Through the Ages is a civilization building game. The goal is to develop your civilization, not to destroy other ones. Military strength is just one aspect of your nation, as well as population, production or science. It is up to you which aspect you will concentrate on, more or less, but you should not underestimate any of them while building your civilization.
Victory is achieved by the player whose nation produces the most culture during the game. However, there are many ways to produce culture: through religion, literature or drama, by building wonders, by utilizing cultural persons etc. Considerable amount of culture can be gained even via wars or aggression.
Description from BGGThis is the thread for the third Play By Forum game of Vlaada Chvátil's Through The Ages, which I'm opening as it looks like there's sufficient interest in another forum game (despite people playing on BGO - forum play is more exciting and personal!). This is not a short, simple game; it is an epic civilisation building game. Depending on player (and moderator!) speed, the game could take months to complete, but this does give players a good chance to evaluate the board and their options.
A copy of the rules can be found
on BGG here. The rules are great, they're mostly very clear, and so I will make no attempt to explain the rules myself, and instead advise players to read them (you will need a BGG account, which if you don't have, is hassle free to make). I will of course try and answer any questions players may have.
The game will be run primarily from a spreadsheet, such as the one shown
here. I have some midifications from TtAI planned for ease of use. Notably, only a single public sheet will be provided, instead of a sheet for each player. This sheet will show each player's Civil cards. Military cards will be sent to each player via PM on the forum.
I also hope to supply each player with a sheet they can play around on, implement their actions as they go and find out if/how much corruption they'll be facing (and of course provide some easy instructions on how to use said sheet). This should make it easier for players to calculate whats going on in their civilisation, especially after things get complicated.
Players may wish to bookmark
this link, which shows all of the available actions (excluding extras given by wonders or leaders), as well as the turn structure summary. Sections 1 and 6 will of course be performed by me between turns.
Some notes for PBF:
- Please do not contact other players about the game outside this thread. I'm not saying you can't mention the game in other threads, but don't go out of your way to conspire in a way that isn't public.
- I will be respecting the standard rules for pacts. This means, you can't talk about a pact you might be proposing before you do, you have to play it, name the roles and the other player can respond. Breaking this rule results in forfeiting your political action for the turn.
- Hopefully the spreadsheets will work, but if there are any issues that crop up, let me know! Also, if you feel that some details could be better displayed, or should be displayed somewhere else, let me know - the sheets are, after all, for your benefit.
- For ease of spotting what your official actions are, please bold your final actions.
- I'm usually pretty lenient about letting people take back actions they realize are not what they wanted to do. Primarily this is intended as a catch for if you have corruption, civil actions remaining, or an uprising, all of which can be easy to miss.
- Try to check the game frequently, even when it isn't your turn, as political actions regularly affect everyone. If you sign up, I'd say at a minimum you should be able to check the thread at least once per day except weekends, ideally more times than that. That said if you check regularly you won't have to do anything a lot of the times you check, and when you do need to it's perfectly acceptable (and advised!) to mull over your options a bit.
Taking your turn:
Turn structure1) Updating the card row: I will do this for you between turns along with step 7
2) Outcome of a war: You sacrifice units, then they sacrifice units, then one or both of you might need to make decisions based on what happened. I will update other things (usually culture) as I see them.
3) Political action: This is probably the most complex bit of your turn. If you want to play an:
- Event: State that you are playing an event in the thread along with it's age. Then, I will reveal the next current event and resolve it (which may require decisions from various players)
- Aggression: Play the aggression in the thread, name your target, and post what you're sacrificing (if you can calculate it yourself, please include your total strength for the aggression as well!). Your rival then posts what they're sacrificing (or bonus cards), and one or both of you might then have to make choices regarding the outcome.
- Pact: Play the pact in the thread, specify which player is A and which is B (if relevant). Your target then either accepts or rejects. Once the proposal has been made, you can talk about it, but you cannot renege or change the proposal.
- War: Announce it as though it were an aggression, but then simply carry on with your turn. Remember it's resolved next turn
- No action: Announce you are skipping your political action (note: Please do announce it, otherwise I might ask people to wait as I check, did you really mean to skip your political action?)
4) Discard excess military cards: Check your military hand limit (normally =military actions), then PM me military cards until you are at your military hand limit.
This is the most commonly missed part of people's turn, please try to remember to do this!5) Civil and Military actions: Post all of your civil and military actions directly into the thread. For the first few turns, or whenever you aren't sure, it
may be a good idea to PM them to me instead, just to double check everything you're trying to do is valid, or perhaps mess around on your provided spreadsheet and see if what you want to happen seems to be happening. It's easy to forget a few things and make a few mistakes, like, you used military actions on an aggression/war, or that Wonder cost 1 CA more than you thought because you've completed a Wonder already, or accidentally trying to play a military tech with a military action instead of a civil one, and that's just a few examples. Either way if your move is valid, it stands (and I'll post it if you PM'd me) and I'll update everything based on it. If you did something wrong, I'll let you know, and you can fix it.
6) Production and Maintenance: I'll do all of this for you. Once I post in the thread the updated card row, take that as a sign that your indicators are updated, food and resources are updated, and your military cards are available.
Rules in useWe will be playing the alternate corruption rule. This lets you choose to not produce one resource token in your production phase. In essence, this rule will reduce your corruption by 1 if you would have exactly 0, 4 or 8 blue tokens left and at least one Bronze mine.
Other than that,
I'm open to any other rules/variant suggestions! Let me know if there's something you desperately want to try as you sign up.
I'm happy to run a 3 or 4 player games, depending on interest and player preference.
Signups (I will be splitting these into two games, one of more experienced and one of less experienced players)
Kuildeous
Galzria
Watno
Jorbles
Qvist
Bozzball
Author
Topic: Through the Ages III + IV signups - Games started! (Read 3653 times)