AOE III Board Game

[Riot]

Eagle Games have announced that Age of Empires III - The Board game will be available in July 2006 (Origins Debut).

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Boardgame News:
The next project we chatted about was the Age of Empires III boardgame. The design is pretty much done now and the game has been submitted to Ensemble Studios - the makers of the computer game - for their approval. The game should be in production in two months and should be released in May or June 2006. I actually got a chance to play a prototype of this one - see below for more on this.

After finishing up with Mattel and saying goodbye to Erik, it was time to head up to Times Square to meet up with Eagle Games. Before the Toy Fair I had gotten an invitation from Eagle to play one of their prototypes one day after the show closed and this was the night. I grabbed the subway from the Toy District, got off at Times Square, and then found the pre-designated hotel. There I met up with Glenn Drover of Eagle who had the prototype of Age of Empires III under his arm. We pushed together two tables in the restaurants, set up the game, and started to play.

First off, Age of Empires III is a German style game through and through. This is not a conquest game - you are not going to be moving units and rolling battle dice. The game is more on the gamer game side of things - it’s not really complicated, but it is a bit more involved than, say, Ticket to Ride.

The basic premise of the game is you are sending your colonists out to colonize the new world, in this case represented by a map of North and South America divided into areas. Each area is worth a certain number of points at the end of the game and the player with the most colonists in an area scores that area. There are a number of other ways to score victory points as well. At the end, whoever has the most points wins.

When Glenn first started describing the mechanics of each round, the resemblance to one game immediately came to my mind - Caylus. At the beginning of each round, each player gets five colonists to work with. On the board, beside the map, is a series of tracks each with a number of spaces. Each track corresponds to something you can have your colonist do - discovery (check out an undiscovered part of the board), colonize (move to a discovered part of the board), get goods (like fur, tobacco, etc), build buildings (which give you special powers), create special units like soldier and merchants, etc. Each player in turn plays one of his colonists onto a space until everyone is out of colonists.

After this is done, each track is executed one by one and each colonist takes whatever action he chose. For example, if we are executing the colonize track, the player in space one will take his colonist and move it to the new world into a discovered area. Then the next player on the track does the same thing.

Now up to here the game really does sound a lot like Caylus. At this point, though, the games diverge. The actions in Age of Empires III are quite different from Caylus (except for a turn order track) and area majority part of the game looms large over the game. One might be tempted to describe the game as an area majority game with a Caylus action selection mechanic, but I think that would be oversimplifying things - the game is much more than that.

I do want to explain the game end bonuses, which I think are quite neat. There are four different bonuses (one for most money at the end of the game, etc) and on your turn during the game you can allocate your colonists to one ore more of these bonuses. At the end of the game, the bonus that has the most colonists (no matter whose) on it is worth 15 point to the player that fulfills the bonus (which may be different that the player that has the colonist on the bonus!). Each other bonus is worth 10, 5 or zero, depending on the colonists on the bonus. This way the bonuses aren’t automatic - you’ve got to work for them!

A bit about the production of the game. The game should come in the now standard Eagle box - the size of the Conquest of the Empire and Railroad Tycoon boxes. In a departure for Eagle, the board will not be huge - the board for this game will be four sections with each section being the length and width of the box. The game will have miniatures, of course, for the colonists and special units, and lots of other components.

So what did I think about the game? Actually, I thought it was very good. Of course, one might say I loved Caylus so I’m bound to like this, but aside from the similarities to that game there is a lot going on here and I very much liked the way the different mechanics interwove with each other. The game just worked very well and I was engrossed the whole game. I’m very much looking forward to the game’s release so I can play it again!

After the game finished it was time to head to bed (and hopefully some sleep) in preparation for another day tomorrow. Stay tuned!

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