Progress: Evolution of Technology Review - Chairman of the Board

hey everybody today i'm talking about progress evolution of technology now this is a card driven civilization game for one to five players that takes 45 to 90 minutes to play this one is designed by andre novak and agnessa capera and published by nskn games which is the modern day board and dice uh before i get into my thoughts and how to play progress i try and give a shout out to kianda dot co dot uk who sponsored the show and my go-to online retailer in the uk so be sure to check them out okay so let's have a look what the setup looks like for a game of progress so you're going to have this board here which is going to be a kind of a a way to score points at the end when you climb up these tracks as you get with a lot of euro style games the higher up you get the more points you're going to get so if you're further up this track you're going to get 10 points but the person second and third are going to get fewer points respectively and that applies to all those different tracks here and i've only set out for one player here but you don't really need to see the other pieces to get a gist of how the game works you've got different sets of cards here um relating to different ages you've got h1 h2 h3 and an optional h4 if you choose to play with it um you can stop at h3 if you want to and they're going to show all the different technologies on the other side but we'll have a look at the cards later you've got these little tokens here which you can collect throughout the game which can kind of proxy i'm having the kind of engineering or science or culture kind of points you need to collect as the game goes on and you've got these ones here as well which are wild and they're very useful tools to have at your disposal and each player setup is going to look a bit like this we have your unique or individual player board here and which relates to you in particular and you're going to of course have a set of cards now i've got some cards here which relate to the first age so we've got very primitive technologies here like bridges wheels musical instruments and i'll show how they work with each other and of course as i mentioned you've got your individual play board here which is going to show your abilities throughout the game and as the game goes on and you build more and more of these cards you're going to go up these um going to kind of move these little tokens and markers up here to show that you're getting better at doing things and that can also get you points the higher you get up these tracks you can see here when i get to seven or eight on this track then i'm gonna start acquiring victory points so let's take a look at the anatomy of these cards so um let's just use this one here as an example so this masonry card the symbol in the top left shows that this is of the engineering variety and as i said there's three different types to engineering science and culture this is going to show the rewards you get as a result of completing this car door or making this card um that this is going to kind of show different symbols relating to your individual player board here so if i built this card here i'd move up on this track and i'll explain what all these different icons do a little bit later and of course this one here correlates to this um this track here which is going to move me up again if i get this card built um but i suppose i should show how these cards get built in the first place so in the bottom left here um this is going to be a kind of a cost you're going to get or or a currency you're going to get by just disposing of that card into a into the discard pile um so in order to build to this card i either need three engineering points or to have previously built pottery and that's the two different kind of prerequisites that i need so in order to build it with engineering points i would either need to discard kind of an amount of cards equal to these this brain simples symbols to that to that value there so if i got rid of say uh this card this card this card that would complete a value of three and then i'd be able to build this masonry card in my tableau and get the corresponding rewards however if i did have that pottery um card built so let's just have a look through the deck here and hopefully we can find it without too much trouble there we go pottery so if i had already built this one which would have cost me two engineering points or all these ones here which are of course wilds um then i would like to just straight up buy that i'll build that without any trouble whatsoever and without having to spend anything else so this really is a game about building those tech trees and trying to get those prerequisites so that you can get things as affordable as possible you can also see that some of these cards have bonuses in relation to taking these tokens so when you take these tokens like if i built these musical instruments and i'll take one of these culture tokens that is going to be basically a a token i can use every single round and i can exhaust every single round in order to kind of contribute towards that value so let's say i really wanted to build i'm something that needed one culture rather than discarding a card like i would normally have to i can actually just flip this one over and say that that's paid for my um that's paid for the cost and therefore um i do not need to sacrifice anything and then at the start of each round and when it comes back to you you'll refresh those to be able to be used again you can also see here like on cards such as this wheel you can get victory points um in order to build them and of course as the game goes on and you go through the different ages then the victory points are going to increase let's take a look at the player boards so um this is one of my favorite parts of the game and see how you can you know increase your ability to do things so this one here um it shows how many cards you can have in your hand so we're going to start with a basic value of five but you can increase that all the way up to having an eight card hand this one here is how many cards you can draw and you can either draw cards from the kind of face down deck or or from the face up deck as more cards get discounted and you can only ever draw the cards on top so that's a really useful way to get particular cards that you want and of course you can increase that all the way up to six starting at a basic value of three and this one here is the reshuffle deck so if there's a particular card you want that's been buried and discarded by other players you can use this ability in order to reshuffle the deck back into the main deck and then draw that many cards off the top and kind of the more you get this up here you can end up shuffling all the different ages um to give you more control this one here is like a quick draw ability so this one means that you can start with the basic ability of drawing one card and not having to discard any but as the game goes on and as you increase this track you can draw um a five and only have to discard one so again lots of control to get the cards you particularly want to get those prerequisites this one here is a really strong one because this actually shows how many actions you get in the in each of your rounds so you start with a basic value of two and you can actually go up to five actions per turn which is of course a massive significant difference and this one here is how many cars you can develop at any time and this one here is how many cards uh sorry how many cubes go on those cards when you develop them so let's talk about how the develop action works so let's say i really wanted to make this bridge card but i didn't have the masonry or i didn't have enough kind of engineering points in order to build it then i could do something called a research action and i did call it a develop action that is the incorrect terminology it is called a a research action and when you do that you are going to take a number of these black cubes here and you're going to place them onto the card and the number of cubes you put on there is going to correspond to this track here so again you start with a basic value of four you can get that down to a two so let's just say i had a three here i put three cubes on it and all that means is this is basically like a a timer that means in each of my following turns i'm going to remove one of these cubes and then eventually all the cubes are going to be removed i mean that that card is going to be built automatically once that kind of time has elapsed so this is a really good way of getting around those hard prerequisites and more difficult cards to build but you have to bear in mind that it is going to cost time in order to do so and you can only have a number of cards being researched that's equal to this track here so you can only start by researching one so you can't really just spam that action and but you know having the ability to develop to develop or research four different cars at the same time is particularly strong especially when you get high up on this track making it more and more efficient so the game is going to advance into the next age once a certain amount of these cards here with this symbol on are going to be built and that's going to depend on the player count but that means that the next age of cards is going to come into play and so on and you're going to keep doing that until you either can go to the end of the third age or enter the fourth age depending on the variant you want and then all points are going to be calculated and that's basically how the game works so let's talk about all the different cards here they're going to show up and to show you some variety okay so let's show you some of the different technology cars that are going to show up so you've already seen some of the aged ones here you know your real basics are the basics but then you're going to go on to age 2 where you can get things such as coal mines and printing presses you know windmills and i love how intuitive these things are you know in order to build the windmill yes you can go the straight up science and um kind of engineering route or you can have the prerequisites which are logical you know you need the wheel and you need irrigation and if you have both of those cards then you can build it straight up for free but if you have one or the other then you only need to pay that corresponding amount that's remaining so i really do like the way that works you know to get a compass you need to have cartography to have a university you need to have libraries and renaissance arts so it's all very intuitive and very logical and when you start going into age three you start getting like education and modern arts refrigeration which will need you know electricity electricity which will need windmills and thermodynamics and then even into the h4 cards where you can get things such as mass media and you can do that if you've built the telephone and television antibiotics which give you you know if you had refrigeration or biology then you can build that for free and even automobiles where you have assembly lines and combustion you know you can build that card for free so i love the progress here and the kind of logical flow and the game does come with these very useful technology trees which shows all the previous prerequisites you need in order to build things you know so you know for a fact that in order to build a windmill um or to build a windmill you can kind of stem off and build steam engines or um you know to build a printing press for free you could if you have you could have paper so it's all very logical and um you know i think with or without this you can understand the game but these are certainly a welcome addition okay so let's talk some final thoughts on progress evolution of technology so first off civilization games have always been a weird one for me i've wanted to find the game for me but i've struggled to do so because a lot of them are so full on they're so involved they take hours and hours and hours and have a massive rules overhead that they've kind of been a bit of an obstacle for me to get into this one i think does a great job of kind of branching that gap of offering everything you'd want from a civilization and textile game but still being relatively straightforward and manageable a very simple action systems and a logical flow to all the different technologies that you'd want so i really do love the way this is weighted and it's certainly not overwhelming in terms of its rules overhead or anything like that but it still again offers that full civilization experience the mechanisms in particular that i like are the uh individual playables this is fantastic you know all the different things you want to do and particularly having a bigger hand size or drawing more cards because you know drawing cards is going to be a big part of this game and even going through discard piles is going to play a big factor to get particular cards you want um but even like taking more actions which is going to be a massive help or of course developing cards or more cards and cards faster and more efficiently all of these things are worth exploring at the same time you want to be going up these tracks here making sure you're not falling behind so you get these big points at the end of the game and of course always building those tech trees to make sure that you'll have the right cards to build future cards a lot more cheaper and a lot more efficient efficiently so i really love that i might also again i love that research action i think that's fantastic you know when you wanted to build this particular card you just shove a couple of cubes on it and it's basically a countdown mechanism that really helps you get past that idea of kind of milling through the decks trying to get particular cards is a nice way to overcome that and it keeps the game ticking along very smoothly and i think without that this game would suffer quite a bit and i think that's a real good decision to put that into the game and i actually think that's a wonderful mechanism uh additionally i love the way that you can collect these bonus tiles um so that you don't have to so so much rely on discarding cards from your hand which you might want to build um yeah as the game goes on you're gonna be more free to discard certain cards that you know you don't want and as the game goes on as well you know the cards are going to be worth more and more of these research points but these are always great especially as they renew every single round so you can use them again and again and again and getting them early is going to be a massive boom so yeah generally everything flows wonderfully very simple kind of action point system and i didn't have any issues at all teaching this to a relatively inexperienced gamers gamer and they had a a very good time at the end of it so yeah i really do think some strikes a nice balance between being gamey but not too gamey but still having all the kind of core things you want from a civilization game the balance of the game is generally quite good yes you can be particularly lucky or unlucky with the cards that you're drawing i mean some of them might just work together and synergize with each other wonderfully whereas your opponents might not um but i think that's where all these come in where you do have a lot of control to get the cards that you want into your hand and i think as the game gets to an end that's gonna you know it's gonna more often not balance out so i never really felt disgruntled or anything like that about when particular cards were working for me or against me so i do think the game is pretty well balanced the game does take probably around 75 to 90 minutes to play on average which i think is is fair it would be nice to have a little bit shorter because essentially you are doing the same thing from start to finish but i suppose the artwork's changing and the the prices are going up and up and up but i didn't really have an issue with that it didn't it certainly didn't outstay its welcome and i think it's it's a fair and proportionate amount of time to take the up time of the game is is fine i mean as the game goes on people are going to taking be taking bigger actions but at least you can plan with the cards in your hand to know what you're going to do on your turn the interaction of the game is generally how the cards flow about you know people hiding cards that you want in the discard piles etc and of course you've got the trident kind of trusted version of um these tracks which are used in so many different euro games and it tends to work for me i've got no issue with these kind of um you know push as far as you can in these tracks to get more points that's just kind of my bread and butter of eurogame so i've got no issue there at all um so yeah general interaction of the game is is fine it does feel more kind of multiplayer solitaire than anything just passive interaction with how the cards are managed and of course as i mentioned those tracks the production of the game is pretty standard stuff really no issues but no particularly high praise either you know the card quality is is fine and these player boards i suppose they're good that they're recessed so you can move the cubes up and down without them falling anywhere so that's that's a good addition uh the track is just you know just a simple little cardboard track and your basic kind of euro cubes um artwork and stuff on the cards is pretty good it looks quite uh atmospheric and of the time so i do like these kind of got this serious artwork and all the iconography on the cards is crystal clear as well you can clearly see what everything does um the only issue is black borders on the cards i generally don't like it when games have black borders because the more you shuffle those decks the more they're going to get chipped and marked and damaged so that's my only real complaint ready but other than that production is absolutely fine so final thoughts on progress evolution of technology so i will say straight up i've really enjoyed this game and i'm very surprised that this game isn't talked about anymore i know civilization games are generally quite popular but they are normally of that again that higher rules hair overhead that really heavy variety of game whereas this one is something a little bit different and i will say this is kind of the game i've been looking for so this is fits quite a nice niche in my games collection because i don't really have any other tech tree style games like this and again i love the logical progression of all the different cars everything is intuitive very simple rules but there's enough going on to kind of sink your teeth into in terms of upgrading your player balls and finding those winning combos and see how you're going to string all those cards together so i think this is a very nice game surprisingly easy to teach and understand and play pretty straightforward and how it works but it does offer satisfying and meaningful decisions and it does feel really good when you get these big expensive cards played for little to no effort i really love that research action that adds a lot to the game as well and it certainly feels like you're crescendoing as the game goes on collecting more and more tokens getting these bigger prerequisites and getting those more meaty cards played so i think this is a really nice game very pleasantly surprising it's weirdly underrated nobody talks about this one anymore maybe it's been lost to time or maybe it's such a niche style game where as i said most most kind of civilization style gamers want something or they want they want the full kind of kitchen sink of mechanisms chucked in whereas this one does certainly hold those reins back and kind of tries to cater to a different audience but this one is going to get my shield of quality i enjoyed it that much and i'm looking forward to playing it more and finding more winning combos so that is my final thoughts on progress evolution of technology check it out thank you so much for checking out this video if you found it useful or at least somewhat entertaining then please hit like and consider subscribing if you haven't done so already additionally if you wish to support the show because i am a woman operation i don't get any support from publishers then please consider backing on patreon at patreon.com forward slash chairman of the board where you can back for as little as two pounds per month thank you so much i'll see you next time