Just received "Roll Through the Ages" and my initial impressions are good! I am a big fan of dice games and this one seems to have quite a bit of depth.
The game includes cribbage like peg boards to track your food and goods as you play.
The idea is to score points by building cities and monuments, acquiring goods and developments at the same time you have to feed your cities. The more cities you acquire, the more dice you get to roll.
When skulls come up on the dice that means disaster for you or your opponents. Any game with skulls on the dice has got to be good!
I was checking this out too. Looks interesting. Building a civilization in an hour or so has its appeal. I'm not experienced in civ games beyond Origins: How We Became Human and that game scares too many people I game with so I don't get to play it much. Something short and accessible would be nice. The dice for Roll Through the Ages look cool.
Short version- pretty good! It's a 30 minute game that doesn't completely suck, anybody can play it, and it actually does feel like CIV. A little bit, at least.
I've played it twice and it's a good game, if you like dice games like Risk Express, Knizia's Decathalon, and Yahtzee (to some extent).
I wish this was published by Z-man or RGG though. The wood dice are a bad choice and for 7 dice, a score pad, and 4 peg boards this should not be over 25 bucks.
Dice sides are:
3 workers
3 food
2 food OR 2 workers
1 good
1 coin (worth 7 gold toward improvements)
1 disaster(skull) AND 2 goods
You must keep dice with skulls and you have 3 rolls to get what you want (a la yahtzee).
3 skulls is actually 3 disasters (3 negative VP) on your opponents. Then you may spend goods stored plus any coins rolled to improve your economy and spend workers to build monuments (for VP) or cities (for more dice in the future) and the food has to be there to feed each city you have (the number of dice you rolled that turn).
I can see how it wouldn't appeal to the ADD crowd, since the interaction doesn't start until about an hour or so in.
The final 1/3 of through the ages is a blast though, the wars, aggressions, all that stuff is really where the game shines. The first 1/3 is St. Petersberg advanced, and the middle section is OK for a eurogame but not that great.
Roll through looks OK for a 30 minute long filler, but I really hate FRED.
While I like Roll thorough the Ages. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone here.
It's a quick and easy Yahtzee variant, but it is an efficiency engine with a slight push your luck element. Not all that exciting, but it plays quick as a filler.
Not to be too much of a gaming cliché, but does anyone see any wife/girlfriend potential with this one? With two little ones now, game-time for my bride and I has been reduced to pretty much a short window of time right after the kids' bed-time. Roll sounds like it might fit the bill nicely ... but I've learned to ask first.
Not to be too much of a gaming cliché, but does anyone see any wife/girlfriend potential with this one? With two little ones now, game-time for my bride and I has been reduced to pretty much a short window of time right after the kids' bed-time. Roll sounds like it might fit the bill nicely ... but I've learned to ask first.
Anybody can play this game. You could probably get your grandma to play it. The Civ theme is surprisingly strong, but by the same token it's really concrete and there's no convoluted mechanics or opaque decision making beyond rolling dice and picking how to distribute what you get.
I'm reading up more on this game and trying to better understand how the peg/goods thing works... I wish they would post the rules... Can someone explain that?
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