lot of science fiction concerns the expansion of humanity to new places, the new technologies necessary to undertake and survive the journey, and the adaptation of humans to new environments. This is generally in the context of migration into space, but these same challenges were already overcome by our ancestors in populating our own world. And as with space migration, we can only speculate as to exactly what it was like.
The Settlers of the Stone Age is a new board game about humanity's conquest of its first planet. Each player controls a group of early Homo sapiens, starting with a few camps in Africa and expanding from there to the rest of the world.
Stone Age is played on a hexagonal world map with each hex producing one of four resources: bone, flint, hides or food. Each hex also has a number from 2 to 12. At the beginning of each turn, the player rolls two dice, and hexes with the resulting number produce their resources for those players who have set up camps around them.
Next, the players trade resources and use them to outfit explorers, to move these explorers, to convert explorers into new camps and to develop new technologies. There are four technological tracks, these being food preparation (which allows explorers to move faster), clothing (allowing movement into cold environments), building (allowing travel into other hostile environments and across water) and weapons (allowing some limited raiding of other players' resources). As explorers travel to more and more remote areas (the Bering Strait, Polynesia, Tierra del Fuego), higher and higher levels of technology are required.
Players gain victory points for building new camps, for reaching the pinnacle of a technology, for exploring remote areas and for having camps on every continent. When one player reaches 10 points, he or she wins the game. Each player can only have five camps at a time, so the players must dismantle old camps in order to build enough new ones to win the game. This departure from the cradle is also encouraged by the creeping desertification of Africa, triggered by randomly distributed event tiles found in the remote areas.
Populating a planet for fun and profit
The game box describes Settlers of the Stone Age as: "An exciting game of migration and development." This nicely sums up what makes it different from the other games of the Catan series, despite surface similarities to other games in the series and particularly to the space colonization game Starfarers of Catan.
The necessity of leaving the old lands behind in order to settle the new make it a game of migration, rather than just expansion. This helps the game both by adding the interesting choice of which old camps to disband and by assuring that no player can completely dominate the board. All the way to the end, players operate on a roughly even playing field.
There is also a level of excitement not found in the other games, resulting from various prizes awarded to those who reach remote areas and continents first. Staying ahead here requires a clever mix of resources (to build explorers and keep them moving) and technologies (to move quickly and to penetrate natural barriers).
In fact, this mix is indicative of a great strength of this game: There are many roads to victory. One player might move explorers quickly through the relatively friendly environments, while another goes on the long journey to the Americas and a third concentrates on building lots of new camps (and disbanding lots of old ones).
This leads to variety within the game, which is fortunate because other factors could lead to repetitiveness. The board is completely fixed, with the locations of resources and numbers unchangeable. The only random part of the setup is the distribution of the hidden event tiles. The rest of the difference between games must come from the actions of the players themselves, which while diverse will tend to fall into patterns.
Settlers of the Stone Age is therefore probably the most exciting Catan game while simultaneously lacking in replay value. I can play Settlers of Catan five times in a row and feel that I'm meeting five different challenges. Stone Age doesn't have this quality, but when it comes to the first game of the night, the stirring prospect of peopling the planet means that I'll reach for it first.
That the spread of the desert comes about as a direct result of exploration gives the distinct impression that humanity is being punished for seeking things man was not meant to know. This led to some great table talk during my games, as the camp-building players cursed the more intrepid explorers for bringing down a biblical (or Lovecraftian) doom upon them all.
— Bob
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