Roll Through the Ages

Designed by Matt Leacock, who had a smash hit early last year with the co-op game PANDEMIC, ROLL THROUGH THE AGES was apparently designed as something of an in-joke lampooning the current trend for publishers to follow up a successful game with a dice version. Leacock set his sights pretty high and went all out to come up with something that would at least resemble CIVILIZATION: THE DICE GAME. The surprising thing is that he was pretty successful at it, and ROLL THROUGH THE AGES at least scratches the surface of the key elements of CIV. The irony of it all is that the publisher of the game decided to call the game ROLL THROUGH THE AGES (one of the worst titles I’ve ever heard) in order to capitalize on the success of THROUGH THE AGES, a pretty decent civ-building game by designer Vlaada Chvatil.

However, ROLL THROUGH THE AGES has nothing to do with that game other than the general theme and it’s very clear to anyone who’s played CIV (and YAHTZEE) where the real inspiration lies. This is a simple dice game where players roll dice and tick off boxes on a score sheet. The number of dice you get to roll is a function of how many cities you’ve built, and the amount of food you need to feed your cities is based on the number of cities you have. The die faces range from skulls (disasters), wheat (food), jugs (commodities), coins (money) and people (slaves). You get a free re-roll apart from any skulls you’ve rolled, but the more skulls you get, the worse your disaster. If you manage to push your luck and roll three skulls, you can send some disastrous love to another player. It’s not terribly interactive but at least there is some opportunity for nasty business. Gathered food and commodities are tracked on thick wooden boards with peg holes. One of the neat things that nicely capture a mechanic from CIV is that by getting more dice your potential to get more diverse- and valuable- types of commodities increases.

Once you’ve settled on the roll and tracked your gains, food is distributed to cities and if you’re short you suffer a famine, a -1 point penalty per unfed city in the final reckoning. There are five different goods in increasing values so if you roll three jugs you get one each of the three lowest types. So rolling more jugs gets you better goods. Goods are spent to buy advancements and just like in any civilization-building game they confer benefits, advantages and protections as well as points. For example, Agriculture will get you an extra food per food roll, Masonry lets you spend stone to get extra people and Empire gives you a bonus for each monument you’ve built by the end of the game. Getting the more expensive advancements can be tricky- you can only save six commodities per turn so having access to the high value ones is important, and you have to have more cities to get to them. Any coins you’ve rolled can be spent for a discount off the price of advancement. Finally, any people you’ve rolled are spent to either build cities or monuments of varying sizes.

ROLL THROUGH THE AGES, all told, lasts for 30-45 minutes with four players (but plays solo, two, and three players just fine) and like YAHTZEE it comes down to making good choices, gambling here and there and pure luck. It’s simple to pick up and play yet it manages to have adequate theme and narrative for such a compact package. I was really surprised to see how some of the chief concerns of CIVILIZATION turned up in a game that your grandma might like; for example, the game features a simple paradigm that more cities gets you access to more goods, but at the risk of more disasters. It’s proof that short, simple and accessible games don’t have to be stupid or abstract.

The production is kind of odd, with wooden dice and Cracker Barrel-style player boards but I think it’s nicely done overall even though the printing on the dice sucks. I think the gameplay is just right for what it is and the only real complaint I have is that I think the disasters aren’t as frequent as they should be or deadly enough. You’ll rarely see the five and six skull disasters and the weaker ones are easily mitigated by advancements. The game feels like it needs just a little more threat, a little more risk to it than what is there. But hey, it’s hard to complain about a game that is otherwise just right for what it is.

Ghost Stories

Now we move from a game that doesn’t have enough threat to one that seems to have way too much of it. Asmodee’s recent release GHOST STORIES is a cooperative game based loosely on Chinese Wuxia Pian films and ghost mythologies. One to four players represent Taoist priests/exorcists/ass-kickers (each with a special ability, of course) attempting to protect a small village from the encroaching minions of the evil Wu-Feng. Apparently his funerary urn is located in the village and he’d really like to get it back…or something like that. Wu Feng isn’t content to just send in the B-team—he turns up in the game as an incarnation and when he does it’s big trouble in Little China. One of his incarnations isn’t called “The Hope Killer” for nothing.

This is really a siege game above all else and even though the theme is great I almost wonder if the John Carpenter reference point should have been ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13. The ghosts are trying to get into the village and wreak havoc while the Taoists bop around the 3x3 grid representing it, taking special actions and going blade to fang by rolling dice to exorcise the encroaching spirits. Each turn, a player turns over a ghost card and places it on one of the player boards surrounding the village. There are three spaces on each board, and when these fill up it’s no good- a full board docks Ki (fancy hit points) for the corresponding player and some ghosts have special abilities that can disable a player’s power or spawn additional ghosts.

It kind of feels like trying to patch holes in four leaky dams, but instead of water you’re trying to prevent the flow of slavering, demonic spooks. Once the ghost cards are placed, the player can move and either take the special action of the village tile he or she winds up on or fight an adjacent ghosts. In true Wuxia fashion, that means if you’re on a corner you can double up and hit two at a time. Ghosts have a set of colored dot requirements that have to be matched either by the die roll or by spending colored “Tao” tokens. Players can also team up to fight exceptionally tough ghosts and there is always an impetus to help bail out comrades in trouble.