How do I get Age of Empires to work?

Well, a friend offered to play AoE 2 recently, and I took him up on that offer. However, we can't figure out how you play. Now, the only thing I've read so far is to open up ports, but is that really necessary?

So how can we play? Do we have to have GameSPY (which is literally the truth, putting adware on my pc)?

use the cd