Don't forget to feed the workers!

Worker placement has become a staple of mechanic of modern boardgaming, the familiar pleasure of putting a meeple on the board and performing the action corresponding to where you’ve put it provides the basis of many of the hobbies most popular titles and clever designers have found countless ways of playing with that simple concept over the years to keep it fresh.

So, approaching Bernd Brunnhofer's 2008 classic worker placement game Stone Age there was a degree of worry that the last decade or so would have seen this much loved title become a little out of date in todays more demanding marketplace. 

At its heart it’s a simple game that sees you competing with other players to build the best Stone Age tribe. To do this you take turns placing workers onto the board and performing actions. These actions will allow you to do things like earn resources, build buildings, grow your population or purchase end game scoring cards. Those end game cards are crucial because while building can earn you decent points as you go, the big rewards are to be found at the end. These cards come in two styles offering either points multipliers based on the progress of your settlement or on the number of artifact sets you’ve collected. 

If you've ever played a worker placement game before then this will all sound pretty straight forward, perhaps even a little lacking in colour. Fear not, Stone Age has a couple of things up its sleeve to make life a little more interesting.

The first wrinkle is the continual need to provide food for your workers at the end of each turn. The more workers you have the more food you need which makes deciding when to grow your population that little bit more delicate. Thankfully food is the easiest resource to collect but the continual need to keep supplies topped up never goes away adding a persistent pull on your workers availability that gives the game a welcome extra dimension. 

The other thing Stone Age does that sets it apart is how it handles resource collection. Unlike other game things aren’t quite as simple as placing a meeple and getting the reward. Instead, the number of meeples you put in a particular area indicates the number of dice you'll get to roll. The total of those rolled dice is then divided by value of the resource in question to indicate how many you've collected. Thankfully you can offset this randomness slightly by crafting tool tokens which allow you to add value to the dice but still, you're never fully sure what you'll end up with.

This focus on dice for resource collection is probably the most divisive aspect of the game and the one area where it perhaps shows its age a little. On a purely thematic level I think it works quite nicely, back at the dawn of civilisation mining, hunting etc would have been unpredictable and the addition of tools to make things slightly less so is a nice touch. However, for some people, the random nature of dice is an instant turn off and in a game where your entire round may have been working towards buying something specific it can be frustrating to see the plan scuppered by something so out of your control. 

For what is undoubtably a simple game rules wise, those two key aspects add the flavour needed to keep things interesting. Anyone who's played heavier games like Agricola or Caverna will recognise the added layer of stress feeding your people can add while the element of uncertainty in resource collection means you're constantly having to adjust plans as the fates decree. Add into that the constant drive to build buildings to keep your score ticking over and the need to nab the end game scoring cards that best work for you and you've got a game that builds nicely on its more beginner friendly framework.

I admit I was slightly concerned that games had moved on to such an extent since its release that Stone Age would feel a bit left behind now. I needn't have worried, while it remains relatively lightweight compared to more elaborate worker placement games it has enough going on to still provide some crunch for more experienced players while being easy to learn for beginners too.