Unboxing: Dark Ages Board Game (both versions)

[@bmrigs]

Thanks for the unboxing. I picked up Dark Ages: Heritage of Charlemagne for $68 on sale at Cardhaus. It was a reprint and I hope they fixed the errata. Time to get a gaming table 😉

[@steelman774]

I like the duality of the board sides. At 11:09 the backside of the top board (brown) has places across the bottom for 4 and a half cards implying that there’s another board (Western Europe confirmed at 17:45 and 20:29) to continue on to as well as 16 church slots (small spaces indicated around the cross emblem) versus the 10 or so on the grey side. Great artwork!

[@marksteelman7747]

Yes, there is a lot going on but the pieces seem to fit together well.

[@vondeekin287]

Hi Mark, Thank you for the 'unboxing' video. I 'am anxiously waiting for my copies of both games to arrive &, like yourself, can't wait to try the game out. (this video is helping to curbing my anticipation, A LITTLE!) ALSO, the retail availability of this game is "VERY LIMITED!" Hopefully Board & Dice will do a second print run or (maybe) another Kickstarter for people that missed out. HAPPY GAMING!!

[@marksteelman7747]

Yes, we played it once so far. It's a lot to take in. However we had fun. My wife said she started to have fun about her 5th turn as she started to groc all the options.

[@balbright]

sorting out the cards was very cumbersome. I wish they had separators in the card packs with the descriptions on them. I found the only way was to 1) separate by the backs of the cards, then 2) go through all the module descriptions where they name all the cards which belong to each module. Then I put each module's cards into small baggies with a label.....

[@marksteelman7747]

Yeah, I had to go to BGG to try to get some clarity on the barbarian cards. It turns out the Barbarian cards are called out as part of the solo expansion in the rule book but are in fact used in the core game. Eventually I got it all sorted.

[@garretwilliams5739]

Hey mr,steelman you remimber me from your math class in 8th grade

[@JasonSetley]

Just saying hello I found your channel and recently subscribe to it. How does this gameplay have you gotten to the table yet. This one must’ve fell through my radar but looks very interesting.

[@marksteelman7747]

I have played it once and am now painting it. We like it. The most remarkable thing about it is that it plays a lot faster than similar civ games. I think our first three player game came in at around 4 hours including teaching the other two the rules. Most civ games are longer than that. I can believe that with experience we will finish it in 3.

[@BadCrowBryk]

How did / do you end up enjoying this one, 2 years later?

[@marksteelman7747]

@badcrowbryk I like it, I’ve been thinking about getting it out again recently. I have only played the Heritage of Charlemagne version and I played it 4 times, once with 4, once with 3 and twice with 2. All of our games ended with a technology track victory. The faction that starts in Champagne has an advantage in producing iron which really helps moving on the culture track and in a 2 player game the other faction starts in Normandy and is better at warfare. I mostly play with my wife and she prefers a euro style game so we don’t play that aggressively and you really can’t win as the Normans unless you play aggressive and deny resources. We had fun with it though and I still have it. I painted the pieces and it has really good table presence.

[@BadCrowBryk]

@@marksteelman7747 Awesome, thanks for sharing!