William Terdoslavich - Sep 6, 2008 11:27 am (#24541 Total: 24604) I'm tired of playing Euro games. I want to kill!!! On the Table last night in Long Island: Seven Ages. I once owned it, read the rules, got rid of it and never looked back. This is a pretty unfair thing to do to a game I never played. Now that I played it for the first time, perhaps I was right. Seven Ages tries to be historical at the expense of being playable. It is still an admirable game. It's not easy trying to encapsulate all of world history for replay with a bunch of chits on a map. The designer deserves respect since he tried to "swing for the fences." He incorporated just about any large-scale polity that ever emerged anywhere in the world. He makes sure their "start areas" are on the board. He rates every one of them, each with its own card. The cards are multi-use, resolving trade differences, warfare, advancements and disasters. Empires can be started or ended. Income is gleaned and spent. Units expand boundaries of each polity. Every turn, each empire can only do one thing. And yet... The attention to historical detail is awesome, but the game that must summon this forth is cluttered. Combat takes too long to resolve. When each turn lasts a century, there is no need to "micro-manage" a conflict by determining how many units go into the first line and how many shall support them, and when these units become "exhausted," triggering factor changes. As a multi-player game, Seven Ages suffers from the endemic "fraction problem." If there are five players at the board, you are only playing one-fifth of the time. What do you do with the other four-fifths? Read a book? That critique is admittedly unkind. But there is a Euro-game buried beneath this game, just dying to get out. There are too many areas. Key to winning is getting an empire to start in a region too distant from other players. Deconfliction removes challenge, as polities in central China, South America, Africa and North America emerge unscathed and unchallenged, racking up a lot of VP. Why bother starting a new empire next to a competing player when you can score more points starting another one in the middle of nowhere? Halving the number of areas, halving the number of pieces and making the game simultaneous in execution would increase player conflict, force bargaining, and burn through some empires what should not have toodled along unchallenged for half a millennia. The mechanic does not fit the scale, and therein lies the problem. I really wanted to like this game, back when I bought it and again when I played it, believing that maybe I made a mistake in judgment. The map is beautiful. The pieces embody some very clever mechanisms. The counter-mix limits the effective size of empire. But it all doesn't come together in the end.