Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization by Vlaada Chvátil is the 2015 refresh of 2006’s Through the Ages: A Story of Civilization. This is a semi-abstracted take on the Civilization building genre of games, and I feel it does a phenomenal job imparting the feeling of progress to players and simulating a civilization building game.

In Through the Ages, players are trying to build the best civilization through resource management, developing new technologies, appointing appropriate leaders, building wonders, maintaining a strong military, and developing a culture. A failure in any of these areas can and will be exploited by your opponents.

Through the Ages takes players right from the age of antiquity all the way up to the modern era. The primary mechanic of Through the Ages is card drafting. Everything in Through the Ages is represented by a card that you have to take. Cards flow through a river, refilling and cycling at the end of each player’s turn. The newest cards to be available cost 3 actions to take, while the cards that have been on the table for a few turns may only cost a single action to take.

Photo Credit: Constantine Veze @KThVez via BGG

Beginning with Despotism as your system of government, philosophy for science, bronze as your best resource, and the barest thoughts of religion and agriculture, you’ll slowly grow and expand your civilization in different ways. There are lots of thematic touches in Through the Ages, such as having a peaceful change of government, or the violent revolution. Corruption siphoning resources out of your stockpiles, and famine causing workers to fall idle, everything in the game just makes sense when put in the context of a civilization game. That said, the theme falls away pretty quickly as you spend your turns min/maxing the options available to you, and how you can maximize your numbers.

All of the systems of Through the Ages are linked together. If you want to build a new building, you’ll need a citizen and some resources to build it. If you need more citizens, you’ll need to spend food to bring them into your civilization (and pay an upkeep, depending on how many workers you have). If you want to discover new technologies, you’ll need to earn science, if you have a large population, you need to keep them happy through religion and entertainment. As I said before, it’s vital to keep everything at a good balance, as any bottleneck will cripple your progress.

Another major aspect to consider is military. While having a strong military presence won’t outright win you any games, having a weak military will almost certainly cause you to lose. I’ve often found the rule of Mutual Assured Destruction can apply here. If no one has a military, no problem. But as soon as one player starts to arm themselves, everyone else must invest in their own military to keep pace. Should you choose to neglect your military, you may find yourself having your resources and/or food stolen, your science points stolen, your leaders killed, your wonders destroyed, or your culture siphoned away. I think it’s important to highlight here that conflict isn’t resolved by rolling dice, or moving units on a map. It’s literally just comparing your strength numbers, which the defender can augment by spending cards. Most of what Through the Ages is at the end of the day, is pushing numbers up and down.

Photo Credit: Constantine Veze @KThVez via BGG

There’s a lot of depth in Through the Ages, which makes each play more and more satisfying. I don’t consider myself particularly enthusiastic about Civilization, mostly because I tend to not enjoy direct conflict in my games. I really like how Through the Ages approaches player interaction. How everyone needs to keep each other in check, and if someone leaves their front gate open, you’re obliged to sack their court.

After dozens of plays on Board Game Arena and the app, I can confidently say that the digital version of Through the Ages is the way to go. Managing tokens, sliding cards, and keeping track of resources and scores in the physical game is clunky. In the digital form, these issues vanish, letting you focus on the puzzle-like strategy that makes Through the Ages such a cerebral delight.

And what a cerebral puzzle Through the Ages is. needing to manage so many aspects of your empire, and the consequences for mismanagement spreading throughout every other aspect, creates a tense and exciting game. The ravages of time will reduce your surplus population and leaders will die, forcing players to pivot and adapt instead of running a single strategy right from the start of the game. You’ll need to decide between building more mines or farms, but if you don’t have resources you can’t build farms, but if you don’t have food, you can’t staff your mines. Everything is pulling for your attention, and how you manage each of these pulls will determine who comes out as the victor.

As I said above, I don’t consider myself a civilization connoisseur. I’m a euro gamer at heart, and Through the Ages is firmly in the euro game category for me. It does feel unintuitive to streamline the whole of history into a card river and the technological advancements from bronze to iron as just numbers on a card. But even with thematics as a weak point, Through the Ages is a great game. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to anyone who likes to burn their brain a little bit, and I’ve been the direct instigator for a few people to buy the app on their phone (and their productivity at work taking an immediate plunge). I don’t think I would recommend to anyone to pick up and play the physical game. It’s certainly not impossible, but there are pain points that get smoothed away when Through the Ages becomes a video game. If you like big board games and haven’t tried Through the Ages yet, you owe it to yourself to give this a try.