My First Stone Age vs Race to the Treasure

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.

Race to the Treasure introduces children to concepts such as making choices, prioritizing, and planning. Adults can guide kids to the best choices and explain them, which makes the game a good educational tool. There are many meaningful decisions to be made – where to place the tile, how to plan a route, picking between a key, an ogre snack, or the exit, etc.

Race to the Treasure is extremely simple and can be taught in a matter of minutes to anyone. The mechanic is elementary – you draw a tile and place it. The tile can be either a path or an ogre. If it’s a path, then you decide where to connect it to the road you’re building. If it’s an ogre, then it’s added to the ogre track.

When you gather three keys and reach the exit, everyone wins. If the ogre reaches the exit first, you lose.

Race to the Treasure can take a maximum of 20 minutes, which is short enough for keeping the attention of younger players and not taking too much time for adults.

Setting up the game is quick and easy. You place the board, shuffle the tiles, and then roll the two dice, one with a number and one with a letter, to determine where the keys and the ogre snacks are going to be placed on the 6x8 grid.

This also helps younger children with numbers and letters, so the setup can also be educational.