Stone Age is a fun, simple game with just enough strategy to keep players interested. One drawback is all the dice rolling, then adding and dividing the numbers. This quality makes Stone Age excellent for teaching arithmetic, but can get boring or draining when you just want to relax. Here is a very simple variant to minimize the mental arithmetic, but not completely remove it.
Variant Rules
1. Each die roll for Food, Wood, Clay, Stone or Gold is treated as a 3.
The result is less addition and a reduced pool of numbers to divide.
Design Notes
As a six-sided dice has an average of 3.5, this variant does make the game harder. The value of tools is clearer, especially when getting Food, Clay or Stone (as the calculation divides by a number that is not a multiple of 3). In general, the game becomes more strategic as the resources are more reliable.
There is a potential for the variant to be boring, as reacting to the variability of the dice rolls is part of the challenge. The counterpoint is that there are other random elements on the board and the jostling with other players for spaces to alter the tactics of each game.