THE GAME
Roll Through the Ages is a bit like Yahtzee meets Civilization.  Players roll dice and they can keep the results or re-roll as they wish.  After 3 rolls, or if earlier if desired, the player uses their results to hire workers, feed workers, gather goods, build monuments, and develop their civilisation. The goal is to score as many points as possible.

Players start with just 3 dice and hiring extra workers can give them up to 7 dice to roll each turn; however, workers can not be fired and must be fed each turn, so lots of dice means lots of mouths to feed too or you lose points.  Points are primarily scored by creating monuments which takes workers and you only score when you complete a monument – so sometimes it’s better to start building a smaller monument that you think you can finish rather than risk not completing a larger one.  Read the rest of this entry »

THE GAME
In Medici, players are merchants bidding over goods at the dockside so they can load their ships.  There are 5 different types of goods and each good tile has a value from 0 to 5 on it too.  On their turn, a player draws 1 to 3 goods one at a time and then auctions the good(s) off as a single lot with the current player bidding last.  Players get just one chance to bid and can only ever buy a total of 5 goods in a round.  If no-one bids on a lot they are thrown into the sea.  A round ends when the goods run out or all players have their full 5 goods each.

At the end of a round, players potentially gain florins for their ships and their goods.  Ship’s Score: Players each total the values written on their goods tiles – the player with the highest total number gains 30 florins and the next highest amounts gains florins too – the exact amount of florins and the positions that score are based on the number of players playing.  Goods Sore: Each good tile (regardless of the value written on it) moves its owner’s marker one step along the relevant goods track (i.e. two cloth tiles would move the  player’s marker 2 steps along the cloth track). Read the rest of this entry »

After more than 5 years of having Windows PC smartphones, one of the main reasons I switched to an iPhone was because of all the boardgame conversions appearing on it.  Looking at my survey results so far, over 50% of respondents play games on their iPhones so it seems I’m not alone.

Therefore, I’m pleased to announce that from Friday 24th September, the Metagames blog will also be reviewing iPhone board games in addition to the usual board game reviews too.  To kick this off, there will be a new iPhone game review every day for a week as well as the usual board games reviews and posts too. Read the rest of this entry »