boardgaming in photos

Here's another photo finish of Through the Ages, played on Sun 30 May 2010. Michelle and I are big fans of the game, but had not played for quite a while - almost a five months hiatus. We actually missed some rules, which is disgraceful, considering we've played it about 50 times before. But we did catch our mistakes during the game and tried to compensate for them as much as possible.

Here's my civilisation (white).

I started off with Julius Caesar, i.e. stronger military and being able to draw more event cards. However as we eased into mid game, Michelle boosted up her military and became much much stronger. Thankfully she didn't like aggressions or wars, else she could have crushed my civilisation. Towards late game I drew the Shock Troops tactics card, and planned to get it into play. This was one rare occasion that I spent the effort to build enough modern troops to make effective an Age III tactics card.

I played as many blue tech cards as I could, because I had seeded the Age III event card which rewarded points for these.

Michelle's civilisation:

She had a bigger variety of urban buildings. She was producing so much stone that I felt so sure she had played the Age III event card which rewards points based on stone production capacity. And she used up all her yellow tokens!

She had Aristotle as her Age A leader again. This is her favourite. Her Great Wall wonder was what gave her a big military lead in mid game.

This was the end of the last round, before the last four Age III event cards were resolved. Michelle was ahead of me by 6pts.

First event was Impact of Happiness. Both our civilisations were at full happiness, so the gap remained.

Second event was Impact of Competition. Michelle had played this when she was militarily much stronger than I was. She didn't expect I would build so many more modern troops. The gap narrowed, but I was still behind.

Third event was Impact of Colonies. We both had two. I had been hoping to get more because I was militarily stronger in the early game. However I kept drawing poor cards and was unable to trigger more events. Michelle was of course reluctant to trigger events lest they harm her position.

Fourth event was Impact of Progress, seeded by me. I had been putting down as many blue techs as I could, and this event let me overtake Michelle to win the game!

After the game, we realised that I had forgotten to score on my final turn. I think my score should have been about 12pts more. So it wasn't really a photo finish afterall. But heck I'm not gonna waste these photos I so painstakingly took.