strength while Peter and I have 16, perhaps Dave represents the more immediate geopolitical concern.
Not sure why I just picked those names: When I was younger and learned English at school it was always Peter, Paul and Mary!!
Four Players: Civilisation Management Meets Herd Behaviour
Four-player Through the Ages is different again.
There are more cards circulating, more military cards, more competing strategies and considerably more uncertainty.
You cannot control everything.
Trying to prevent every opponent from obtaining every useful card is impossible.
Instead you need to concentrate more heavily on efficiency: building your own civilisation while identifying which opponents genuinely threaten you.
Diplomacy and pacts become more relevant.
Military strength remains important, but being the strongest civilisation is not always necessary. Sometimes being sufficiently strong that attacking you looks inconvenient is perfectly adequate.
Essentially, military strategy becomes similar to encountering a bear in the woods.
You do not necessarily need to outrun the bear.
You merely need to ensure somebody else looks easier to eat.
And because four civilisations develop simultaneously, table position and timing become increasingly important. A powerful card disappearing before your next turn can completely alter your plans.
The best four-player competitors therefore tend to combine long-term engine building with considerable adaptability.
Which brings us back to my traditional 30-second mobile-phone turns.
Excellent.
What Do 1,200 Games Actually Mean?
My game total probably illustrates something interesting about modern digital board gaming.
Playing 1,200 games creates enormous pattern recognition.
You recognise combinations.
You understand resource curves.
You know when population is becoming a problem.
You recognise dangerous leaders and wonders.
You know approximately when somebody’s military strength is beginning to look less like national defence and more like a planning application for invading you.
But quantity does not automatically create quality.
If many of those games are played quickly, they reinforce intuitive decision-making rather than deep calculation.
That is not necessarily bad.
Experience matters.
But tournaments expose the difference.
Strong tournament players are not merely asking:
“What is my best move?”
They are asking:
“What will the position look like three turns from now if I do this, what will my opponents probably do, which cards will disappear, where will my resources come from and how vulnerable will I become?”
Again, disturbingly similar to chess.
Apparently thinking is useful in more than one game.
Who knew?
And We’re Already Underway
This is no longer merely theoretical.
The first batch of the World Championship actually started earlier this week, and fittingly it consists of two two-player games.
Both of mine are now underway.
We are still very much in the early stages of each game, where civilisations remain relatively small, nobody has accidentally destroyed their economy yet and everyone can still pretend that the carefully constructed master plan is proceeding exactly as intended.
So far there has been no dramatic military catastrophe.
No civilisation has collapsed.
Nobody has discovered that they desperately needed the card which disappeared immediately before their turn.
Give it time.
More importantly, I have actually been trying to follow my new revolutionary tournament strategy:
play on the laptop and think about the turns.
Whether this produces better decisions remains to be seen.
There is, after all, every possibility that spending five minutes instead of 30 seconds analysing a position simply allows me to make the wrong decision with considerably greater confidence.
But at least the World Championship has officially begun.
Gr33ny is playing.
Two games down on the screen.
Four points available in each.
And somewhere around the world there are two opponents presumably looking at my civilisation and wondering what on earth I am doing.
Perfect.
The World Championship Begins
So here we go again.
Nearly 1,200 players entered.
Sixteen possible qualification games.
Different formats.
Different strategies.
A vast combined league table.
First survive the top-720 cut.
Then either produce the near-ridiculous 39-point Round 1A performance or survive Round 1B.
Then somehow become one of the 294 qualifiers entering the Main Phase.
Then 42 seeded players arrive.
Then the field gets cut.
Again.
And again.
And again.
Until six people remain.
And somewhere among all of this is Gr33ny, armed with more than 1,200 games of experience, a Steam-linked laptop and the radical new concept of spending longer than 45 seconds making important decisions.
What could possibly go wrong?
Well…
Two years ago: Round 4.
Last year: Round 2.
Mathematically the trend is concerning.
But perhaps this is the year.
Perhaps slowing down, analysing positions properly and understanding the different demands of two-, three- and four-player games will make the difference.
The first two games are already moving.
Perhaps this time I will carefully analyse a position for fifteen minutes, make a sophisticated long-term strategic decision…
…and somebody will take the card I needed immediately afterwards.
Because this is still Through the Ages.
Civilisations rise.
Civilisations fall.
And occasionally Gr33ny presses the wrong button.
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