Dark Ages is a historically based game where you will build a civilization with an innovative action selection mechanism. As long as your action tokens remain on the board, you may be able to get secondary bonus actions when you or another player repeats the action.
While Dark Ages features objectives commonly found in 4X games - for example, they encourage you to explore nearby regions, expand your territory, exploit resources, and wipe out your opponents - it does so with different mechanics that let you normally seen earlier in Eurogames. Collect resources from lands you control and use them to build your cities and fortifications. Some buildings offer you different ways to gain important benefits, while others increase your military strength or simply score victory points. As you expand your territory, claim noble titles, acquire new technologies and train your military units. Each region and leader offers asymmetrical choices with their unique abilities.
Dark Ages actually consists of two games: Western Europe (subtitled Heritage of Charlemagne) and Central Europe (subtitled The Holy Roman Empire). While both versions have identical gameplay, each focuses on a specific part of Europe during the Dark Ages (western and central respectively). As a result, the game board cards differ between the two versions, as do the countries in which players compete for control and leaders of those countries. By combining both versions you can expand the map into an epic battle for five or more players!
Each game box is filled with finely sculpted miniatures of towns, forts, farms and other buildings. The different types of troops - infantry, archers and cavalry - are represented by unique miniatures.
The solo mode for Dark Ages was designed by Dávid Turczi.