Age of Empires III Review

Age of Empires III

The game comes in quite a large box, which is bursting with plastic figures (just room though to add the 6th player expansion, which is a set of white figures).
Each player gets 60 nicely detailed figures each, although they do look similar initially.
The board is nicely detailed and captures the feel of the era.

The rulebook runs to 14 pages, but this is mostly taken up with ample gameplay illustrations, making the game quite intuitive to learn.
Basically, each turn a player gets to place 5 colonists into action boxes, which will then determine what you can do through the coming turn:
Initiative - who goes first next turn
Colonist Dock - This is where your pieces get to travel to the new world and earn you points
Trade Goods - Lets you choose the trade goods that available this turn to earn money
Merchant Shipping - Having most here earns you a ship - a wild trade good effectively
Capital Building - Lets you buy a building thats available this turn, each provides benefits
Discover - somewhere to keep colonists to later discover new worlds
Specialists - Allows you to gain a specialist for use next turn
War - Fight a battle or declare war with another player

Quite often you'll want to place your colonists everywhere, but are limited each turn into where you can place because you can only place 5 colonists, so timing is crucial.

The trade goods are used to earn income by collecting sets of them. You need at least 3 to earn a decent income, so rice for example only has 3 of them, so is hardest to collect, which is where the ship comes in.

The game is about discovery and exploring the new world, rather than combat and trading.
To discover a region, the player decides how many units they will send – a tile in the region is revealed, and the number of Native Americans on it (one to five) is compared to the number of pieces sent. If the player sent an equal or greater amount of forces, they receive points and money as shown on the counter.
If they sent too few units, however, then they get nothing, and the tile is flipped back over.

Combat is there to help you gain a region from another player but war is costly to you both, while trade goods are basically a way to earn some extra income.
That said, there are several different ways to gain points so each game will be different as much of what you do depends on what options your fellow players choose to do. This means each turn has very little 'down time' for the players.

This is a good strategy game which is a lot of fun to play. It's connection to the computer game is really little more than a tie-in and stands up on its own as a good solid strategy game, as I've said.

Review by Brian