My 8 year old daughter and I loved RTTA: Bronze Age. I have a dozen plays recorded here, and I'm sure I've forgotten as many more. So when Iron Age arrived yesterday, we were both eager to play it.
Her enthusiasm didn't last.
There's a lot more going on in Iron Age than there was in Bronze Age. Enter in the ability to spread your empire through ports or provinces. Throw in armies, tributes, and conquests and there's a lot going on. It's by no means a complicated game for me, but if your kids liked Bronze Age, some may end up being like my daughter and finding the new additions too much. Hopefully, she will come around on that.
So, I ended up running through the solo challenge a few times after reading through the 4 pages of rules.
You begin your game by deciding whether you want to start with an extra port or an extra province. Provinces give you extra armies and tribute, but you have to feed your provinces. Ports don't give you any bonuses (Edit: they can give you extra goods per turn), but they don't require food either. Whichever you have the majority of determines the number of dice you get to roll. So if you have 4 provinces and 3 ports, you get to roll 4 dice, not 7. It gives you an interesting decision on whether to go all out in one area to gain dice or balance yourself. However, due to the quick nature of the game, there may be little incentive in balancing.
Once you have the dice, you'll see a lot of the familiar icons. You can roll to get food, population, and goods. Goods are now generic, no longer do you collect individual types of goods. Money is replaced by innovation which really becomes money when purchasing developments. 528
You also get a new dice called the fate dice. This can give you bonuses to food die, the dreaded skull, subtractions to food die, or the ability to seek conquests or tributes.
The beautiful simplicity of the Bronze Age was that all you had to do was build cities, maintain your food, and then throw massive amounts of people at monuments or goods at developments. With Iron Age, you have all that, but now you must maintain an army as well. Keep a low army, and you may get attacked by barbarians. A few barbarian attacks can really make your disasters score jump. Other players may also attack you. Though you don't lose anything, opponents can gain tribute if their army is larger than yours.
I think this added feature could make for some really interesting multiplayer games. Now those development hoarders can't run away with a victory if they are constantly giving up 3-5 VPs to other players.
The solo game, though, becomes quite a challenge. The goal is to score 100 its in 8 rounds. In 3 games, I have yet to get half that. Nothing is more damaging to a fledging civilization than to be attacked by barbarians on the first turn!
Overall, I have some mixed emotions about this game. I believe it to be a general step up from the Bronze Age. There's more to do, more to think about, and there's always the element of luck. But, it does limit the ability for some kids to get into it. For that, I rate it the same I rated Bronze Age, a 9. It'll be a great filler games in groups and provides a hefty solo challenge. 528