LogFAQs > #898522835

On top of that, you don't only need to worry about the track/cube-pushing resources - you also have an action point allowance system (and you can earn more action points with the right technologies, as well). You need to use a Civil Action each time you take a card, play a card, or run operations upgrading your non-Military tableau. And any action affecting the Military tableau costs Military actions (which can be traded to draw Military cards). The Civil card marketplace is well thought out; newly drawn cards cost more action points than do the cards that have already been on the marketplace for a while. The decision-point count is astronomical in this game, especially as you branch out. Drafting a yellow Action card to give you more resources (which cannot be played on the turn it is drafted) means you sacrifice Actions for resources. Drafting Technology cards puts a strain on your Science supply - and many of those technologies will require Workers placed on them. Everything is deeply linked, and figuring out your engine is paramount. In a game with 130+ cards to go through, you need to strike the balance between grabbing and playing the best cards, and figuring out which cubes to push to which location, and when to do each.

So TtA is incredibly tight and smart. It's also fiddly and kind of a giant fucking mess just because of the scale of everything. (As an example - the resource that virtually all players call "Stone," and is generated by Mines, is actually called "Resources" in the parlance of the game - but "resource" is a word that of course can seems generic in gamer-lingo.) The player mat has a bunch of distinct areas on it so you can track both resource production and accumulated resources (which can go on different tiers to indicate how much they're worth). It's nice that the components are good - little, transparent yellow blue cubes for the Workers and Resources; white and red cubes for Civil and Military actions. Be careful not to swipe your hand across your board, because that would really suck. I believe I've seen TtA described as "Accounting: The Game," and you can see why. Thankfully, the game does have three public tracks that don't reside on your tableau - the Military, Culture, and Science tracks.

Unfortunately, while the Action Allocation system is fantastic strategically, it can result in brutal downtime. Instead of Agricola's "your turn is one action" system, where everyone gets to stay involved with frequent mini-turns, TtA forces you to take all of your actions at once, and you can do them in pretty much any order you want. The analysis paralysis this can produce is enormous. I've only played with one other human in face-to-face games, but I get tired of the downtime even playing against three AI opponents. And their actions are only separated by like 5 seconds of animation!

Nonetheless, I admire the design of TtA a ton. The astounding amount of things-to-keep-track-of is appropriate given the sprawling scale of things - we go all the way from the eras of Caesar and Alexander the Great through Genghis Khan and Joan of Arc through Shakespeare and Napoleon through Bill Gates and Gandhi. The techs are thematic as well and it's ultra-satisfying to upgrade the basic Science Labs from Philosophy to Alchemy (in Age I) to the Scientific Method (in Age II) to Computers (in Age III), or to progress from your Despotism government into a Constitutional Monarchy into Democracy, or to go from a basic Swordsman into Rifleman with the Modern Infantry alongside your Knights being upgraded into Cavalrymen and then Tanks. For a tale with this epic a scope, that long playtime can be almost desirable.

Future - ... which doesn't exactly make it easy to get to the table. It's almost guaranteed to be a no-show at most game nights due to its bulk. Aside from in-home play, I'm going to have to ask 1-2 people specifically to play this. Probably worth it, though.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness