by Bill Todd

Created on: April 23, 2010

Stone Age is playable with 2 - 4 players. An average game with experienced players takes 30 - 45 minutes. Set up time is under 5 minutes. Suggested ages are 11 up, although I've seen kids as young as 7 playing.

Components include the pieces representing the resources: Food, wood, brick, stone, and gold. Each type of resource has a limited amount available. There are also the population pieces the players use to play (10 per player). Then you have the tiles that the players buy to earn victory points (total of 28, although the number used varies depending on how many players there are), and the all-important stack of cards that players can purchase to boost the game-ending victory points. There is also a cup with eight or nine dice (D6) in it. Also, there are 4 place-cards. They are exactly alike. Each place-card has 5 tile sections on the bottom for you to hold tiles you've purchased, along with the chart for converting resources into points and vice versa (see explanation in later section). There is also a section that explains the bottom portion of the cards (also explained in a later section).

The board looks complicated but it really isn't. Starting from the bottom and reading from left to right:

The 4 spaces in the bottom left represent the victory point tiles. You shuffle the tiles and place them on the stacks, seven to a tile per player. Thus, in a 2 player game, you'd only use fourteen tiles, 3 player game uses twenty-one tiles, and a 4 player game uses all twnety-eight tiles.

The track that reads up from 0 to 10 on the left side is the farm track. You must feed your population at the end of the turn. Not doing so will cost you resources, and if you can't pay in resources, it will cost you ten victory points. During the game you can use one of your population tokens to take over the farm which will move your counter up the farm track. For every farm you have, subtract one from amount of food needed to feed your population (if you have 5 population you pay 5 food at the end of the round. If you have 3 farms, you only pay 2 at the end of the round).

The four larger place holders on the right side of the board are for the cards. This deck of cards has 2 symbols on each card. The top symbol is the immediate effect it has for you in the game, and the bottom symbol represents game-end victory point conditions. I'll explain the cards in more detail later on. To buy a card, you must place one of your population on the card and pay the cost. The cost is represented

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