My First Stone Age is a children’s version of the popular board game Stone Age. It’s made for 2 to 4 players. The players walk around the prehistoric landscape, gather resources, and build villages. The first player that manages to build three huts is the winner.
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Pros
Pro Introduces many concepts
The complexity level of the game is great for younger children – it teaches them a lot more than just flipping tiles and moving, it also handles memory, resource management, and some risk.
The forest tiles are upside down, and two of them get flipped every time someone reaches the hut space, so you must keep track of where the tile you want is.
There’s quite a bit of trading and exchanging. When you land on the construction space, you trade in specific resources for a hut. The price of the hut is shown on the bottom of the hut tiles, it can either be three different resources or two resources of the same type. Also, when you reach the trading post tile, you can trade one resource for another.
The game also has a dog “wildcard”, which can substitute any resource, but there’s a catch – there are only two dogs in the game, and if they’re all taken when someone walks on the dog tile, then they can steal it from one of the players, so it’s a risk to hang on to it too long.
Pro Short play time
Kids and parents probably won’t get bored of the game so quickly because a full game takes only 15 to 20 minutes.
Pro Aesthetically pleasing
Similarly to the actual Stone Age, the artwork and the components look great, albeit with a cartoony twist, which befits a children’s game. The gameboard and hut tiles have cute prehistoric artwork that include little cavemen doing all kinds of silly stuff – swimming down waterfalls, playing, eating, etc. The 3D villages look very cool, and there’s no mistaking what the resource tokens are supposed to be.
Pro Durable components
My First Stone Age has high-quality components, so they should hold up very well. The meeples and the resource pieces are wooden, the cardboard huts and movement tokens are thick and rugged, the storage box is sturdy, and the cards are made of durable cardstock.
Pro Simple to learn
My First Stone Age is easy to play, as a children’s game should be. Players take turns flipping tokens that tell them where to move. The tokens feature either icons with specific spots or dice, in which case you must move the according amount of spaces. When you reach the hut space, then you can use combinations of resources you’ve gathered to build a hut. The first player to build three of them wins the game.
Cons
Con Might be outgrown quickly
The lifespan of My First Stone Age isn’t very long because the introduced concepts are quite basic and simple, so kids might find it repetitive, boring, and easy in a year or two.