An Age Contrived Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review An Age of Contrived, published by Bellows Intent. An Age of Contrived is an action efficiency board game that will have you trying to earn the most points.

Action Efficiency Eurogames are a sub-sub-genre I quite enjoy. Terra Mystica is my 3rd favorite game of all time, and I have at least 100 plays of it. I love being able to play and replay a game over and over, trying to squeeze every single victory point I can from the game’s engine. So when I had the opportunity to review An Age Contrived, a game whose premise lent itself to this level of play, I knew I had to take it. Does it live up to the potential of its systems, or does it fall flat under the weight of its own promises?

In An Age Contrived, players will be competing to see who can score the most victory points. These victory points are acquired via a few primary different methods. The first is through the construction of Monuments. These Monuments are 3D cardboard structures that players will be expelling energy to play. As they are built, piece by piece, some of the energy spent from the construction will go to a collection space where players will be competing to have three units of energy. The more areas where they have three energy, the more points they score at the end of the game.

Another source of victory points are the Pillars spread throughout the board. Players will be spending their energy building these Pillars, which have exponential scoring opportunities, the more you’ve built around the map. Finally, players will be working towards Achievements, where players will be competing to complete mini-objectives first, in order to spend energy to “lock in” these scoring opportunities.

All of these objectives are completed by taking actions through a conveyor belt system on their personal player board. Depending on where your energy lies, depends on which actions you can take. On your turn, you will either push the conveyor belt forward or take actions (as many as you have the energy for).