A few weeks ago, I picked up The Golden Ages at Schwerkraft because I'm interested in civilization games and it promised to deliver the goods in less than 2 hours. I finally got to play it. Naturally, as is often the case with new games, left hand against right hand. The right hand surprisingly won, even though the left hand was clearly ahead for a long time. And the game is great - I play many games against myself to learn them, but I'm relatively rarely really enthusiastic about the game itself, because it's quite cumbersome to play against yourself. But here, each player is given goals early on through their starting civilization and their future technology that point in a certain direction and thus provoke a rather asymmetrical build-up. This is complemented by a really smooth game system in which you don't have to keep track of much and each action is self-contained, so that you never get the feeling that the game is "fiddly". The only downside is that the setup is a bit time-consuming because you fill your tableau and empty it during the game (unlike in other games), so you have to assign technology tiles. But once you've done that, the next time will be faster - and with more than one player, you can build up in parallel. Including setup, my test game lasted 3 hours and was very exciting. It will definitely hit the table again.