Roll through the Ages by Matt Leacock and Gryphon Games is a dice game themed to match Through the Ages, a fairly more complex civilization game by CBG and Eagle Games. Roll Through the Ages is a part of the bookshelf collection and from all the talk it is also one of the better ones. I have an extensive collection of board games and lately I have turned my eyes to trying to acquire said 'bookshelf" games. Also I wanted a DICE game that had some meat to it, assuming that was even possible.
Play: Each player starts off with 3 dice, a score sheet, 6 pegs and a peg board. Each player will roll dice in order to
A:) Build up food for their workers
B:) Get more goods to trade in for coin to spend on developments
C:) Add more workers, for your cities (which increases the number of dice you roll) or for your monuments
D:) Coin, which can be spent that turn for developments like irrigation and agriculture, which help you with future rolls etc.
E:) Skulls, which are paired with 2 goods as well. Skulls you have to keep every time you roll. A build up of skulls cause a list of disasters that effect you or all of your opponents in a generally negative way.
You roll the dice keeping what you want or what you have to, three times re-rolling unwanted dice. You use the final results to develop your score sheet in the way you want to attempt to score points. Each of the developments are worth points and each of the monuments are worth points, as long as you are first to build them or the second to build them. The game ends when all the monuments are built or any one players gets 5 developments.
Components: The components are great. There are wooden dice and peg boards which are very pleasing to look at. The score pad comes with like a billion (estimated) sheets in it, I'd imagine that you would have a very hard time running out of them unless of course this was the only game you EVER played and you played it all the time. My one complaint is that the pegs don't set into the peg board perfectly even but that is just a picky thing that I assume normal people wouldn't pay all that much attention to it.
Finale: I enjoyed my 1 play of this quite a bit. There seems to be quite a bit more depth than say the CATAN dice game that I also like very much. You have alternate routes to victory, some player interaction, and really nice looking components. There really isn't much more you could ask for out of a dice game let's be honest. I highly recommend even the most casual gamers to pick this up, I plan on using it as a gateway game as I tend to have a lot of friends that haven't delve to far into the gaming world.
Provisional Score while awaiting more games: 9/10