Stone Age Session Report

I played Stone Age with Nora, Manny, and Mando at the last meetup. For some reason, I'm enjoying playing it less now than I did at first.

I pursued my typical strategy of taking what was given to me. My priorities, in order, are:

1. Moving up the food production track.
2. New Meeples, but don't stretch food too thin.
3. Good cards for low resource cost; late in game, cards that give me a lot of points regardless of cost.
4. Huts that meet my resource needs.
5. Tools, don't want more that 4 to 6 total however.
6. Wood, good for trading for cards. Need to keep a bunch on hand.
7. Higher cost resources for getting points from huts.
8. Food, I can always throw meeples in the food production area since there are no limits.

Mando and Nora weren't really too much of a factor in the game, but Manny made a strong push at the end by trading in a lot of gold for points. He was able to accumulate a lot of Meeples quickly but wasn't able to move up the food production track enough to keep up with his population growth. It seemed to me like he was going for food almost every round.

His strategy seemed to be to get as much production of resources as possible and convert that into points. To do so, he almost completely ignored tools and cards. The lack of cards really hurt him. By getting a few more key bonuses that fit his strategy, he could have easily have pushed past me. Also, getting just two cards that allow him to roll for a food production bonus would give him 8 chances to roll a 6, pretty good odds. The extra food would have helped him a lot.

It would have been interesting to see what would have happened had he played a little tighter, especially since I made a major screw up in one of the last rounds miscalculating the number of resources that I needed on a turn.