OUR REVIEW

See human history through an inventor’S eyes

Progress: Evolution of Technology

Discover inventions and develop your technology tree

Inventions are not a fallout from heaven or come from out of the blue. But they build upon each other. One of the surely most important inventions of mankind is the wheel. Just imagine how many machines and appliances would not exist today if nobody would have invented the wheel. In this way many inventions that appear to us today as very simple ones are in reality crucial for our modern high-technology world. Many generations of human history had to pass and many clever brains have contributed that this our history has been accompanied by permanently made and continually more complex inventions. And it is rather probable that future generations will be astonished about the simple technologies that we had to be content with in our days.

In Progress players imitate this history of humankind’s development. In several ages we are asked to discover inventions of the respective area and to use already made inventions for this purpose. We start with inventions of the first age, dating from about 10.000 to 400 B.C. and end up in the third age, the Renaissance. Each invention yields advantages immediately and has positive side effects - you may enhance your prestige, contribute to the strength of the armed forces or increase the growth of population due to the affluence achieved.

Each player works at his own „family tree“ of inventions, thereby achieving improvements for his options for actions in the game and simultaneously collects victory points for a final scoring. Despite the fact that Progress will surely generate comparisons with the game of 7 Wonders for some players, Progress is a completely different game. In Progress, cards are the central element of the game, too, but Progress does not play as easily and fluently as 7 Wonders. Upwards from a certain number of players you must be prepared to cope with long waiting spells till your next turn.

In the core game Progress is played over three ages. Each age commands its own stack of Technology cards, which is assembled individually for each game in relation to the number of players. Each Technology card corresponds to one invention. At the start of the game only cards from Age I are available. Players collect those cards in their hand and play them via actions in their turn, meaning, they lay them out on the table and thus discover their inventions. Therefore there are only two basic actions available as options for actions: Take a card or cards or play a card or cards, but this is possible in different versions. The playing, that is, laying down of cards usually causes costs, which is paid for with Knowledge as a currency. This currency is available in three types - Knowledge of Culture, Knowledge of Science and Knowledge of Engineering.

Let’s take a closer look at those Technology cards:

First and foremost each technology card is assigned to one of three kinds of technology: Science, Engineering and Culture - thus being identical with the types of knowledge.

Each card has its own cost for its discovery, those costs must be paid in one or maybe two types of knowledge. For each type of knowledge the card states an invention besides the “acquisition cost”. When a player has that type of invention already on the table he does not have to pay the acquisition costs for the card. By clever laying out of cards you can massively reduce costs - this is again a concurrency to 7 Wonders. When all inventions on demand on a card are already laid out with a player he does not need to pay anything and the invention is free. If you manage such sequences in the best way you have the greatest chance to win.

You can also get the information on advantages that come from discovering an invention from the card. Those advantages are a mixture of victory points, raise in the prestige, armed forces or population figures for the player, upgrades of his own options to act and acquisition of permanent knowledge.

A card from your hand cannot only be laid out but can also be used as a means for payment. Therefore each card also has a “monetary” value. This monetary value is always consisting of general knowledge that can, so to say, be used as a joker instead of one of the three types of knowledge. This monetary value rises with the ages up to a value of 4, in the first age is comes to maximum 2.

And, finally, individual cards decide on the start of a new age because they carry the respective symbols.

For marking the raise in their personal options for actions each player holds his own board with seven different tracks of abilities. One of those tracks determines the number of actions in your turn, another one the limit for cards in your hand, and all others upgrade a certain action. Each track has a starting value that is identical for all players.

The raise in prestige, population and armed forces due to an invention that was displayed is marked on a central game board, the so-called Power Board, which features a track for each of those characteristics. All players mark their scores on those tracks.

As a playing aid each player is given a technology tree on which each invention is depicted with its relations and its dependency to other inventions. This enables you to strategically plan the discovery of inventions - at least in theory. The technology tree also informs you on bonuses of cards and how often the card is present in the deck.

At the start of the game each player receives - in relation to his seating position to the starting player - between 5 and 7 technology cards of the first Age, Beginning with the starting player, the game now is played in turns until the end of the game. The active player can do a certain number of actions in any combination of his choice - the number of actions he can do is determined by the ability track for number of actions on his player board, at the start of the game you have two actions. For each action you have a choice from five action options. Two of those five action options are for playing cards and three of them are for taking cards.

The two actions for playing, that is, laying down a card are Discover and Research. When an invention is discovered you must pay for the card with the knowledge stated on the card. You lay down your cards in columns, one per type of technology, and you should leave the card titles visible so that you can see quickly and easily if for a new invention some knowledge must be paid for or if is already paid by a card in your display. When costs must be paid with knowledge you can pay in any mixture of cards in hand or already acquired permanent knowledge in the guise of knowledge tiles. Any knowledge tile you have acquired you do keep to the end of the game, albeit only being able to use it once in a turn for payment. If you use cards to pay you must discard them. When costs are paid and the card is laid out, you immediately acquire the advantage from the card.

If you cannot afford the cost or do not want to pay the price you can research an invention instead of discovering it. In this case the laying out of a card is free of charge, but the card is not immediately available, but only a few rounds later in the game. How many rounds the research takes is related to the progress on the corresponding tracks on your player board. At the start the duration is four rounds. You place the card that is to be researched into a separate area and put the currently valid number of black cubes on the card. At the beginning of your next turns you remove one of those cubes per turn. When the last cube is removed the invention is considered to be discovered and is moved into the display for discovered, active invention. The card under research is already counting towards payment for another invention. There is also the option of not completing the research, you can take back - at the beginning of a turn - an invention under research in your hand to maybe discover them.

The number of inventions that you can have under research is limited. For his limitation, too, there is a track on your player board, so that you can improve this option also in the course of the game. At the start of the game the value of this track is 1.

Regardless of a card being discovered or researched, you are never allowed to display the same card twice.

Three actions enable you to acquire new cards. For each of those actions you have a track on your player board so that you can improve each of those action values during the game. The simplest way to acquire cards is to draw them. At the start of the game you can draw three cards. When drawing cards you can draw them in any combination of your choice from the draw piles or from the discard piles of active ages. This action usually yields the most cards, but has a distinctive disadvantage: Your turn ends immediately after drawing cards.

Therefore there is also the action of Quick Draw, for which - depending on the position on the track - you draw a certain number of cards and then discard a certain number of cards, whereby you choose from all cards in hand. At the start of the game the numbers for this action are draw one card and discard none.

The third action is Shuffle and Draw. You first shuffle both draw pile and discard pile of an age into one pile and then draw the top card. This, too, can be improved to enable you to do this multiple times and also with different stacks.

When a player has put into effect all his actions, he checks if he has surpassed his limit for cards in hands and must, if necessary, discard cards. Then your turn ends and passes to the next player.

This sequence of actions is only interrupted when a new age begins, such a beginning is triggered by discovering inventions. On some of the technology cards of an age the symbol for the next age is depicted. Depending on the number of players and the age a certain number of such symbols must be visible in order for the new age to begin. As soon as the new age has begun the stack of cards for this age is immediately open and available. Therefore the player who triggered the beginning of the new age may already draw from this stack in his next actions. At the start of the Age II nothing else happens, but at the start of Age III all cards of Age I are removed from the game, regardless if they are in the hands of players or under research or are those in the discard and draw piles. Should the symbols on display trigger Age IV, the game ends instantly.

At the end of the game a final scoring is done, in which you add up the victory points accrued during the game: Active inventions showing victory points, advancements on the tracks of your own board earn you the number of victory points depicted and the scoring tracks on the Power Board are scored. For this the relative position of players’ markers is scored. For each track the player in the lead as well as those in second, third and fourth position score the number of victory points noted on the board. If you then have most victory points, you win the game.

Various individual elements in Progress give a strategic touch to the game. The strategy aims at the fact that inventions build on each other which can make discoveries exceedingly cheap if you manage to make your discoveries in a given, planned order. This effect can happen, but cannot be counted on, as the element of chance has a very big role to play here, surely too big a role for a strategy game. Already in the starting hand some players are at a disadvantage or at an advantage, because not all inventions of the first age can be used as a basis for other inventions of that age. Therefore, if you only rarely get cards that follow on each other and must pay most of the time for your inventions, you are at a grave disadvantage as regards to other player who were luckier, very often at a game-deciding disadvantage. The game also does not put players in the lead at any disadvantage.

Therefore the „strategy“ in the game often comes down to not to discover invention in a planned way, but to discover as many as you can and to speculate on the chance of thereby having better opportunities for free discoveries later in the game.

For me, the biggest need for improvement in Progress is the element of interaction. Each player builds his own technology tree completely independently from other players and is thus not involved in the game while others play their turns. TO plan your moves in advance is very rarely possible as the cards that are discarded by the previous player can be a deciding factor in how you play your own turn. Therefore you usually wait until the turn of your predecessor ends and then plan your move based on the current situation - which of course results in a longer turn per player in general. And the effect of this is that the game - depending on the types of players involved - can get quite long to play. So, even being intended for up to five players, I can only recommend it for 1 to 3 players.

But Progress has its allure all the same and is fun to play, you only must refrain from playing the game too strategically, because that would not result in a happy outcome, because the element of chance is too big for this.

There are already expansion for the core game, for instance a fourth Age (Industrial Revolution), famous persons and milestones, which can be played as variants of the core game. Additional ages have been announced, if they will be published will remain to be seen. So far, the game has only been published in English, but there is no text despite the names of the inventions. A rule in German is available for download and a German edition is announced from Heidelberger Spieleverlag.

Bernhard Czermak

Players: 1-5

Age: 12+

Time: 90+

Designer: Andrei Novac, Agnieszka Kopera

Artist: David Szilagyi, David J. Coffey

Price: ca. 40 Euro

Publisher: NSKN Games 2014

Web: www.nskn.net

Genre: Card management, development

Users: For experts

Version: en

Rules: de + en

In-game text: no

Comments:

Easy rules

Chance-driven

Needs lots of room to play

Compares to:

7 Wonders

Other editions:

Heidelberger Spieleverlag

My rating: 5

Bernhard Czermak:

A card game with easy rules that offers strategic possibilities but is yet governed mostly by chance. From consideration for fellow players this is not recommended for brooders, as with them a game might feature mainly waiting periods.

Chance (pink): 2

Tactic (turquoise): 3

Strategy (blue): 2

Creativity (dark blue): 0

Knowledge (yellow): 0

Memory (orange): 0

Communication (red): 0

Interaction (brown): 1

Dexterity (green): 0

Action (dark green): 0