Overview

Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization (“TTA”) is a civilization building game for 2-4 players designed by Vlaada Chvatil. In TTA, players have to carefully balance their food, raw materials, science, and military in an effort to become the most influential civilization in the world. The game takes place over five Ages, during which players take turns drafting cards, creating workers, constructing buildings, declaring war, and colonizing territory. The goal of all this activity is to accumulate culture points: the player with the most culture points at the end of the game is the winner.

If you’re already familiar with Through the Ages and just want to hear what we think, feel free to skip ahead to the Thoughts section. For the rest of you...

Gameplay

The goal of this section is not to present a full rules overview, but to give new players an idea of the core game mechanics. For a full overview check out the rules which are freely available from Czech Games Edition’s website. A normal round of Through the Ages has the following phases:

• Start of Turn
  • Fill up the card row, check and see if the end of an Age has occurred.
• Politics Phase
  • Do things like…

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You were browsing the Top 10 of BGG and noticed a game called Twilight Struggle. Once you figured out it had nothing to do with teenage vampires your interest was piqued. Strap in, because if you enjoy history and politics, you might be on your way to becoming a wargamer. Wargaming is a niche within an already niche hobby, and sometimes it can be difficult to know where to start. The goal of this post is to orient people with the basic types of wargames, provide a brief introduction to the hobby, and some tips on how to get started with wargames.

Wargaming as a hobby has a long history going back to the 19th century. It originated out of the need for militaries to study past conflicts. One of the earliest wargames from this era was the German game Kriegsspiel (literally translated ‘wargame’) which was used to train officers in 1812. Civilians eventually got in on the fun, and there was a "golden age" in the 1970s and early 80s when games like Axis and Allies sold to a large market.  While much smaller today, the variety and quality of games continues to shine.

A wargame, at its heart, is a conflict simulation model. Sometimes these conflicts are historical (Twilight Struggle, COIN series, Washington's…

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