Base price: $50.
2 – 4 players.
Play time: ~75 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 13
Full disclosure: A review copy of Ancient Knowledge was provided by Iello / Flat River Games.
Man, BGA has been crushing it lately on “things that help me actually get games played”. I forgot that moving to a new place and having adult responsibilities and commitments makes it hard to play board games all day every day, especially when you have fewer roommates than you used to. That’s the business, I suppose. BGA has been great, though having 30 active games at once does kind of melt my brain a little. You just kind of get used to it, I suppose. As of writing, 82% of my plays this year have been BGA, so… it’s very much a reviewer’s best friend, in that regard. Anyways, I’ve been playing a surprising amount of Ancient Knowledge, so, I’m excited to write more about it! Here we go.
In Ancient Knowledge, your goal is to build a civilization that stands the test of time. Seems familiar, but hey, we love a civilization game. The challenge here is that time will quite literally weather your civilization, gradually reducing your great works to dust. If you don’t fully understand and appreciate those works while you have them, that knowledge will be lost to time. Not great, from a legacy perspective! So work against the clock to build and slowly watch your monuments crumble. Each round, players can place monuments on their timeline, learn technologies, and use artifact abilities to gain points and switch things up. At the end of your turn, however, the Decline Phase shifts all your monuments to the right, which can trigger additional effects or cause any monuments with knowledge tokens still on them to convert those to Lost Knowledge, which incurs an end-of-game penalty. So dig in, create your favorite monuments, and see if you can preserve what you’ve learned! Whose civilization will create a lasting legacy?
Contents
Player Count Differences
Not a ton with this one. The Technology market is pretty much the only thing, and even then, it refreshes once the second card is taken, so since you get two actions every turn, even if one player has taken one, you can take another and try your luck with the refresh. At lower player counts, the more aggressive / take-that cards don’t really have much teeth, but they can hit everyone a lot harder when you’re playing at four, I suppose. I’ve mostly played at two and three players, and I’d say that the slowdown from a third player is fine, but not my favorite. Probably strongest recommendation at two players, though I appreciate in almost all instances the take-that is against all opponents, so there’s little-to-no ganging up on one player.
Strategy
- There’s a “shoot the moon” strategy that’s dangerous as hell. In this strategy, you take as many Lost Knowledge as you can, as there are a bunch of cards that give you disastrously useful effects if you have, say, 15+. You can even lose a chunk of them thanks to some of those effects if you’re willing to risk it. Just keep in mind that every Lost Knowledge is worth -1 points, so, if you can’t get rid of them by the end of the game, you’ll probably lose. Risky, but that’s half the fun.
- In general, you may not want to rush the end of the game. There’s some advantage to taking a lot of technologies. They’ll boost your points and give you useful effects if you meet the requirements. If you just go for monuments, you’ll end up running out the clock and ending the game a bit prematurely.
- Look for synergies! A lot of monuments help with or reward getting technologies. You can use monuments to get discounts on certain technologies or other monuments, or you can use them to reward you for getting certain types of technologies or monuments with extra points. You can build a strategy around that whole thing which can be pretty lucrative.
- Being able to fluidly move monuments around in your Timeline can be pretty helpful. I’ve had a few games where I got an artifact that lets me move around any one monument with 0 Knowledge on it, which can be pretty great. You can keep a low-scoring monument in play with a great effect, or you can move monuments to activate other effects or quickly score monuments that you’ve already cleared. That kind of movement ability can be pretty clutch.
- Make sure you know when an effect is activated. There are cards that activate when they move into your past, during final scoring, at the end of your turn, when played, and just whenever, so know what you’re playing when you place a monument. You can mess up synergies if you’re not paying enough attention.
- Don’t just fill your tableau with artifacts straight out of the gate! They’re hard to discard and they don’t always synergize. You kind of want to get artifacts that lend themselves to a strategy, not just whatever you find laying around. If you fill up with artifacts, there aren’t too many cards that will let you discard them and you can’t replace them easily, so you risk getting stuck with cards that don’t work together well and just take up dead space.
- Genetic Disc is good. This artifact lets you remove two Knowledge from any monument(s) on your timeline whenever you play a monument in zones 5 or 6. Combine that with the one that lets you move monuments around and you’ve got a pretty efficient system with only two cards. It’s just a generally great artifact, kind of regardless of situation (unless you’re shooting the moon).
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- I really enjoy a civilization game every now and then, and I was just starting to feel the itch. I like the expansiveness of them and how good ones include a variety of things from a variety of places and times. I get to feel like I’m learning a bit every time I play.
- The Timeline shifting is pretty novel to me, and I really like it. It’s sort-of engine-building in that you’re playing cards in the hopes of combining their effects, but your engine gradually degrades as cards move out of play and into your Past, which I think is really cool! It ends up forcing you to adapt but giving you a chance to have some high-level strategies, which is a nice combination for a game like this.
- The art style is pleasant. There’s a lot of nice colors and images, and the cards look good, which I appreciate.
- The Lost Knowledge as a penalty / balancer is interesting, too. It helps the cards gain a sense of “objective value”, as the “best” cards often have high Knowledge, low points yield, and can even be locked (you can’t place them anywhere you want on your Timeline) and require discarding additional cards.
- Actually, the Timeline flexibility is nice, too. Being able to discard cards to move cards up and down your Timeline when you first place them is nice. It allows for some flexibility so you’re not just stuck waiting for card effects to activate.
- In general, just a satisfying strategic game. I like trying new things every time I play, and there are enough new cards and random draws that I feel like I’m working with what I get rather than waiting for the “best” card or my favorite strategy to reveal itself.
Mehs
- There’s probably some advantage to knowing the cards, but I don’t feel like it’s as aggressive of one as it is in your usual engine-building games. Knowing that there are some types of cards available for certain effects can be helpful, but I don’t think it’s as aggressive as, say, Terraforming Mars, where knowing the cards provides a distinct and legitimate advantage.
Cons
- The rulebook for this one isn’t my favorite; reading it makes the game seem a lot more difficult and complex than it actually is. I’m not entirely even sure what it was, but every player I’ve introduced this to (myself included) has had a rough time with the rulebook, and there are only five different actions! It ended up feeling pretty dense.
- I do wish the cards with some element of player interaction weren’t overwhelmingly take-that; I think I almost always prefer everyone gets some benefit and you get a better benefit, like the Hermes Trismegistus card. It’s just a bunch of forcing your opponents to discard cards or adding extra knowledge to their monuments. The one not-negative interactive card just draws five cards from the deck. You get one, everyone else gets one, and then you get another one. Things like that appeal to me because they have some strategy (maybe you’ll grab a card that benefits another player more than you) without being actively and directly negative.
Overall: 8.5 / 10
Overall, I think Ancient Knowledge is pretty great! I was surprised to see it’s the designer’s first game, but it’s a solid concept with good execution that lands quite nicely. Granted, a lot of my plays have been virtual, so it’s been nice to play it asynchronously, and it’s a solid game for that: your state is pretty easy to ascertain at the start of every turn, and there’s not really any hidden or surprising information beyond what cards are in your hand, which you also control and influence. From there, it’s just an interesting game of building a strategy that must remain flexible in the face of the inexorable passage of time. You lose some abilities and add new ones, changing how you score points as your monuments sink into history. There’s even a shoot the moon strategy for players who like living dangerously. I’ve never tried it. It’s still fairly approachable for a complex title, which I appreciate, as well. Despite the rulebook, the flow of the game is clear and most players can pick it up pretty quickly and start delivering. I’ll be interested to see what the expansion holds, should I ever get a chance to try it. In the meantime, however, if you’re looking for a fun civilization game, you enjoy old-timey monuments, or you just want to find a cool crystal skull, consider checking out Ancient Knowledge! I’ve been really enjoying it.
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