Flashback Friday - Stone Age - Love It or Hate It? Do you Still Play It?

Sulla wrote: . . . still haunts me.

Greetings fellow Roman.

Who was it that said at WBC about 6 years ago “Stone Age is a Shit House”?

A. Drunk Will Keyon
B. Drunk Matt Lotter
C. Drunk Josh Look
D. All of the above

Played it for the first time recently.
I am not a fan of WP. I know that's probably the standard round here. For me it's because usually they break all thematic ties for me. There's always things in there that give me an uncanny valley effect that just piss me off. I can cope with abstraction, but not gamey abstraction, where you can see the mechanisms pointing out.

So Stone Age I felt was 2 games, in that respect, because the sending out your hunters and gatherers and rolling dice for them was great, and felt like a very nice abstraction. But the cards, I couldn't work out what was going on thematically - just a maths exercise , really, and not a hugely interesting one. I didn't feel I was giving my tribe any character or whatever. Just adding up. I burnt through the deck that triggers the ending as quick as I could.

Funnily enough I was teaching myself Neanderthal at the time which actually uses the same idea for hunting and gathering. Except of course you can muscle in on territory, get attacked by predators, there's changes to the spaces, and improvements are thematically explained pretty well. There's plenty of problems with it of course. And my kids are probably not ready for it like they would be for Stone Age. I guess though I want those thematic ties to be meaningful. And the precarious existence theme doesnt come through in swapping resources for VP via a card with... a picture of... a chief? I think?

I still play it and I still like it.

I mainly play it in my board game design class as it is one of the "faster" and "simpler" worker placement games for the students to understand.

I know that the WP playing community prefers a more complicated game (see Scythe or Root or Everdell or...) but I think it's still one of best gateway wp games around.

Just don't smell that cup.

Nope, never liked it, still don't. Hate games with any sort of score multiplication at then end.

Here's hoping the 10th Anniversary cup has extra stank.

I only played a couple times when it first came out. I wasn't impressed. I felt like it was too nakedly number-based, even for its genre. I also felt like the endgame scoring was disproportionately important. Fully 80% of the final scores were from bonuses.

But it does look really nice, and it's certainly more forgiving than something like Agricola. Just didn't click for me though.

It's a supreme middle finger to new players too. I've played too many Euros with some dingus who camps out in BGG threads learning exactly which cards to play or how to win best. Stone Age seems designed to cater to them.

I generally like Euros but it's sort of an endemic problem in the genre that the endgame always feels like an audit.

I haven't played in years and don't feel the need to return to it. It was fine, mostly unoffensive, but I'd rather play Caylus. And I don't really want to play that.

Played it for the first time this Christmas. It was okay - nothing special. I can see the draw as an intro to worker placement, but even something like Viticulture is accessible, and also more fun.

Not bad by any means, but I think its time has passed.