We got to play a game of Stone Age with two friends yesterday, Jasper and Alanna. Jasper has incredible intuition with games, even when his five year old daughter is distracting him, and he lost to my wife by a few points. Stone Age is definitely more of a game (i.e, there is more skill) than I thought, an opinion I've come to through my inability to win it. I had recently finally won a game online, which was nice, but I'm still awful at Stone Age. I actually don't find the dice feel like a huge factor to me in the outcome of the game, although a bad early food roll might be the biggest potential impact dice roll. Here's how the game started out:
Turn 1: Alanna takes a baby, Bronwen takes farm, I take tool.
Turn 2: Bronwen takes farm, I take baby.
Turn 3: I take farm.
Is this a mistake? Should I go to a starvation strategy right there and pass up the farm and instead take another baby? One thing I had wondered was whether the people in the first two seats have an advantage, but in this game Jasper did well from the fourth seat.
I got a few cards early - the 3 x hut card, a 2 x hut card, and a 2 x farm, but then had a hard time getting any more farms - so on turn 7 I decided to forgo the farm and start starving my people. I was having a hard time keeping up with food requirements, which seems to be difficult for me when I am in seats 3/4. It's possible that my strategy/style in this game has swung from overvaluing the cards to undervaluing them and rating huts too strongly. Overall, I really like Stone Age. I would play it at WBC but unfortunately it usually conflicts with other games that I like.
Chris
I like Stone Age a lot, and would be happy to play you online, either realtime (BSW) or turn-based (yucata.de).
ReplyDeleteIf you already had the 3x hut card by turn 3, I think you definitely should have gone for starvation. I think that if no other player is going for starvation in a 4-player game, it's almost always right to starve.
That makes sense to me. I wish I remember more of the details, so I could tell you whether I spent any actions hunting for food or not, but I probably did.... is that a mistake? When your tribe is still small, it might be worth hunting even though you plan to go starvation after you get another baby.
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