Last updated on January 4th, 2026 at 11:28 pm
Through the Ages – Strategy Game Review
Through the Ages is a Strategy/Board game from CGE Digital s.r.o., first launched in 15th September 2017.
It’s rated 12+ and currently has 5,102+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Through the Ages Stand Out
Through the Ages is based on a highly acclaimed civilization board game by well-known designer Vlaada Chvátil. The original game is recognized as a modern classic board game.
ENDLESS POSSIBILITIES
Become a chieftain of a small civilization at the dawn of humankind's history.
Expand your farms and mines to ensure you have enough resources to grow your civilization.
This is our chance to make history!
Develop various technologies, improve armies to defend your cities, or attack other civilizations nearby.
Choose the best government that fits your goals and build magnificent wonders to achieve memorable victory at the end of the modern era.
CARD-DRIVEN GAMEPLAY
Through the Ages is a card-driven, turn-based board game that gives you countless options on what to do and how to play.
Thanks to the pool of hundreds of cards, every game is unique, allowing you to build a mighty civilization.
PLAY SOLO OR ONLINE
You can play against AI-driven world leaders with various difficulties, or you can jump into online games against other players.
Thanks to the ELO system, the game will find you opponents of the same level as you are.
Clash with them and discover whose strategy leads to victory.
You can also participate in some of the many championships, including the official World Championship in Through the Ages.
PLENTY OF CHALLENGES
The game offers more than 30 challenges that change the winning conditions or rules, so you must adapt your strategy to lead your civilization to victory.
Prove that you understand how civilization works and become the mighty world leader.
This Strategy game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Through the Ages is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 26th November 2025
Recent improvements include:
animation fix
Download & Availability
Through the Ages is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Get Through the Ages on App Store
Requirements: Requires iPhone 5s / iPad Air / iPad Air (Cellular) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina, Cellular) / iPhone 6 / iPhone 6 Plus / iPad Air 2 / iPad Air 2 (Cellular) / iPad Mini 3 or later.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices.
Player Experience Highlights
Community Insight:
Best game ever developed. Been playing thousands of hours.
Nothing not to like about this one.
EDIT: Podcasts work again after latest update. Most excellent. We used to be able to listen to podcasts while playing, but now this game kills all audio playing from other apps. And the rendering is now causing crashing. We can tell it speeds up frame rate during animations which looks pretty when it works, but if you play with the hard AI the CPU still kills the frame rate so it is kind of pointless. But as it is a turn based game, who cares about frame rate? Wish we could downgrade.
We have been playing and raving about this game to family and friends for a year, thus past week it kept crashing on our iPad even if we have the latest updates. Contacted customer support through the app and reached out to their Facebook but received no answer. Please help us play again.
We really like games that have a start and end. You can learn how to play and do better next time. Worth the money if you are into deep strategy games. We still havent mastered the medium challenge.
Since the last update it takes FOREVER against the AI. You also cant pick up a saved game anymore. Super annoying.
The app updated on 10/5. Now it doesnt work. When we tell it to load a game, it acts like it, the bounces out of the app. When we double click to see the apps that are up, it shows up. But when we select it, it repeats the loading process. Running on an iPhone 6 iOS 12.4.8.
They have done an AMAZING job with creating this application. There is only one bug that we have noticed, the activity log will sometimes not scroll. Otherwise, the app is flawless. We have numerous over board game apps, and this one is by far the most well executed. Kudos to the team for making it.
If you love card based strategy games this is the one. The playability. The tutorial. All excellent you absolutely need to purchase the expansion. You wont regret it. Great pvp options. Any expansion they sell we will be first in line. This really is a great strategy game. We play online with friends and randos. Truly excellent and great support.
We play other online versions of Thru The Ages. This one plays the best and gets upgraded more frequently. Highly recommended.
Not only is this game deep and well balanced the async play is best Ive experienced on iOS. We wish other games mobile implementation where half as good as this one is.
Excellent game in every respect and very challenging! Buy it.
Fantastic game, excellent app. We play exclusively solo and the challenges provide hours of fun.
Verified that family sharing works, and we also play with friends who bought the game with their own money. We had one terminal glitch and had to abandon a game but otherwise its been pretty flawless over many games. There is a learning curve. We mostly lose, but still have fun. You can play with people you know or people you dont know or by yourself (against the computer). The pacing is so perfect. You play a hand for five minutes and then walk away while waiting for others to play. Our games typically last about a week and provide little moments of fun several times a day when its our turn to play. We bought an expansion pack and its fun. Unfortunately expansion packs dont work with family sharing. Devices tested include iPhone 11 Pro, iPhone 10, and iPad Pro 2018. Play the tutorial and read the rules – youll have less frustration that way.
We keep coming back to 5is game. We really like how they did the expansions to make it more re-playable.
A lot of fun, with very good AI PLAYERS (at least compared to ourselves). They should change the rules about military strength ties, though. One obvious change would be to use the exploration strength to break a military strength tie.
Great game but unfortunately growing increasingly unstable with frequent crashes. In recent release you often must abandon game and restart new App needs to be focused on stability fixes.
The latest update supposedly improves performance and gives fps options but what it really did was make performance way worse and battery usage is almost untenable. Im on iPhone 8 and one full laggy game of about 45 minutes takes battery from 100 to 40% performance. Please fix. This is one of our favorite apps but now we can only play it when Im plugged in. Very frustrating.
Ive played a few games and am amazed at the perfection. The tutorial by itself is worth at least half the cost for new players like us.
An outstanding app. UI is user friendly, with a valued undo option. Game is great; it has a learning curve, but AI has multiple levels facilitating the learning. Expansion adds diversity and is worth the buy.
Im a big board & card game enthusiast with a fairly large collection (compared w/ normal folks) and this digitalized version might even be better than its original 2nd Edition tabletop version. This is easily our favorite Civilization-themed board game and we love playing it online with our real-life gamer friends. This digital version allows for the near perfect info of tracking all the game decks and each opponents civilization, all at your very fingertips. Now, the new expansion allows for more variety and mix of cards to keep the game fresh with every new session. We wholeheartedly recommend this Civ based game as it has some learning curve but its really worth the ascent.
This is a wonderful digital translation if the original tabletop game. Do the entire tutorial, its totally worth the time.
The game itself is an awesome game, but takes a super long time to learn and play. This app makes it MUCH easier to play quick games against actually competent AI. The challenges are fun and engaging, and the app is super well designed. Its the first board game app Ive had that has an undo button, which we feel like should be a requirement for all board game apps.
Edited – The developers got back to us and suggested that our iPad might be older and if we click the option for reduced graphics it might help. It fixed the issue completely and we cant even tell a difference. We love this game. It is super fun and addictive. It would be 5 stars except for when we try to play the challenges the app keeps crashing. You can restart it and it doesnt lose your spot, but it will only crash again and again. Usually once it starts it will keep happening over and over and it takes a long time to be able to finish the game. What is weird is it lets you play more than half the game before it crashes the first time.
Good overall, but for the past couple months the game sometimes does not send a notification or badge.
This is a decent port of the tabletop game. It loses a lot of points for forcing users to make an account and literally locking the expansion we paid for in the online game account. Bad bad bad. The game just crashed twice on us, iphone 6s. We swear we dont know why we buy boardgame apps anymore.
In the tutorial when we get to the part about tap opponents strength rating and the… Tactics Help box opens, the app freezes no matter how many times we restart the level. Please help.
Absolutely love the digital version of this game! Our only suggestion is if you could give us a little bit more freedom in the custom custom game settings. We want the option to make our games longer, and do wacky stuff with the settings kind of like you have the challenge modes set up. Users love more freedom! Other then that, this is everything we would hope a Through the Ages, digital version would be! Excellent work and we look forward to see what else the team can dream up for the future of this magnificent board game.
Amazing port of the game. The user interface is incredibly polished. We have almost 100 hours into this game.
We bought this game to teach us how to play the board game, so we can teach our friends. We are so happy we did. There are many nuances and details we may have missed. Highly recommended.
Its way too hard to start a new game with specific people. Would be much better if we could just rematch after a completed game. An auto-rematch option would be even better.
If there is one thing we have to say about this game, it needs difficulties. And when we say that, we mean the training needs to be training, easy needs to be easy and so on. There needs to be a better sense of progress. Not punishment/frustration. Tone it down. We have seen the reviews here and we believe there need to be more critical/helpful reviews. This game is interesting but feels hopeless at the same time. It really is no fun to play a game where the easy AI is already hard. Why play further then? Its a card game, not an IQ test. And the card game is way too complicated compared to others. We have played plenty of civilization/strategy games throughout our life – Civilization, Age of Empires, Armello and so on – and never have we faced a more discouraging game than this. We have hardly beaten the easy AI, which is not a good thing. We usually dont even know how we won, considering the AI spam the bonus points at the end. That should be the medium or hard AI. But when its easy alone that shows you up, why even bother trying anymore? It really is discouraging. And how can the hard AI be any harder if easy knows the game so well? We have tried this game at least a dozen times and dont feel like Im learning anything. 7 Wonders is why we even found this game and that card game is way more balanced/easy. And when we lose at that, we dont feel nearly as defeated. Its a good game for all. Its as several reviews have said for us; we feel like we are catching up with the AI only to have the game end. Its ends too soon. There is a growing sense of frustration that defeats you right off with this. And playing a training AI is not an answer. Thats just dull. You just cut off its one hand/move. Brutal. Again, you dont really learn anything, you just try to cheap win.
Its a fantastic game and works really well on iOS. However, the app has all kinds of problems and any frequent player has memorized the Connection to Server Failed screen by now.
Just finished our first match, and we have no words to describe it! That's just an amazing strategy game, we'll come back later to write a more detailed review.
Amazing game. Some minor bugs from time to time, but nothing major. Super fun to play and great online multiplayer experience.
Tried a lot of Euros in real life and in the App Store and this one is the best.
We really like this game. We also like the graphs at the end that show your production across all areas, turn by turn, compared to your rival. That is cool! We do want to give advice to new players. We almost gave up on this game because we made the mistake of trying to quickly play through our turns and paid no attention to our rival. Consequently, we lost every game. So we almost gave up, but then decided to try one more time, and slowed down. We thought through our choices on every turn, figured out that production and military strength early on is important, while still doing things to generate culture. We even wrote down what our rival was doing so we could analyze the AIs card and resource production choices. For new players, we would tell you – take your time and think through your turns. It makes a difference (we won that game by 31 points).
Played only once over the board and knew there was something good there but played too poorly to poorly to really grasp how good this game is. The app seriously makes it easier to learn the animation of the civilization you build is cute and makes the experience that much more enjoyable. Phenominal game.
Ive been playing Through the Ages for 12 years now and this app helps us keep our addiction going.
One of the best implementations of a strategy board game you will ever find.
Ive tried to learn this game many times but the tutorial really helps to make it more manageable. Bravo!!,.
One of our all-time favorite games.
App has always been amazing but just recently it starting freezing on us frequently. Often when we were ending our turn, it would freeze and Id be forced to hard reset and re-do our turn. This never happened to us over months of owning the app. Im wondering if the recent update for bug fixes actually caused more problems than they fixed? This was a perfect app before but it is very irritating to play right now. It freezes during pretty much every turn we take.
This is our preferred way to play TTA. We will forego getting the board to the table and just play from our phones.
Through the Ages is one of the best strategic card games out there, challenging and always forcing you to think on your feet. This is a terrific version of that game too, possibly the best board game app on iOS. Theres a lot of game here, and its not a casual design at all. But those who want to learn will find it rewarding, and this is a great way to learn.
Ive now bought this game on three platforms and have felt good about paying for it every time. Brilliant digital implementation of the game. We have experienced very few bugs over our many hours playing, and they have added many features the community has requested.
We think everyone already knows that this is the best boardgame adaption ever made.the tutorial is great and the game is so smooth.well done developers.
Insanely wonderful app. Allows you to take back parts of your move step by step, so you can try things out before committing. Does all the heavy lifting when it comes to the fiddly stuff. Very cool sounds, too. We usually like the physical board games better than the app version, but this ones the exception we own the board game, but we only play the app version, because its perfect. Phenomenal job.
If you enjoy Sid Meiers Civilization and/or engine building board games youll likely love Through the Ages. Fun and challenging in so many ways this game will leave you begging for one more turn into the wee hours of the night. A+ 5/5 Well done.
This really is the standard to which all boardgame apps should strive for.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 2.19.1133
- Size: 188.01 MB
- iOS: 15.0 or later
- Languages: EN
- Content Advisory: Infrequent/Mild Realistic Violence
- Developer: CGE Digital s.r.o.
Last updated: 26th November 2025 | Genre: Strategy, Board | Developer: CGE Digital s.r.o.