Ice Age Village is a classic mobile game that's about building up a town for animals to live in. Based on the Ice Age series of animated movies, this older game has inspired countless newer building games, but it's still great fun to check out one of the originals.

Ice Age Village is a mixture of a city-builder, a gacha game, and an idle-style mobile game. In Ice Age Village, your goal is to build up a village for animals from the Ice Age to live in. You accomplish this by planning out and upgrading your village, managing the families of animals and incubating their children in a nursery, playing mini-games and getting rewards, and collecting loot that pops up every so often from your families, buildings, and other city structures.

Ice Age Village doesn't have the most modern or fancy graphics. Instead, it's got a clear, cartoonish visual style that's influenced by both the Ice Age movies and other mobile games. The animations and pictures are somewhat lackluster by modern standards, sure, but you still can tell what's going on and you can still get a great look at all sorts of neat animals, including many that aren't commonly found in today's modern ecosystem.

As you progress through Ice Age Village, you'll gain the opportunity to start families of all sorts of animals. Animals can be bought from a rotating shop, retrieved as rewards from minigames, and otherwise acquired as new creatures migrate to your village. You get to both set up a place for these animals to live and help them by incubating their children. Incubating babies is a time-gated task that requires using one of your limited incubation slots, so you'll have to carefully manage which families you level up when. You'll also have to regularly log into the game to retrieve the children from their incubators so that you can turn them over to their animal parents.

Ice Age Village is not a difficult game. Instead, it's a game that rewards participation. Most of the stuff you'll get in the game comes from families and buildings that you've got set up in your village. In order to collect the rewards, you simply click on these parts of your village and watch the coins and loot spill out. Other rewards come from mini-games, which award the same end-of-game loot regardless of your skill or score, social activities (like finding things in friends' worlds or sending gifts), and daily log-in bonuses. This makes Ice Age Village a great game to play if you're worried about other games being too difficult or if you're just looking to look at some cool animals.

Early on, Ice Age Village gives you a huge number of quests to perform. These quests help guide your exploration of the game's content and always reward more stuff than they cost to complete, making them a great way to experience the game. However, as you advance in levels and content, the quests start being a bit more thinned out. While you can burn through a lot of quests very quickly early on, after a few days or weeks you'll probably find that most of your game sessions involve you just logging on, collecting loot and rewards, and then logging off while you wait for incubations and more rounds of loot.

Success in Ice Age Village is all about understanding the game's reward systems and pricing mechanics. Ice Age Village is full of lots of things that can trap new players and cause you to fall behind in your progression rate, spending dozens or hundreds of acorns on things that aren't worth it at all. This means that you'll want to do a bit of out-of-game research before you start playing to ensure that you don't fall into any of these traps. 

First, do NOT spend acorns on revives in the minigames. Also, do NOT play the minigames once they start to cost premium currency. The minigames give you 2.5 acorns on average when you complete them, regardless of which minigame you play or your score at the end. This means that starting a minigame and then immediately failing it is exactly the same as getting a crazy high score. The exception to this is that you can pick up acorns within the Egg Hunt minigame, making it a slightly superior choice if you're looking to actually try while you burn through your daily minigames. The extra acorns will add up, even if you don't always get one on each run.

Second, do NOT spend acorns on characters from the shop that aren't special. The shop has a rotating shop of animals that can't normally be acquired. These animals cost quite a few acorns, meaning you'll have to have a big bank of acorns ready for when they do appear. The other animals, like raccoons, can be acquired from any source of animals. This means that unless you've got a huge bank of acorns and you just haven't been seeing one of them, it's definitely not worth picking them up from the shop.

Third, be mindful of where you place your decorations. Decorations boost the output of families near them, which can have a huge impact on the income of your village. Big decorations with low bonuses should go near your basic families that don't generate much gold, while small decorations with big boosts should go near your more valuable families that churn out lots of cash. Getting these set up at all is much more important than getting them perfect. You can get a lot of land in Ice Age Village, so there's no reason to sell decorations or otherwise delete things.

Fifth, buy the dinosaur village as fast as you can. You can get acorns in leaf piles in this tileset, meaning your purchase will pay for itself in a matter of days. It's a great way to boost your premium currency income long-term.

Finally, it's handy to understand how you can convert resources into other resources. Mud farming, for example, utilizes frenzies bought with acorns and mud farms to turn acorns into gold very efficiently. Purchasing special animals from the shops turns acorns into gold more slowly, but will generate a huge amount of gold over time. Acorns can be converted into login bonuses if you need to spend them to fix things, or into more income by purchasing incubator slots. All of these purchases are great ideas, sometimes. If you're light on acorns, however, it's more important to save these premium seeds for the next big purchase.

Are you an Ice Age Village master? What are your top-earning families? Let us know about any tips or tricks we missed, your favorite animals in the game, and more in the comments below!