7 Grand Steps: What Ancients Begat

It's like a solo board game but without the transparency. It appears extremely random and often rigged against you. By age 2 out of 7, I maxed my family's social standing and had a ruler with mostly maxed out stats, several heroic titles to his name, beloved by populace and administrators to the extent that they made him king. The city likewise had great stats and economy with everything expanded to heavy extents (hence the popularity). Then the challenge of the age came and there was zero feedback on why I failed or succeeded any of the challenges. A failure nuked my family and reset everything I had accomplished so I crashed the game and retried a number of times. Choices that were wildly successful once (and fit his stats and those of the city) randomly failed at other times, resulting in insta-death. There was no indication of why I was losing sometimes and winning others or which stats were being tested. The only consistent thing was that across ~10 reloads (against, with everything just about maxed) my family was somehow destroyed every single time and reset from a king descended from generations of nobles, to the lowliest unskilled worker with zero transference of progress. If you want to essentially delete a savegame and do it frequently, you better leave the player some sense of agency.

This is an old game. Nobody probably cares about this review. I'm just posting it mainly so my friends will not see that I've played this game for 20 hours of my life that I will never get back and think that means I enjoyed it. I really wanted to, but honestly the last 15+ hours of play was just me trying all the different options to try to see if I could make it make sense. Sometimes, I could. Other times, it seemed painfully random. It also kept crashing, or the adults would die and the child would not age up, but the game also didn't end, so I was stuck on the same screen with no choice but to just quit and start a new game, even though the dad had siblings... Sigh. suffice to say that NO, I do not recommend this game.

I love this game. It's estetic choices brim with personality. The gameplay loop is fresh and filled with surprising complexity which lines up well with the story. My favorite part is the love boost. If a character lands on a space where an ally or lover in love stand they get sent further ahead. This is super powerful and two characters in love can be total beasts. The fun happens when only one in the couple is in love. Very quickly the uninterested party gets to do loads more than the love stricken character. Often its even beneficial to sacrifice the love smitten fool for a few extra tokens before a new generation takes over. This sort of gameplay incentive towards callous characters is something I really enjoy in my roleplaying games, and this slot machine, historical, CYOA, rpg, manages to hit that mood to a tee.

Ah, what the hell! This game is not the best game, it is heavily dependent on RNG, but at least it tries something unique. I haven't played a game similar to it before. I recommend it but keep your expectations low. I think the worst part is the RNG because you can easily fall behind because of it and when you have fallen, it takes time to get back on track. Otherwise how it presented its story through a board game was really interesting.

Honestly, I never understood how anything worked or what I was supposed to do.

I bought this extremely unique game over a decade ago, in my teens, and it marked such a before and after in my perception of what a game could be and who could make them with its engaging gameplay and simple but polished presentation that I thought it a massive success, a cornerstone of indie games that surely everyone must have stumbled upon circa 2013. I only found out that wasn't the case a couple of weeks ago checking the reviews, and I made a point to return back to it to see if it held up the way I remembered it to leave the 300th (counted) review. It not only holds up, it's plain amazing. Where in 2013, despite it feeling frustratingly hard at the time, I spent hours upon hours trying to get my family to survive the copper age, today, after 13 years, I found out that you can play well enough for the game to actually crown your family and continue to the next age. I'm in the bronze age now, gazing in horror upon the fact this game left an indelible mark on my heart and I'd barely even seen what it had to offer. The one frustrating mechanic I recall from playing as a teen was memorizing the patterns for the adventures, and I'm still not a fan at all since it seems playing them to fit your chosen personality is not the right way to go about them, so I focused exclusively on inventions and social climbing. If you like games like King of Dragon Pass, the Sims, Dawn of Man... this is not exactly any of them in tabletop version, but much like Civilization, the simple gameplay will keep you coming back for just one more turn, while the emergent narrative and the writing that is actually derived from gameplay will keep you invested in your family (and wishing you had more tokens so your kids would stop hating each other). It's a shame we never did get Step 2, but I do think this game is a worthy experience on its own. Thank you for making one of the games that inspired me to become a dev so many years ago.