boardgaming in photos: Through the Ages - A New Story of Civilization

My wife Michelle and I used to play a lot of Through the Ages. This is a heavy 2-3 hour game. I am blessed to have played it this many times. In 2015, a new edition was released, called Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization. The game was mostly the same. There were just a few minor tweaks. For this edition, there was an expansion released in 2020, containing tweaks, and more importantly new leaders and wonders. I have played the 2015 edition (someone else's copy). Being a big fan of the game, I had told myself I was going to buy the new edition sooner or later. It turned out to be a bit later than I had expected - 2023. I hadn't intentionally looked for it. I was just browsing, and when I saw both the base game and the expansion side by side, I decided it was time. I hadn't tried the expansion at the time. Now I have. 

I wanted to try all the new wonders and leaders, so I played a simple brute force variant, replacing all the leaders and wonders from the base game with the new ones. The leader I picked for the Antiquity Age was Cleopatra. That on the right is the start player marker. Not absolutely necessary, but nice anyway. 

The 2020 expansion tweaked some of the overpowered and underpowered cards in the game. This was game balancing. A digital version of the game was available, and the designer and developers collected data about how players chose cards and how well the cards did. This is the power of big data and data analysis. 

I like the new player boards in the new edition of Through the Ages. Six cards are preprinted on the board. In my previous edition of the game, these were actual cards we had to lay out and arrange. So now the player board is larger. The previous player board was used mainly to manage the blue and yellow tokens. 

In the new edition, the main game board is broken up into several pieces. The idea is you can now organise them in any way that works better for your table size and shape. Do what you like. I'm neutral about this. I wouldn't have minded a single central board. 

The wonder Silk Road is unusual in that once you start building it, one of its powers already take effect. When you play an action card,  the benefit you gain is increased by 1. One annoying thing about the Silk Road is you need five actions to complete it. It doesn't take many stones (a resource), but it takes many actions. 

So far in this particular game, both the colonies I won forced me to discard blue tokens. This meant I suffered corruption more easily, and thus I lost stones more easily. 

 

The end of turn sequence is shown at the centre of the player board. I find this very handy, especially since I am a little rusty. 

Nelson Mandela is one of the new leaders. When Michelle and I play, we don't play wars or aggressions. So we remove these cards from the game. This doesn't make military useless. Military is still relevant because of colonies and events. However some leaders in the game have powers related to wars and aggressions. The next time we play, we should remove such leaders from the game, because they are rather pointless. 

These were my wonders, leaders, colonies and blue technologies.

My mines and farms were still at Level I by the end of Age III. I upgraded them in Age I. Michelle took both the Age II mine and farm. The Age III mine and farm both came out near the end of the game. By then there wasn't much point for me to take and develop them. The game was about to end. To solve this difficulty I had, I took many blue techs. For most techs you need stone production and food production. You need stone to build armies or construct buildings, and you need food to grow your population and have citizens work in the buildings or become soldiers. Blue techs don't need stone or citizens. They just need science. Thankfully I had decent science.