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.

Stone Age - 3 Player

Ed was busy trying out St Petersburg while I really wanted to get in at least one game of Stone Age. Since Steve had just finished playing a round with 3 other players and wanted to move on to another game, I was only able to corral two other players, Eve and Josh.

Three player has slightly different rules than the four player version - out of food field, the mating hut, and the tool hut, only two can be occupied and once a resource has two players occupying it, it is full. Other than that, and the fact that each player gets more turns because there is one less person fighting for cards and huts, the game plays similar.

I followed what is becoming my favorite Stone Age strategy:

• Get as many Tribespeople as is prudent. I've never tried the starvation strategy, instead I try to get only as many as I can support. I ended the game with 9.
• I try to keep my permanent food production within 2 or 3 of the number of Tribespeople that I have. The number gets skewed a bit at the start of the game since I start with 5 tribesmen and no food. Fortunately, I also start with 12 food, which keeps things stable until I'm able to increase my production. I added 2 food production before I added my first new Tribesperson.
• I cherry-picked the cards that I wanted and only paid more than two resources for one late in the game. By that time, I had 6 different symbols and was willing to pay whatever it took to get the extra 13 VPs that the 7th symbol would provide. My opponents were a bit inexperienced and allowed me to take whatever cards I wanted with very little opposition.
• I'm rapidly losing my love of tools. I ended the game with only 2.
• Whenever possible, I put all my resource gatherers on one task instead of spreading them around. Without a lot of tools, luck plays too high a role otherwise. After one round of rolling two dice for gold and getting snake eyes, I abandoned the one or two on a resource tactic unless I was forced into it. Note: an obvious exception to this is food. With one guy and one tool, you're guaranteed at least one food and could get as many as three. By the same token, if I only absolutely need one wood and I have a tool available, I feel reasonably comfortable devoting only one or two tribespeople to the task.
• Buy huts early and often.

I ended up with 154 pts on the track, good for second place before bonuses were counted. Unfortunately for them, my opponents did not understand the true value of the cards. After adding up bonuses, I had 303pts compared to Eve's 218.

I swear that I will post game reports of games that I lose as well, but I've won 6 straight since deciding to start this blog.

Stone Age

Prior to Saturday night, I had played Stone Age a total of three times and had not won once. Despite this losing streak, and I must admit that winning a game and enjoying a game are often much too synonymous for me, I found that it was rapidly rising up the list of my favorite games.

I'm trying to figure it out why it is so much fun for me. Perhaps it is partly due to Ed's insistance on shouting out "they're entering the mating hut" whenever he creates a new meeple. I like the game play. It seems fast and doesn't drag. I like the tool mechanism for smoothing out luck in rolls, and I like the fact that you can completely screw your opponent by filling up a resource that is desperately needed. Overall, it's just fun.

With Dee, Josh, and Matt as my adversaries, I was finally able to win my fourth time playing the game. My major mistakes in during my losing streak were:

• Liking tools too much. It's great to get 3-5 of them, but I was ending up with 10. Making them less of a priority helped a lot.


• I have a tendency in resource games to try to spend the first part of the game establishing my engine and the last part of the game acquiring points. This doesn't seem to work in Stone Age. You need to be converting resources into points as early as possible.


• Under-emphasizing or over-emphasizing the cards. My first time to play, I pretty much ignored the cards. After losing badly, I routinely bought cards for 3 and 4 resources for the next couple of games. I learned to take what was given to you. If a good card is there for limited resources or a great card is there that is worth more resources, I take it. If not, I let it go and spend my resources elsewhere.


• Way overvaluing the card that gives all players bonus resources based on your die roll. I love these cards. During my losing streak, I'd go out of my way to get one of these. I finally figured out that, even though rolling a 5 or 6 worked great for me, it was also helping out all my opponents. I stopped overpaying for these and instead rejoiced when the player to my right chose to take one.
• Taking what was given to me instead of forcing a specific strategy. In the game that I won, Dee was obviously pursueing a card strategy, and he ended up with over 100 points in bonuses at the end. However, by taking cards above all else, he allowed me to increase my farming and my tribe really easily. I ended up taking the best of what he was allowing to slip to me.