My First Stone Age vs The Enchanted Tower

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.

Kids and parents probably won’t get bored of the game so quickly because a full game takes only 15 to 20 minutes.

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.

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.

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.

The components of The Enchanted Tower are top-notch in terms of quality, creativity, and uniqueness. Moreover, the art looks magnificent – it’s colorful and highly detailed.

The game is played on many levels on the game’s box - under the colorful gameboard there is not only storage for the components, but also sixteen slots in which the sorcerer hides the key that unlocks the enchanted tower. There’s also a little circular section that must be placed on the corner of the box with eight extra steps on which the wizard must start the game. The tower itself is an actual tower in the corner of the gameboard that has the princess figure placed in the middle.

The player pieces (the wizard and Robin) are minimalistic figures that have magnets on the bottom, which are used to grab the key when you step over the correct tile. After you’ve received the key, you can place it in one of the six locks on the enchanted tower to see if the lock triggers the spring-loaded mechanism in the tower that causes the princess to jump out.

If you have more than two people wanting to play, then you can split up in two teams where one player is the wizard and the others play Robin. This is especially good if you’re playing with younger players and want to team up to help them learn the game.

The basics of The Enchanted Tower can be understood very quickly even by the youngest players. One player takes on the role of the sorcerer who hides the key to the princess’ tower under one of the 16 spaces on the gameboard. The other player is Robin who must try to find the key. Players take turns rolling dice, one die indicates who moves first, whereas the other one shows how many steps can be taken.

Once the key has been found, the player who found it can try to place it in one of the six locks on the princess’ tower. If it works, then the princess will pop out and the player who did it wins. If the tower doesn’t unlock, then the game is reset, and the sorcerer hides the key again.

The game can be very engaging, and it also has a light roleplay element. Gameplay-wise there are some intense moments, for example, when the wizard sees Robin near the location of the key, or when the Robin player sees the wizard catching up.

The game has a nice little story in the official rulebook, which can help with the immersion. Also, sometimes playing the wizard leads to people changing their voice and doing evil laughs, which can be great fun for everyone around.