In Six Ages, you start out by deciding the mythological backstory for your clan. You take the role of clan leader and start making decisions. Your actions — trading, exploring, making sacrifices, building shrines, waging war — advance the time and trigger events such as the visits of other clans or encounters on the road. In every event, you make choices that have an effect on the mood in your clan, or that cost you horses, herds or goods. Each interaction is paired with an artful illustration that you can see in full by hiding the overlapping text with a tap.

In between all of this, you will end up reading a lot. Every event introduces names of deities, other clans or individual characters, which quickly threatened to blur together for me. As a frequent reader of fantasy books, I am not exactly a stranger to exposition dumps, but in most books I like, new lore is accompanied by the stories of individual characters that are relatable in one way or another.

Unfortunately, I found it very hard to keep reading the events and exposition texts with enough attention to actually follow what was going on.

Riders and Horses

The clans are all referred to as Riders, their horses an important basis of their livelihood. Six Ages is in no way comparable to a regular “horse game”, nor does it really follow the collectible/companion structure I’ve laid out here. Instead, horses are a countable resource and could be called a cultural cornerstone for your people. You can buy and sell horses, but like your cows and your goats, they are a number, rather than individual creatures.

Many of the visual representations of horses in story events remind of Mongolian wild horses, with solid builds and short, upright manes. The countless illustrations paint a picture of a world steeped in mythology, with many diverse portrayals of tribes and clans.

My appreciation of the game’s art does unfortunately not translate into any desire to keep playing it.

For me personally, Six Ages feels like way too much of a chore. After around an hour of playing, I have probably barely seen a fraction of what the game offers, but don’t intend to return to it. While I generally enjoy story-driven games, the sheer amount of reading material here is too much for me, combined with the slow, strategic decision-making that is not my favorite kind of gameplay at the best of times.



