Obsolescence Strengthens Progression

One goal of game design is to make players feel they have made progress by the end of the game. A game where the end feels the same as the beginning has an unsatisfying narrative arc. While it is easy to give players new abilities to show progress, it is just as important to contrast these with what they had before. You can create these contrasts through deliberate obsolescence of old abilities.

Through the Ages is an ambitious board game that simulates the history of human civilization. You play through four distinct eras, each with its own events, leaders, and technologies. It embraces obsolescence in a few different ways:

• Cards from later eras are generally strictly better than their counterparts from earlier eras.
• You must discard leaders and cards from your hand that are two eras out of date.
• The game rewards you for switching leaders by refunding the action
• New military tactics are weaker when used with older military units

As you progress through the game, you are repeatedly reminded how much stronger you are than when you started because the game keeps showing you the weaker early-game abilities. You upgrade your buildings and military units whenever possible, replacing weaker versions, and swap old leaders and technologies for new ones. Very little of what you started with remains competitive by the end of the game.

An obsolete resource or strategy need not be entirely useless in the late game. You can still create a sense of progression while preserving some utility, especially if you shift its role from an active part of your strategy to a passive one. The card game innovation forces you to cover old technology cards with new ones of the same color as you play new cards, making their "dogma" (special action) effect unusable. Later in the game, you gain the ability to splay your piles of cards, exposing symbols that both protect you from other players' aggressive dogma effects and allow you to share in the benefits of their cooperative dogma effects. Even though you lose the actions of your old cards, a fragment of their value remains and continues to benefit you.

Assets do not need to remain useful the whole game. Encouraging player abilities to become obsolete strengthens the narrative arc of a game by highlighting the ways that the player has changed, rather than just the ways they have grown.