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I just got Stone Age as a gift and I've played it one time so far. But I have a question about how the tools work.

They way we played from how I understood the rules:

A player places two people and decides to use 1 value-1 tool to gather wood in the forest. Thus the player rolls 3 dice (2 for people, one for tool). He rolls 3+4+5 = 12. Divides that by 3 and takes 4 wood.

This quickly resulted in not having enough dice to handle a single job. Considering you could place 5 people and use 8-value tools which means you'd need 13 dice.

I read online that other people play this way:

A player places two people on wood. Rolls two dice, gets 2+3=5. Then decides to use 1 value-1 tool to up his sum to 6 which lets him get 2 wood instead of 1.

Which way is correct?

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  • 1
    I am unaware of the official rules, but if you need to roll more dice at once than you have available, why not roll them multiple times and add up the results?
    – Hackworth
    Commented Feb 3, 2012 at 10:49
  • That is what we ended up doing, but one player thought it shouldn't be allowed.
    – jb.
    Commented Feb 3, 2012 at 17:16

1 Answer 1

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The last one is correct: you decide how many guys you send to the forest. You roll the dice and then decide to add one or more tools to this.

Tools can't be "broken" (a tool with value of 3 can't be used for 2 in the woods and 1 in the mountain), but you can choose any of your tools for a given place.

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  • Note: the "wrong" method could be interresting as home rules.
    – SteeveDroz
    Commented Feb 3, 2012 at 9:16
  • 4
    That would make tools more powerful than people: they let you roll a die somewhere, but don't need to be fed. The scores would definitely be higher than in the regular game. Compare: improving farming gives you a net of two "placed pips" per turn (in food only), cave-man-breeding gives you a net of 1.5 placed pips per turn (3.5, minus two for feeding), and a tool normally gives 1 pip (with a "real" value slightly higher because you can decide whether to use it after the dice fall), but would now give 3.5 pips!
    – PotatoEngineer
    Commented Oct 23, 2012 at 23:40
  • Yes… but no. Tools may be more efficient, but only for food/resources gathering, which is not the goal of the game. Try building a house or buying a card with a tool and you'll realize people are not that useless.
    – SteeveDroz
    Commented Oct 30, 2012 at 9:12

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