our review

berries, fish and jugs

Stone Age Junior

Goods for huts

Thematically based on Stone Age, players experience the daily live in the Stone age in the guise of Jana and Jono, children in the era – you collect, trade and build huts to expand your settlement.

Each player receives a settlement in the guise of a rack into which you place the huts and behind which you place your goods. 15 Huts are placed in three stacks á five huts on the board and the top hut of each stack is turned up. Each hut depicts the goods that you must discard in order to build the hut.

There are the goods of berries, fish, jugs, arrow head and tooth; depending on the number of players each kind is available three or four times; one piece of each kind is placed on the Trade case, the remaining pieces go to their respective, marked cases. All players put their marker on the Construction Site in the middle of the board. 15 Forest tokens showing dice, action  and goods symbols are arranged around the board face-down.

If it is your turn, you turn over one of those Forest tokens:

When the back side now shows a dice symbol, you move your marker forward in direction of the arrows exactly that many steps and implement the action on the case you reach. For a Forest token with a symbol – goods, dog, hut or trade – you go directly to this case and implement the respective action.

On a Goods case you take one piece of this kind and put it behind your settlement, you may keep your goods hidden from the other players. On the Trade case you can trade any number of goods from your own stock in your settlement for exactly the same number of goods from the Trade case, after trading there must be five goods again in the Trade case. On the Dog case you take one of the two dog tokens and put it – visibly – next to your settlement. When both dogs have been taken, you take a dog from the dog owner who would be the earlier active player after your turn ends. Those dog tokens are joker for goods, when you want to build a hut. This you can do, when you have reached the Construction Site case. When you have acquired all goods necessary for one of the open-faced huts, you put back those goods on their respective cases and take the hut from the stack and place it into your own settlement. A dog token can replace one good, you may – if you have them – also use both dog tiles in one turn. Then you turn over the top hut on the stack where you took your hut from so that there are again three huts available. When one stack is empty, the selection is limited accordingly.

Regardless of having built a hut or nut, you then turn all open-faced Forest tokens back over to the forest side and then swap two tiles. This introduces tactic and memory into the game; if you remember well where which symbol can be found and which tokens were swapped, you can specifically reveal a certain tile and thus selectively collect the necessary goods. If you build your third hut, you instantly win the game!

Stone Age junior borrows the name and the topic from the „big“ game of the same name by Hans im Glück and seems to intend to present the era of the Stone Age seen from the eyes of children, and this has been achieved so magnificently that the game was named Kinderspiel des Jahres 2016.

Mechanisms and rules are simple and full of flair, you collect and trade as in those times, the goods fit the topic and the illustrations are enchanting.

Let me repeat, topic and name have been taken from Stone Age, the game itself is a wonderful game for children with a short duration and even tactic from selective collecting and trading using memorizing the symbols on the Forest tokens.

Dagmar de Cassan

Players: 2-4

Age: 5+

Time: 15+

Designer: Marco Teubner

Artist: Michael Menzel

Price: ca. 28 Euro

Publisher: Hans im Glück 2016

Web: www.schmidtspiele.de

Genre: Move, collect, swap, memo

Users: For children

Version: de

Rules: de en es fr nl

In-game text: no

Comments:

Kinderspiel des Jahres 2016

Very nice components and design

Simple rules

Plays quickly and easily

Compares to:

Stone Age for Topic, otherwise movement/collecting games with memo and swapping

Other editions:

999 Games (nl), Devir (es), Filosofia (fr), Z-Man (en)

My rating: 5

Dagmar de Cassan:

Just as in Carcassonne with Stone Age Junior a game for frequent players has been turned into a fantastic game for kids; topic, components and mechanisms fit together marvelously.

Chance (pink): 1

Tactic (turquoise): 1

Strategy (blue): 0

Creativity (dark blue): 0

Knowledge (yellow): 0

Memory (orange): 2

Communication (red): 0

Interaction (brown): 1

Dexterity (green): 0

Action (dark green): 0