Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization

Setting up Through the Ages involves distributing player boards of your chosen color, populating blue resource banks with 16 tokens, and placing yellow population tokens onto the board, worker pool, and initial cards. You also set up individual tracking boards for science, culture, and military strength, placing markers at their starting values. Shuffle the Age A military cards to create the current events deck based on player count, and arrange the age boards. Finally, draw thirteen cards from the Age A civil deck to fill the market card row, establishing the initial setup for the Antiquity round where players take actions to begin building their civilizations.

The main objective of Through the Ages is to build and guide a successful civilization through three distinct historical ages. You must develop your civilization's technology, military prowess, and cultural achievements while keeping your citizens happy. Players strive to accumulate the most culture points by advancing scientifically, culturally, and militarily, all while managing resources such as food and minerals to sustain their growing population and infrastructure.

A player's turn consists of a structured sequence starting with the politics phase, followed by civil and military actions governed by your current government type. Using white cubes for civil actions and red cubes for military actions, players can take cards from the market row, increase their population, build or upgrade farms, mines, and urban buildings, play leaders, develop technologies, change governments, play action cards, and construct wonders. After taking actions, players move to the end-of-turn sequence, which includes production phases, evaluating science and culture gains, and restocking the card row.

Scoring in Through the Ages occurs continuously throughout the game via various tracks and end-of-turn evaluations. Science points and culture points are earned based on your ratings and deployed workers on philosophy, religion, and other advanced cards. Players also evaluate corruption, food production, food consumption, and resource production. Military strength is compared and tracked on military boards using tactics and units, rewarding players who maintain superior strength and defending against military events.

The game spans across three distinct historical ages, beginning with Antiquity in the first round and advancing through subsequent ages as cards and decks are refreshed. The game concludes at the end of the final age once all rounds and final scoring conditions are fully resolved, determining the ultimate victorious civilization based on total accumulated culture and victory points.