Matt Leacock’s Roll Through the Ages gets a spiritual successor in ‘roll-and-build’ game Era: Medieval Age

Pandemic creator Matt Leacock is returning to one of his earliest designs with a follow-up to dice-rolling civilisation game Roll Through the Ages.

Era: Medieval Age is described as a spiritual successor to Leacock’s 2008 game, which was somewhat inspired by card game epic Through the Ages: A Story of Civilisation and saw players chucking cubes to gather the resources and workers needed to develop their civs’ technology and monuments.

Era focuses instead on the development of a single city, with players’ dice representing the different classes of medieval society. Players use the results of their rolls to add 3D buildings and other structures to a grid board, in a format that publisher Eggertspiele is calling ‘roll-and-build’ – in comparison to Roll Through the Ages’ roll-and-write-ish gameplay. (Like that game, scoring appears to be tracked with pegs on a slotted board.)

While players will be focused on building up their own city on individual boards, the initial gameplay description teases ways for players to interact with each other through “extortion, scorched earth and, of course, disease”.

The 45-minute to hour-long game plays with up to four people, but a single-player mode is included.

Era: Medieval Age is due out at this year’s Gen Con at the beginning of August, and will be the first in what’s teased as a new series of standalone roll-and-build games from Leacock.