An Age Contrived review— Fit for the gods

I’m garbage at baking. It probably doesn’t help that I never dabbled until I lived at altitude, making the learning curve that much steeper, but as much as I’m enchanted by the idea of expanding my cooking skills, my style is more going with my gut and eyeballing than the exacting amounts, timings and temperatures that baking requires. I always enjoy my time with the hobby, but very rarely does anything beyond adequate result. I tell you all this, not because I expect y’all to give a damn about my life, but because my experience with Age Contrived is strangely similar.

Before you get in the thick of it, Age seems absurdly simple: you’re trying to get your energy from your supply to the highest scoring spots on the board by loading tiles onto the left of your device, sliding them to the right, and eventually grabbing energy out to take actions or plop it onto the board. Get going, and you’ll want to have energy accruing interest in the shop, dropping into achievements as soon as you qualify, moving up your personal tracks, and ultimately contributing to the construction of monuments to unlock powers and extra energy to replace all that energy that’s getting tied up on the board. So not all that simple, but also not that hard, because all you’ve got to do is determine the highest scoring places on the board and load your device properly.

But there’s those pesky other players who are trying to do the same thing, which wouldn’t be such a big issue if the monuments weren’t so time dependent, especially at higher player counts. Once a section is started, it’s usually finished within the round, which is fine and smooth if you were planning on deploying the proper energy on your turn anyway, but usually you’re stuck trying to determine just how badly scooping the right stuff out of your device ruins your ability to do anything else. A good player will find that decision to be an interesting point of skill expression, but poor or simply new ones will most often make the wrong call, either missing on a crucial boon or ruining the state of their device to the point they need to start a fresh bake. The winds of change module helps accelerate the process, but there’s still a very real feel bad quality to having to spend a couple turns advancing instead of taking actions that is exacerbated when the wrong energy winds up in your accessible spots when it comes time to contribute to another monument section. At lower player counts, the timing for contributions is usually less urgent, allowing a bit more leeway, but I know not everyone has a collection to the point that they can dynamically shift the game they’re bringing to the table based upon the number of people that are showing and their general skill at medium-heavy euros. Age definitely has some valleys when you screw up and have to sit on your hands for a while. But the peak of a good action turn can make you feel like the god you’re playing. There’s no limit to the amount of actions you can take on a turn, so these wind up being a flurry of efficiency followed up with triggered energies off monument completions nudging you over the top in this or that area. Move your mini, trigger a bridge, drop into a pillar in a new area of the board, buy a tile to grab another achievement and complete a monument section all in one turn? Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.

Normally, such gameplay extremes would lead to edges sharp enough to draw blood, but Age Contrived makes you feel like you’re playing with fine art, which smooths things out. Granted, Chris was kind enough to provide us with the ultra-deluxe founder’s edition for review, but even the retail edition is exquisite. The art is simultaneously gorgeous while not being too busy being pretty to serve its purpose: the regions on the board are clearly defined and the spaces to lock in energy would be noticeable without the UV spotting. Speaking of energy, the energy tiles are a hefty acrylic that harkens back to Azul’s. Then there’s the magnetized monuments, which border on gimmick but provide a table presence and combined with the energy tiles give most actions in the game tactile satisfaction. Your god would’ve been fine being represented by some colored chunk of wood, but instead everyone’s got a beautifully sculpted mini.  No matter how badly the mechanics treat me in any particular session, I spent the whole time being spoiled by the components, so it’s hard to stay mad at Age.

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