Settlers of the Stone Age

We've just gotten this game and have been pleasantly surprised by the game.  I had been expecting it to be very similar to Settlers of Catan with new names for Resource Cards and different Development Cards.  But Settlers of the Stone Age is a whole different game.

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If you haven't played Settlers of Catan, please read about it first.  It will make it easier to understand my comments about the differences between the two games.

The board is set.  It is pre-printed using hexes with numbers that represent dice rolls.  But you can only build campfires at designated intersections.  There are no roads and you don't get victory points for the number of campfires on the board.

Campfires can be moved!  As the game progresses, you may find that you need different resources.  You can take one of your old campfires that isn't producing what you now need, and move the campfire to a new location to start getting different resources.

Everyone starts with three campfires in Africa.  You create explorers that set out from your campfires.  As they locate new tribes you get collect tokens that are victory points when you build a campfire at the tribe's location.

As the game advances, some of the hexes in Africa turn into deserts and stop producing resources!  So the player who was getting lots of resources can suddenly find that their campfires are no longer producing, and they need to spread out through Europe or develop enough skills to travel into Australia or America.

Around the board are the progress charts for food, shelter, hunting and clothing.  You can use your resources to move up the progress chart and acquire new abilities.  For example, explorers start out with the ability to take two steps.  If you use a flint, you can improve your explorers abilities so that they can move three or more steps.

We just starting to play the game so it's taking some time to get use to some new strategies.  Picking good locations for your campfires is still important, but having a desert replace your best hex adds a whole new dimension to the game.

If you are familiar with strategy games, you might want to move straight into the complexities of Settlers of the Stone Age.  If you are new to this type of game, I would recommend starting with Settlers of Catan.

As always, we tend to ignore the age recommendations on most of these games.  Settlers of the Stone Age is recommended for 12y and up.  That may be true if a group of kids were trying to learn the game all by themselves, but there is no reason not to include younger kids in playing this game.  My 8y is having as much fun with this game as I am.

The Settlers of Stone Age