Monday, 24 August 2009

more Through the Ages errors

I have played Through the Ages 40 times. That's no small achievement considering this is a long game. It still take Michelle and I 2 to 2.5 hours to play a 2-player game. And I just discovered that we are still playing with some mistakes! I read through an FAQ at www.boardgamegeek.com and found these.

  1. Producing at improved mines / farms - After you play a more advanced mine (e.g. a 2-stone-per-blue-token mine), when you produce (assuming you have two 1-stone-per-blue-token mines), you can't place one blue token on the new mine technology. You must still place two blue tokens next to your two old mines. We had thought that we couldn't immediately "swap up" blue tokens that we had already produced, but could make use of the more efficient card from that point onwards. Now I realise that we have to upgrade our old farms before we can enjoy the benefit.
  2. When Age III ends, you don't draw any more Age III military cards. This probably would have had little or no effect.
  3. After gaining military cards from a new colony, you must discard down to your hand limit before you enter the civil action / military action phase. I am not entirely sure whether we have played this wrong, but at least now I know I need to watch out for these.

2 comments:

Aik Yong said...

The #1 is one major error... I thought the rules were pretty clear on that, the mines/farms will have to be upgraded before they produce an upgraded resource/food.

Hiew Chok Sien 邱卓成 said...

Yeah, don't know how I missed that. Initially we played with an "even more wrong" version. We corrected it to a "less wrong" version, and played so many games with this 2nd version. Oops.