My First Stone Age is a delightful children’s board game with elements of memory and set collection. It might really appeal to young kids who have seen ‘The Adults’ playing a grown-up’ game like Stone Age by Bernd Brunnhofer and want to join in…
This is, of course, a much more diluted variant. It’s designed by Marco Teubner, takes about 15 minutes to play and is child-friendly for those aged five and up.
The winner of My First Stone Age is the first player to build three huts. They cost a variety of specific resources (so that much is similar to Stone Age). The board also has a familiar look to Stone Age, with both of these titles being inked by artist Michael Menzel.
The board has eight locations situated in a circular route. A series of tiles surround the board: shuffled, spread out and face-down. All of them have an action on their reverse side. On your turn, you flip one of them over, move your cave-meeple to that location and then do that area’s action.
Some allow you to visit an area and take one of the limited resources associated with that area, such as a tusk or a fish. Some allow you to swap a resource from your pile with one on the board. One allows you to take a dog token, which counts as a ‘wild’ resource. Lastly, there’s an action that lets you go to the hut-building space and build a hut. There's always three huts available, but you must have the exact resources shown on the hut (or a dog token acting as a wild) to build it.
Other tiles include ones featuring various dice faces. If you flip one of these over, you move your cave-meeple that many spaces clockwise around the circle, doing that area’s action, as a result.
The memory aspect of My First Stone Age is that once a tile has been flipped, the next player has to flip over a different tile. This continues until someone eventually flips over the ‘Build a Hut’ token. After their turn they then turn all of the tiles facing down again… And then they swap two tiles of their choice. This means that all players need to pay attention if they want to do the ideal move on their next turn!
My First Stone Age also comes with fantastic player shields for players to hide their claimed resources. As well as a further element to remembering who has taken what, they also act as a cool stand to prop up the huts you’ve built so far! All in all this is an excellent memory challenge by Z-MAN Games, whose lovable components will only heighten the enjoyment children will get out of building a stone age village.
