Through The Ages - Shut Up & Sit Down Review

so I picked up a game that I reckon we can do for the first episode of the show for this new shut up and sit down oh that's fantastic which one it's good through the ages it's supposed to be a classic I'm gonna take it home and try it now oh well that's great let me know how it is we'll we'll put it in the first episode together with memoir 44 and citadel's so how do we go it's going fine it's going well we've done about 50 turns so far and I'm just gonna get some food before everything closes um should we do it maybe for just the next episode just next episode - how how is that well I mean it's big enough we could even do a whole episode special about it for a second episode I was thinking we could do descent but maybe we could do through the ages instead hey Paul the p m-- and the the dude who works for me listen I was thinking Rick interview in a city of rooms or through the ages this week um also it's been two years so what I don't know what what do you what are you doing Deb City yep Horse Center halls of the multiverse I'd have to go I have to move some cubes around a lot of love cubes guy hey boy how's it going Quinton a new edition of really ages well maybe we could do Quentin no no you mom hello my name's Paul Dean and I've been playing through the ages as such I have now witnessed the entire span of human human history from the earliest days of antiquity to the very latest innovations of the modern era I have seen it all and after digesting every moment of human existence time no longer has any meaning to me hmm and you know what I'm actually surprised that shut up and sit down didn't get her through the ages sooner this latest and by far best-looking edition of the game is actually the result of ten years worth of honing and tweaking of a game that's already been very popular for for a long time with a lot of people if you look up through the ages on BoardGameGeek which is arguably the Internet's best database of all board games the fam existed ever it amongst the top ten board games twice twice because this latest incarnation is rated in there along with the original version from like 2006 or 2005 or whatever it's in the top 10 twice that's nuts ah and it's a lower game it's a game boy one of them very very most favorite designers ever a designer who's produced a host of excellent board games with all kinds of different ideas and things and mechanics games of dough vs galaxy trucker and code names and bunny bunny moose moose how could you not be excited to try this I certainly was and it's big I mean it's it's large or it's certainly dense at least being mostly a card game it's lots and lots of cards although there's also this kind of awkwardly oversized don't need to be this big boards for tracking certain things it's mostly a lot of cards that cover all of history and kind of everything that's ever been in history or certainly as much as they can possibly squeeze into a game I'm talking things like famous historical figures like Aristotle and Joan of Arc or ideas like drama or journalism or the printing press or or historic structures like the great wall or the Eiffel Tower or din and online dating is probably in here somewhere in one of these many many decks of hundreds thousands of cards how many cards I'd really want to know this now here's how history works you've got the single sort of faux marble cardboard track that sits probably somewhere in the center of your table and you have cards constantly cascading down and representing the waterfall of time or something like that all of which are certain ideas concepts inventions players buy cards off the track which are always becoming cheaper the further down they go but every turn whatever's left at the end of the track if there's anything in a certain number of the end spaces depending on the number of players they just go away they just vanish so depending upon how your game goes sometimes you just won't have pyramids ever no one will ever have any pyramids or any theology or non will ever think of the idea of getting on top of a horse or something like that all of these cards are numbered according to age which is a very very rough approximate of sort of a period of time and some of them actually weirdly broadly approximate but as soon as one of these ages ends and all the cards have been played the next age comes in and then things get slightly more modern than you might start thinking about Charlie Chaplin or something like that he'll cascade down time and you can buy Charlie Chaplin or or not most of those cars will then wing their way over to your player board where they'll be added to it or they'll be put next to it and be complimenting it in some way look for example here I'm now coal mining I've actually improved my mines which were previously iron which is fine so bad is fine it's now coal which is a lot better or Isaac Newton will just sit next to my board and make everybody a bit smarter which I need right now hmm you're messing cubes yeah so here's the thing this play board is absolutely garnished with cubes can you be absolutely garnished you can be absolutely garnished in this game through the ages is a card game it's definitely a game that has card sort of but really it's a game of cubes it's a game of so many cubes it just economies based around dozens of cubes here's how the cubes work cube cam I hope you like cubes because you're going to be shuffling them all over your board for the rest of game until the end of human civilization yellow cubes are basically they're workers they're people are in this yellow Bank right now they're sort of their potential people so they're embryos anyway you pay food and they pop out of here hand into the worker pool where you actually find things for them to do do you need more resources well you can send somebody mining do you need to be cleverer do you need more technology points to actually play more technologies well that's fine put somebody into a Brens building or maybe assign them to the army if you want to be a particularly stabby player thing is as this Bank gradually declines your population is getting bigger it's getting denser so hopefully you're keeping up with that by employing people in things that cause happiness like temples here or the Opera or I've actually got a Basilica here which is nice I don't have to put a person in there and it just makes everyone happy like all basilica's do everywhere these are yeah they're basically your population they're people that workers they represent activities happening within your civilization particularly they're important here and here because they are making things they're making resources that are food or generic stuff whether this is bronze iron or coal or whatever it ends up being your blue bank is all of these resources before they exist gradually these will trickle unto whatever they become like bronze food food different types resources different types but the thing is as this Bank declines you run the risk of corruption that's what that stands for which is a mechanic that stops you from piling too many resources particularly early in the game it represents kind of political corruption but was so just inefficiency where if you have a lot of resources laying around like this oh my goodness - for corruption for cubes go back to the bank because if you don't plow these into the foundations of something that you're building they sort of just disappear government this is your government here at the moment I've got a monarchy which is the best type of government obviously your government gives you a certain number of white cubes which are civil actions which are basically the things that you do on your turn are you assigning a worker from the pool somewhere it's a civil action are you buying a car from the track well that could be a few civil actions depending upon how far up the track it is are you reassigning workers are you playing a leader are you playing some kind of special oh where are they yellow card that gives you a one time bonus that's a civil action the more of these you have the better of the government you have the more stuff you can do on your turn so this is really important then there's military actions maybe you're building a military unit well that's actually a red military action or maybe you're even employing some kind of new tactic that's a red military action or doing something aggressive that's a red military action clearly you need to be constantly thinking about your next form of government what you can employ next how you can be more efficient so that on your turn you're a powerhouse of things powerhouses of cubes and do you want to perform all those military actions you want to assemble a half-decent army like I'm starting to do here then go to war but probably do actually because all of this card collecting and efficiency and the economy maximization is actually a bit of a lonely responsibility you can't play through the ages of it kanpei freely ages as a non-aggressive game without my material but basically it's kind of a solo experience of just maximizing things I mean sure you can be grabbed glow you can be grabbing cards from the track to try and deny your opponent's things but in a four-player game particularly you don't have a huge amount control over that by the time tell them coming back round to you again and you won't have anything much to do so having an army like this and then sending it out to attack people that it gives you a chance to read properly interact with the other players in a way that otherwise just won't really happen you get to declare war on packs or raid people for technology or or to kill their leaders or even steal their culture oh culture of course and that's the whole point of all of this game the your bias to get culture nothing else actually really matters unless it helps you along the way to that all of these splendid leaders and technologies and technology points that you get to enable you to employ new technologies it's fine it's great but ultimately it's got a score you culture points and only some buildings do that only some people do that only very specific things give you culture and that's what you're going to be judged by there's no prize for second place in history haven't make any sense I mean what you know do we have a make any sense but within the context of the game it does who and I'll say it again they were just that there's a lot of Carty going to be coming up all the time through the game and gradually as the game goes on and on and your civilization gradually gets grander and more complex you find you your hands get larger which is to Turnpike through a civil Cube limit and then you get more powerful leaders that start to bounce off either some of the structures you have or even some of the yellow cards that you have your very shrewd you can change certain Carl together certain leaders work quite well with particular buildings and as you can probably guess everything just starts to get bigger than numbers bigger the cards get bigger the amount of science gets bigger the culture gets bigger you got this military track everything gets bigger at particularly military stuff gets a lot bigger thing as much as I want to encourage you to play with your military stuff in your tanks and your rockets and your planes and all of this the military side of the game is also sort of the most broken in that there's no easy way to catch up once you're behind and it's in everybody's interest to always pick on the weakest player because it gives them benefits there are a few yellow cards if you like enough to grab them they give you certain bonuses they give bonuses to players who are behind or who are doing the worst there's not actually that many of them in the game the game generally doesn't really have catch-up mechanics for anything but if I like one thing about the military side of stuff I like a few things but if I like one thing apart from these tactics you can employ in these interesting political events that definitely shake stuff up it's just that the board is the best designed and it's the smallest board you've got this little military board that just it goes anywhere the other boards are just they're just too too long they're stupidly too long and they awkwardly take up space in a way that I just don't like it's really an elegant but here's a thing that actually I forgot to mention enough that I've hinted out enough but let me just be blatant about this on the box for through the ages it says playtime one one hundred and twenty human minutes plus I might be a bit longer I thought I was going insane when I was playing games of this that lasted five or six hours then I went on the Internet good you should check it out looked at what other people were saying and it was not uncommon for people to say well you know it's about an hour per player plus maybe an extra hours so four player game might be five hours could be six hours if you're all new three player game might be four or five hours it's not unreasonable especially if you're very thoughtful yeah yep that yeah that's going to happen when you play through the ages it is the second longest game I've ever played for shut up and sit down behind twilight imperium it has dominated the last two weeks of my life entire evenings days lost to just playing games sometimes just one game of this to see how it is with this many players or if I put this thing into it it's not necessarily a bad thing but on my god I was not ready for that across all this span of history across all this play time that you nest in through the ages the game doesn't feel hugely different at the end to how it does at the start you're still mostly doing the same things with your economy you're still playing in the same way that it's a game that sort of gets to a certain level and just comes along the only thing that changes is of course as you reach them on there and you get more exciting technologies and ideas is the numbers get bigger and that's kind of it and this is a game you know with all this card shuffling this is a game with a fair amount of random listen you don't know when certain cards are going to appear and whether you will ever be able to claim them particularly if there's like three other people are going to go before you - and the card track completely changes or the random event just happen to hurt you random political events just don't fall in your favor and then if you're falling behind and you don't have a way to quickly catch up it's just you can really be screwed you can really seriously be screwed by history in a sort of Guns Germs and Steel kind of way where just complete fortune happens to privilege you rather than someone else is privileged over to its credit though through the ages connector you remain quite engrossing for all of that time because you are always thinking about efficiency and economy and the very best way to do a particular thing all know but know what you know what bugs me the most about through the ages is it's just it's not great it's interesting it has a lot of cool stuff in it after the end of your first game you will have seen pretty much forget everything the game has to offer it will be different the next time that you play but there won't really be any surprises it's not one of the 10 best games that have ever existed it's certainly not two of the 10 best games that have ever existed and I joke a bit about the play time because there's never really that much ever ever consideration again I don't mind being engrossed in something for four or five hours I've had some really fun games of this but also for that same amount of time I think I would rather play that Twilight Imperium game or get into a descent or Imperial assault game really dig my teeth into a long involving complex game of caverna so then shut up and sit down recommend through the ages no not really I it's fairly good it's good it's interesting grossing big maybe that's really your kind of thing it's an acquired taste is a thing and there are some players out there who will actually absolutely adore how big this is and how much there is in here and that's absolutely fine in fact that's more than fine that's fantastic there are other players are going to bounce off this and never be interested and thing is I just feel like I i straddle the line between those two groups of people I can see both sides of the thing I just can't recommend this enough I feel like I've been through an experience and I don't know it sorry hold on after everything that's happened Quinn's oh yeah listen I'm a bit worried this is a flawed ago you know this is bladder I don't want you releasing a bad review we all work hard maybe you've just worked a little too hard I'm sure it's really good what no I'm fine but just don't release your video okay don't just don't release it what will happen if Matt and I can play the game this weekend and then you know we'll probably release the video of our own so you're so bad no no no no no you can't do that no listen I actually already gave the code of laws to Matt he says it looks really interesting Quinn's know I remember when I first started playing this game this is the boy back then even across tenpence floor cavity and you got a biscuit and both of our houses unlocked and we'd share each other's dogs when you wanted to go on a walk can you make me have a day closed down dear Quentin he's gone and while 44 and Citadel's you get that yep let's just give Paul a look at your face one more that's it that's it that's it we're over we're done half our and it's a Vlada game it's game but one of them doesn't Pakistan really distracting box Val and it's a why so I go so I got in the Oh anyway here's Wonderwall

Channel: Shut Up & Sit Down

Views: 229,870

Keywords: Shut Up and Sit Down, SUSD, Shut Up, Sit Down, Board Games, Board Gaming, Family Games, Boardgame, Board Game, Gaming, Tabletop, Fun Games, Through The Ages, Quintin Smith, Paul Dean, Matt Lees, Board Game Review, Game Review, A New Story of Civilization, Vlaada Chvátil, Czech Games Edition

Id: aUxAVjiO0Qg

Length: 23min 31sec (1411 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 28 2016