WizKids Announces Prehistoric Worker Placement Game Age of Dirt

Published: July 1, 2019 4:43 PM /

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age of dust header

Grab your club and tighten your tiger pelt! WizKids has just announced the new board game, Age of Dirt: A Game of Uncivilization, which they describe as "A worker placement game with stupid workers." For two to five players, and running an estimated 45 minutes, Age of Dirt lets players take the role of the head of a fledging prehistoric civilization. Each player hopes to send their workers out to collect resources to help them grow their tribe, create weapons to protect themselves, and create curious inventions to win victory points. The first player to ten victory points wins. Sounds simple, right?

Age of Dirt

There's a catch! Because your workers in this worker placement game are big dimwitted cavemen they don't always do what you want them to do. The game describes a fun mechanic to account for their dull minds. When you're ready to activate a group of workers to collect a resource, you pick up all the workers on a given space and put them in a tower. There they'll tumble down... or not. Flaps inside the tower may trap your workers and keep them from tumbling down to be collecting. And ones left behind may come back with a different resource you weren't looking for, or they may not come back at all.

We haven't seen any images of the tower or the board yet, so it's hard to truly visualize what this will look like or how it will play out, but the core concept is certainly unique. The game hits shelves in October 2019 and will retail for $49.99.


Quick Take

Even though caveman theming isn't really my thing, I was immediately drawn to this game idea as a cool new inversion of the classic "worker placement" game. Traditionally, worker placement games are all about careful planning and mitigating risk as best as you can. But with the use of a tumbling tower to shake up the core mechanic of worker placement (you know, the placing of workers) this really feels like it could revolutionize the genre and inspire future, less-cartoony iterations, and I'm excited to see how WizKids handles Age of Dirt.

What do you think of this new take on worker placement games? Have you seen this mechanic repeated to better effect elsewhere? Let us know in the comments below!

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Giaco Furino joined the TechRaptor team as a Staff Writer in 2019 after searching for a dedicated place to write and talk about Tabletop Games. In 2020, he… More about Giaco