Through the Ages is an epic strategy game of civilisation building for 1-4 players. Advance through the ages from antiquity to modern era.

Through the Ages has the most entertaining tutorial I’ve seen yet in a game. Designer Vlaada Chvatil gets appointed leader to guide you through your first few millennia. And he proves as able a comedian as he is a game designer. With the wisecracks flowing like wine, you'll learn to throw wonders up and your opponent’s down in no time.

Good job too, because Through the Ages isn't the easiest thing to learn. As befits a civilization game, the rules are complex. The physical edition deserves some kind of record for the largest number of the smallest pieces ever in a board game. Putting it all at the mercy of a digital master is, therefore, quite a relief. Yet it's clear a lot of thought has gone into making this as accessible as possible. There are tooltips and help icons everywhere, multiple ways to carry out most actions, and an intuitive drag and drop interface.

This isn't your average civilization-builder. There is no map: it abstracts away almost all the military and exploration elements. You still have an army and you can still conquer territory, indeed managing both well is vital to success. There are a bunch of other things to manage too, in a more familiar style. Food and economy, population and happiness, technology and research.

They're all linked, so you'll want to advance them all at once, and you can't. Learning to triage the is one of the keys of good strategy. Working out how while your brain is being crushed by the cascade of competing demands is a sweet agony few games can match. In the press of priorities, it's easy to forget that troops and technology don't win the game: culture points do. By the time you remember, it's often too late.

The card row is the back-bone of the whole endeavour. From this you select leaders, wonders, research goals and various one-shot bonus goodies. But there's a catch: each turn, the ones at the front of the row get discarded and new, more expensive ones get added to the end. It costs one action to take a card from the front, three to take from the back. It's a conveyor belt of temptation, like something out of a 70's game show. You can grab the prize you want early and inefficiently, or risk seeing it fall into oblivion or, worse, swiped by a competitor along the way.

The cards themselves lend a polite veneer of historicity to this raging cauldron of competing demands. Leaders are people of their respective age, like Aristotle in ancient times or Newton in the Renaissance. Wonders and technologies follow the same pattern. Each play through thus tells a different, but plausible, story of civilization. In this one can also see the varied paths to victory. You could install Napoleon and bury your foes in a sea of cavalry and cannon. Or elect Charlie Chaplin, build cinemas and ride to the win on a sea of pure cultural happiness. In truth you'll often have to switch and change your plans as the chaos seethes around you.

With a game of this complexity, it's easy to presume the AI in the solo game isn't up to much. The toughest setting here won't challenge the most experience human players, but for everyone else, it's a good opponent. Even if you're equal to it, a slew of challenge scenarios provides something difficult enough for anyone. These scenarios, many of which bend and break the basic rules in interesting ways, ensure solitaire play has a healthy shelf-life. To extend it further, there's also a ton of achievements to earn for your trophy cabinet.

Like any good board game port, there is also online play. It's particularly welcome here, given the four-hour play time and fiddly pieces of the physical game. Thankfully, the implementation is full of features and functionality. There are a variety of play modes from real-time to slow as you like. It does seem to have a short fuse for dropping un-started games that don't fill up fast. Whether that's a problem when the play community increases in size post-release remains to be seen.

Through the Ages on PC is such a great experience that the only thing we can really pick fault with is the sound design. The music is repetitive and the sound clips that play with certain cards add little to proceedings. In every other respect it's an outstanding adaptation of an outstanding game.

A game that invigorates with the pure, fierce joy of play that only very best board games can deliver.

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After months of teamwork with Vlaada Chvatil and CGE Team, BGO is proud to release Through The Ages: A New Story of Civilization. You may now play with the new rules and cards. The original version will remain available for the more nostalgic ones.

You may now fix your games and add/remove any resources on production cards (farms & mines). The option is available in the play menu.
Changes will be tracked in the log and highlighted in red so that all players are easily aware of the.. Read more

As there are thousands of games, I would not be able to fix themm all by myself.
Therefore I will implement a new feature that will allow you to manually fix games by adding/removing resources manually, based on the journal entries.
I will.. Read more

Due to a bad update on the database today at 4:30 AM Europe time, most of the resources and food in all games got messed up on about 10 different cards.
The update I did was for 1 game and it actually updated all games. I don't know what happened.. Read more

Option to play without wars or aggressions was bugged since the update. It's fixed now. I have also removed all cards from the decks, only keeping the ones in the hand of players.

Changes have been made in game creation.
You may now select any combination of expansion set you want and play with these.
The BGO expansion now groups only the new leaders and wonders. Former changes to tactics and standard leaders have.. Read more

Due to a mistake during maintenance,all games that did not complete first turn have been lost.
Really sorry for the inconvenience.

Site has been affected by some hacking attempt.
All names and emails were changed. I am in contact with the person who did this. I managed to recover all names but emails couldn't get recovered. Please edit your profile to update your email.. Read more

Long time demand : On the last turn, where there is no possible sacrifice, the game paused although there was no other possible option than let it go.
It's been eventually changed to go immediatley to the war resolution and the next player's.. Read more

The Czech expansion set is now online with 4 new leaders and 4 new wonders.
As the Polish expansion, all new leaders and wonders are automatically chosen when you create a new game using this expansion set and the remaining leaders/wonders are.. Read more

Credits : Through The Ages is a boardgame designed by Vlaada Chvátil and published by Czech Board Games,Czech Games Edition, Eagle Games, HomoLudicus, IELLO, MINDOK, Pegasus Spiele, REBEL.pl, Wargames Club Publishing and Wydawnictwo Portal.BGO expansion set designed by Nicolas d'Halluin.