Sid Meiers Civilisation: The Board Game is a new boardgame from Eagle Games, and is based on the Computer Game of the same name (which, interestingly enough, was originally based on another boardgame). This review will consider the Eagle Games version of Civilisation, and will not attempt to compare it to the older boardgame (mostly beause I have never seen it).
(Note - OK, the game is actually called Civilization, but I just can't make myself spell the word with a Z, so throughout this review, you'll see it with an S. What is it with you yanks and your Z's anyway?)
Firstly, what do you get? The game itself comes in a very hefty box, weighing several pounds. The board is gorgous, expanding out to a full 46"x36" representation of the world, divvied up into Risk-like territories. Although recognisably Earth, it is based on an ancient earth, long before the continents had moved apart very much, so most of the land is grouped closely together but you can see where North&South America, Europe/Africa and Asia are. Australia is a seperate country to the South East, and - like all Eagle Games world maps that I have ever seen - New Zealand is conspicuous by it's absence.
Yes, I said 46"x36" - it's massive, and beautifully painted around the edges and corners. You may find, however, that you'll be playing it on the floor unless you have a very big table (as you'll need more space than just the map for players to store all of their cards etc).
Also in the box are nearly 800 plastic pieces, representing military and city units from the four eras the game covers (more on that later), 53 Technology cards for players to "research", 25 "wonders of the world" (such as The Great Wall, Shakespeares Theatre and the Manhattan Project), 61 city cards, 64 city improvement cards, 90-ish exploration markers, The Technology Tree, a Reference Card and the rulebook. It's a very hefty and satisfying box, although it did take me several hours to punch out all of the plastic pieces from the runners they were produced in, then sort them and put them into labelled bags.
The game may be played by up to 6 players. Each player gets plastic City Tokens (in 4 sizes, from Village, Town, City to Metropolis), Settlers and Flag Bearers in his own color, while all of the military units are the same dull grey color. This was presumably to cut production costs, and it means that players who have military forces roaming the map are obliged to put a Flag Bearer of their color with their forces so everyone knows what belongs to who. This has the potential to become confusing in large games, but I must admit that in playtesting so far it has never been an issue. My only beef so far is that one of the six player colors is Grey, different but very similar to the grey of the military pieces. This is more of an asthetic complaint though I guess, it shouldn't be a barrier in play.
The military pieces themselves represent 4 types of units for each era (plus a fifth one for the modern era). The eras are Ancient, Medieval, Gunpowder/Industrial and Modern. Each era has an Infantry piece, a Cavalry piece, an Artillery Piece and a Ship(Fleet) piece. In the modern era, players may also buy Planes. The pieces are very nicely sculpted and generally easy to differentiate, except for the cavalry - the ancient, medieval and industrial cavalry all look rather similar and at a glance are hard to tell apart. This is easily mitigated by being sure what you're committing to battle, but could be a problem if you think you're attacking someone with your Industrial Dragoon, but it turns out to be your Ancient Horseman, for example. We also found the Ancient Fleet and the Medieval Fleet difficult to tell apart but otherwise the pieces are fairly self-explanitory.
So, how do you play?
There are two sets of rules that come with the game. We have tried both the Basic and Advanced. This review will focus mainly on the Advanced, and I'll mention the changes for the Basic game at the end.
To set up the game, players are first obliged to populate the board with exploration resource markers. These go face down, one to each territory at random, and may be revealed by exploring the marker with a settler piece. Territories are thus different from game to game, and may contain anything from a special resource (Coal, Oil, Iron, Horses, Gems, Grapes/Wine, Spices, Rare Metals, None) to a terrain type (deserts, forests and mountains, which restrict the city size that may be built there) to an event (a plague wipes out the settler and often surrounding territories, a minor civilisation is found, free money is found or a free technology from the current era is found). This nicely keeps the game from becomming stale, because you never know where the "good stuff" is to be found from game to game, but also heralds one major flaw with the game - the total randomness of the resource allocation can be problematic. In our 4-player advanced game, the player who began to settle Africa and Europe was hampered by constantly finding resource-less terrain (which is almost worthless to build cities on), restrictive terrain or plagues which killed off his expensive settlers. By comparison, the players who settled North and South America found resource after resource and thus became far more wealthy (and money leads to everything in this game, allowing you to buy more cities, purchase/research technologies and thus Wonders of the World, buy more military units, etc). Unsurprisingly, those two players dominated most of the game because of their wealth, and it was entirely due to luck, not to any particular good strategy on their part. I'm going to deduct an entire substance point for this alone, because it's a real game breaker if you get a sucky resource allocation near your starting cities.
Anyway, after the resource markers are placed, players get to start with 2 free cities each (each containing a settler and the basic ancient era infantryman), plus one free technology. Play then continues in four phases per turn, with all players sequentially performing their actions each phase, before the next phase starts and all players sequentially do that phase, and so on. The player who goes first gets to go first every phase for a turn, then the next player is the "starting player" and goes first every phase for that next turn, and so on.
The four phases are Movement, Trade, Production, Purchase.
During the movement phase, players may explore and settle the world, and move military units around. Settlers can move up to two adjacent territories, and may look at the secret resource marker in the territory they stop in. Thus that player (only) knows what resources are present in a territory and whether it is worth building a city there. All land-based military units may move only one adjacent territory, while sea fleets can move 1,2 or 3 sea territories depending on the era they're from. Planes (in the modern era) can fly up to 3 territories, but must land where you already have troops, a city or an aircraft carrier (which is the modern era fleet unit). Battles are conducted at the end of each players movement round before the next player gets his movement and battles, so you don't have the chance to reinforce a territory that is being attacked, making military build-up and strong fronts vital in this game if players are militaristic.
Battle is a fairly simple rock-paper-scissors process. Each player secretly chooses one unit (only) from his force to fight one unit from the opponents force (also chosen secretly). Units get a D6 per era they're from (so an ancient era swordsman (Infantry) gets 1d6, while a Modern Tank (Cavalry) gets 4d6, for example). Additionally, Cavalry is strong against Infantry, who are strong against Artillery, who are strong against Cavalry, and if you have an advantage (in the previous example, the tank is superior to the swordsman because Cavalry beats Infantry) you get a bonus to the die roll depending on the current game era (so 1 in the ancient era through to 4 in the modern era). Defending cities also get 1 to the roll. Whoever has the highest total kills the other players piece, and both parties pick again until one side has been wiped out. There is no retreating. Battles at sea work in the same way, except only fleets can fight and they never have an advantage over each other, so it's just the 1d6 through 4d6 roll for the era of the unit. Planes may be used in any battle, adding extra dice to the roll of the unit fighting, but if that player loses, the plane is destroyed as well as the fighting unit (thus planes cannot fight by themselves, only ever as support units).
All in all, we found battle pretty satisfying, except that we were disapointed that fleets can never fight against land units (battleships bombarding coastal targets et al), and as such fleets never played a large part of either of our playtest games, except to transport land units around - up to three land units can move onto a ship unit and then be transported elsewhere by sea, which is useful because the sea territories are far larger than the land ones, plus the map wraps left to right so fleets are a quick way of moving troops here and there.
The next phase is the trading phase. Here, players can make deals to trade the resources their cities are producing. This is useful because there are only 5 of each type of resource in the game, and a player who controls three or more of the same resource gets a massive gold bonus in the production phase because he's said to have a "monopoly". This usually resulted in "you trade me your iron and I'll give you 1/3 of the extra gold it'll give me" etc. Trading was effective, if a little dry. It's also possible to trade cities, technologies, wonders of the world, and so on. In fact, you're allowed to trade anything for anything and it doesn't have to be fair, as long as both parties agree to the deal. One very confusing point here is that the rules are unclear as to whether if I trade away the resource from a city to another player, does the city still produce gold for me that turn as a resourced city? We decided it did, but clarification would be nice. The manual also suggests actually swapping resource cards with other players, but since those cards are also your city cards it would get very confusing if you did so, so we just wrote trades down on a piece of paper.
Next comes the production phase. Players collect gold from their cities depending on how large the city is, whether it produces a resource or not (all resources are as effective as each other), whether the population is happy, and whether the city is "extra productive" (more on that later). Thanks to the excellent city cards this is easy to determine (as long as you DIDN'T just swap city cards to represent trade). The starting player also rolls for the "critical resource", which is the resource that is the most important that turn, and any player who has a city developing that resource gets extra gold (as long as they didn't trade it away in the previous phase, of course). Everyone collects their gold and then moves onto the last phase - purchase.
Rather than keeping track of the volumes of different resources a player controls (like wood, oil and gold in most PC games, for example), everything boils down to money in the boardgame for simplicity. Thus in the purchase phase players may spend money to buy/research new technologies, buy military units, buy settlers or turn a settler into a city, make cities larger, or buy cities improvements. I'll briefly cover each of those in turn.
Technologies - there is a pretty cool technology tree in Civilisation. As you get more and more advanced technologies, they get more and more expensive. Also, after the starting technologies all new technologies have pre-requisites. Nobody can develop "Feudalism" (for example) until "Code of Laws" and "Construction" have been developed. "Code of Laws" itself requires "Alphabet/Writing" and "Pottery/Specialisation", and so on. Players do not have individual technology trees as in the PC game, instead once one person develops a technology, everyone benefits from it, but the person who bought it gets an "owner benefit". Owner benefits usually reward the player with a wonder of the world (whoever develops "Construction" gets the Great Wall wonder, for example) or free military troops. Additionally, most things in the game (city improvements, military units etc) cannot be bought until the technology that allows them has been developed (e.g. Catapults cannot be built until someone develops "Mathematics") and once those units can be bought, players who buy them pay a commission to the owner of the technology that allows them. Finally, as soon as someone buys the first technology from the next era, at the end of the current turn the new era takes effect.
Military Units - As previously stated, these can only be bought when the technology that allows them has been developed. They may then be placed in any city, but there is a placement limit of one troop in a city per "size" of the city. So I can only place one unit per turn in a village, but I can place up to 4 units per turn in a metropolis (a size 4 city).
Settlers/Cities - You can only make a city where you have a settler. Pay the money to the bank and you lose the settler to gain a single size 1 city (a Village). Once the technologies allowing city size improvements have been developed, you can increase the size of your cities (it's very expensive however) at a rate of one size increase per city per turn. Speaking generally, it takes about 5 turns for the increased production of the new city size to pay for the cost of the size improvement, but there is the additional advantage of being able to place more troops there in the meantime etc.
City Improvements. All cities are either "resourced" (because the territory had a terrain marker) or not (because it didn't). Resourced cities produce more gold and give you the chance to trade resources to make monopolies etc. However, all cities start off unproductive and unhappy (cities that produce wine or gems are always happy however). Other than one free happy city per turn, all of your cities are thus unhappy and unproductive. Making them happy increases their gold production by 2 per turn, and making them productive doubles it (happy and productive is thus *2 4 which is sweet). Happiness and Productivity is generated by buying city improvements. These must be developed technologically first ("Pottery/Specialisation" allows the Granary improvement, for example) and once bought may be applied to a city making it happy or productive. You can only ever buy one of each improvement, which is a natural limiter on the number of cities you can realistically control, since unhappy unproductive cities are pretty worthless. For example, in the ancient era, the following improvements can be bought: Granary (makes a city productive), Ziggurat (makes a city happy), Courthouse (happy), Library (productive), Temple (happy), Aquaduct (productive), Colosseum (happy), Marketplace (productive). The next era has a new set such as Castles and Universities, right through to Modern era improvements like Television Stations, Nuclear Power Plants and Airports.
Another pretty hefty hole in the rules says that at the end of an era, all improvements are lost. This means that everyones cities become unhappy and unproductive until someone develops the technologies that allow the new improvements, but that's harder when you have less money to buy technologies because all of your cities are unhappy and unproductive and thus not making much money. This has been errated on the webpage so that old improvements are only made obsolete (on a one for one basis) when new era ones are developed, but that requires a lot of bookkeeping. We went with an alternate rule I found on the webpage where improvements always last one extra era. Thus Ancient improvements last right through the Medieval era but expire at the sart of the Gunpowder/Industrial era, and Medieval era improvements expire at the start of the Modern era. This gives you one era's "grace" to replace your improvements before they expire, keeping the pace up. The other way would slow the game considerably, and as you'll see below, that's something this game just DOES NOT NEED.
And that's the game in a nutshell. Players develop and manage cities, build military forces, and conquer the world. However, there are actually four ways to win the game.
You can win through total domination, killing off all the other players. This happened in one of my playtest games; in the medieval era one player won a pivotal battle and basically swept the world.
The other three ways to win are controlled by whoever buys pivotal technologies. The player who buys the Radio/Television technology gets the United Nations wonder. That player can at any time thereafter declare a Diplomatic victory condition and the game ends, then all players tally up their points and see who won. The player who buys Space Flight gets the Apollo Program Wonder, and can thereafter declare a military Victory Condition, ending the game. Finally, once Fusion (the last technology) has been developed, anyone can build the Alpha Centauri Colony Ship wonder and end the game with a Technology Victory condition.
All players tally up their score - you get one point per size per city you own and control, 2 points for every wonder of the world you own, and 4 points per "Seminal Discovery" you have made - one technology per era is considered the hallmark of an advanced technology and whoever develops that seminal technology gets the bonus at the end of the game. The seminal discoverys are Alphabet/Writing (ancient era), The Printing Press (medieval era), Steam Power (industrial era) and Computers (modern era). Finally, if the game has a diplomatic ending, the player with the United Nations wonder gets plus 5. Or, for military conditions every player gets plus 1 per military unit they control. Finally, if it's a technological ending each player gets plus 1 per technology they have deverloped over the course of the game.
Whoever has the most points has the best civilisation per the victory conditions and wins the game. I especially like this variable winning, and it leads to very stragegic play. In our second playtest, one player was careful to buy radio/television (and thus the United Nations wonder) before another player could, because that second player was in a position to possibly win the game with it. Similarly, one player had easily twice the number of military units on the board than any others, so people were careful in their technology purchases so that he couldn't buy Space Flight and declare a military ending to the game (which was difficult to prevent, because he also had the most money). Amusingly, the player who bought the United Nations, and sat on it, actually would have easily won had he used it since he had twice the number of cities as anyone else and the 5 from the UN would have won him the game. He didn't, and ended up losing when someone bought the Alpha Centauri colony ship and had enough technologies to just eek ahead in points. Still, them's the breaks. And even better, the technology winner was me :-)
It's also worth noting at this point that the variable winning conditions and the fact that there is so much to do and enjoy in this game makes it not be just another RISK clone - in one playtest there was a fair bit of battling and skirmishing, but in another we didn't have a single battle until the modern era(!), and that wasn't boring, it was actually really cool, and heaps of fun. However, it's also worth mentioning that with militaristic players and more frequent battles, people will be spending more money on troops and thus have less to buy technologies with, and this would slow down the game even more.
Civilisation is a very rich, satisfying game experience, but this excellent game play comes at a price. Our 4-player game using the advanced rules took *eight* hours to play through, making it a game that you can't just whip out for a quick evenings bash. There is a basic rule set (technologies become generic, eras change when a player buys his third technology, military units are always available in the current era, cities produce gold according to their size only (1-4) and resources are almost meaningless unless you have 3 or more or the critical resource for the round) but after playtest we found those basic rules to be rather boring and I wouldn't play them again. The manual suggests shortening the Advanced game by stopping when you reach the Medieval or Industrial eras, but that sounds just as unsatisfying to me, making it an 8-hour(ish) game which I'll only be able to play once or twice a year. This is probably Civilisations biggest flaw - it's too rich and full :-)
Support for the game looks not too bad. There's a webpage at www.eaglegames.net, where they have the errata and also a forum. They also mention a planned expansion pack that will add the concept of different nationalities to the game, and also different government types. This sounds pretty cool, but frankly, I'm wary of anything that will make this an even longer game to play. I'll probably buy it anyway, I'm a sucker like that :-)
Style - 4.5/5. The board is beautiful and the pieces are all damn cool. It would have been nice for the different era military pieces to be easier to tell apart (different colors for each era perhaps?) but that's only worth half a point loss and I'm going to round up anyway, so 5/5 overall.
Substance - 3.5/5. A bloody fun game to play. I deducted a point for the randomness of resource allocation, and half a point for the wishywashyness of the city improvements expiring and the length of time it takes to play, but again I'm going to round up so total score 4/5 overall.
Thanks Eagle Games, this is a bloody good game. If you feel like sending me a free copy of the expansion when it comes out, I'll be sure to review if for you... :-)
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