So I finally got a chance to play Age of Empires III last night. I think I can sum up my feelings of this game in one word: Awesome.

As someone who has played and loves the computer game as well. This game is  absolutely awesome. Granted, it really has nothing to do with the computer game beyond a little bit of nostalgia that the theme invokes in you.

The Basic Premise of the game is that you have 5 colonists that you are able to place each turn onto spaces which will grant you the ability to do a certain action each round (Same as the workers in Caylus). These actions can be things like getting a trade good, starting a battle or a war, discovering more territory, changing the turn order, buying a capital building (which gives special privileges in it's own right), and sending colonists over to the new world, there are a few others as well.

Beyond worker placement, there is also on the other side of the boardin the "new world" there is a subtle El Grande style area majority game going on with some of the colonists. This created an amazing amount of tension in deciding whether you wanted to buy a building, create a specialist, or increase your economy on one hand, or send your colonists over to the new world to gain area majority points. We played the game with five players. This made for a lot of competition in the limited work spaces available in the game. I found this tension to be wonderful, there was always something I wanted to do, but never had enough workers or time to be able to do them, so I had to prioritize. And the best laid plans can be ruined when someone does something you didn't expect or a particular action you wanted to do fills up before it comes to you and you can place a worker there, so flexibility is a must.

The gameplay of this one is a wonderful blending of a few other games.  Which comes together beautifully to create a complete game all its own.

All this praise and I haven't even mentioned the bits. This was originally intended to be an eagle game, and it has that style to it. The new company Tropical Games has lived up to its predecessor and delivered quality that anyone would be proud to be a part of. The Tiles are thick, the board is beautiful, and the pieces are stunning in all their plastic glory. With Many different molds per player to distinguish between their normal colonists, and all the specialists available as well. If I have any complaints at all, it's that the new world map is very beautiful. So beautiful, that it sacrifices a little bit of functionality, for aesthetics. It's sometimes hard to see which users are in which colonies, and which colonies may be adjacent to other
colonies. However, this hardly detracts from the game, and I can
easily overlook this because of the brilliance of the game, in any case it will get easier to distinguish the colonies with more play anyway.

Bottom Line. This is a good one not only for us Seasoned boardgamers, but I believe it has a broad appeal to the general masses given it's popular license. I have a feeling this game might draw a few people into the hobby that may not have known it existed before.

Manufacturer: Tropical Games
Designer: Glenn Drover
Players:  2 - 5
Time:  120 Minutes
Categories: Civilization; Exploration

 Avg. Rating: