Glenn Drover was one of the first American designers to implement mechanics pulled directly from European games such as PUERTO RICO into more baroque, thematic board game designs such as the PC game-based SID MEIER'S CIVILIZATION and AGE OF MYTHOLOGY. These games were fairly clumsy and not completely successful in providing the proverbial "best of both worlds"— the efficiency, balance, and simple play of the European designs and the conflict, multiplayer dynamics, and rich atmosphere of classic American-style games.

His latest release is AGE OF EMPIRES III, not only carrying on the license granted by Microsoft and Ensemble Studios to develop board games from its series of popular and justly acclaimed real-time strategy games, but also continuing his attempts to combine American and European board game design ideas. AGE OF EMPIRES III was in development for several years and when Mr. Drover's company, Eagle Games, collapsed its future was uncertain. Thanks to his latest publishing venture, Tropical Games, the game has finally seen the light of day.

The Box.

Unfortunately, AGE OF EMPIRES III, while certainly a decent game, fails to live up the hype in part because it has little in common with the game for which it is named, and because of its by the numbers gameplay and a surprising lack of historical detail.

The game never emerges as anything more than an aggregation of successful ideas from other games and its own success is largely pinioned on what's worked in the past. Of course, videogames have been cloning each other’s designs for years now with varying degrees of success, so it’s certainly possible to have a good time playing a game that doesn’t shoot for innovation but instead pulls ideas from other sources. So if you are a gamer relatively unfamiliar with games like PUERTO RICO, CAYLUS, or the games of Martin Wallace then you'll likely be much more impressed with AOE III than I was. Of course, if you particularly enjoy those games you may well appreciate the way it uses similar mechanics in a slightly more thematic milieu.

I did appreciate that AOE III, despite its "Euro-Style Gameplay" (advertised in the box copy), offered a more fully realized sense of theme than its European predecessors; indeed, a given game of AOEIII is likely to be filled with exploration, colonization, exploitation, and maybe even a little musket-to-musket scrapping over prime New World real estate. However, if you expect the game to replicate the pace and flow of the PC game along with the emphasis on armed conflict you'll be sorely disappointed. Yet, it does capture something of the resource management present there and I think it models the worker assignment angle pretty well and in a much tighter and more strategically compelling way than earlier games that have used similar mechanics. Efficiency is of the utmost importance and learning to maneuver through the game's programmed decision points for the maximum profit is critical.

The game plays 2-5 players (6 with an optional extra set of pieces) and will last around 2-3 hours. It's a fairly simple affair overall; most of the game action boils down to simply placing an allotment of Colonists into various boxes on the game board that provide different functions. Place one in the Colonizing box to send them to settle in the new world. Putting one in a trade box will get you a pick of various trade goods that yield revenue each turn when collected in sets. Training boxes let you train Colonists to become Specialists such as Soldiers, Explorers, Merchants, or Missionaries, generally giving you bonuses for deploying them in different functions.

The Board.

Each turn sees a player receiving a number of Colonists and in turn placing them in these boxes and when all are positioned each box is resolved in turn. The result is that the game plays something like a flowchart; this isn't something like AXIS AND ALLIES where the players have a huge amount of options and strategy is limited only by imagination. It's all very scripted and orderly, with each turn proceeding in a predictable and processional manner. The game consists of eight turns divided into three ages, each interim marked by a scoring round in which each New World territory is assessed to see which player has the most Colonists there—a simple "area majority" mechanic seen in many other board games. At the end of the game, players total up the sum victory point values of their successful explorations, bonuses imparted by special buildings which can be purchased throughout the game, and the overall income produced by their trade goods. The game is tightly balanced so only a player who completely fails to comprehend the rules will fall far behind.

If all this sounds complex, be assured that it really isn't. In fact, it's frustrating that the game boils down huge historical concepts and events to something much vaguer than it really should be. While playing the game I noticed several things that made me really feel like I was playing a précis for a much larger, much richer game with a more fully realized sense of time, place, and circumstance. Even physical material, such as the detailed, sculpted caravels that are used as nothing more than off-board wildcard trade goods and turn markers seem strangely stunted and a waste of plastic.

Each player plays a different color and the rulebook mentions that each colored set of pieces represents a different nation embarking on colonial endeavors yet it has no actual game effect and is sure to be forgotten after the first turn. This is shocking because it goes against the spirit of the game upon which it is based. There’s nothing to differentiate England from France other than blue and red figures, which is a real shame because it’s a major strength of the PC game. See For Yourself