Fantasy Flight Games Sid Meier's Civilization the Board Game

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As with other forms of production, scouts may harvest on behalf of a city, and the harvesting of resources may be blockaded by enemy units. During the game, players can acquire advanced versions of their starting focus cards, which have greater impact on the game. 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. Perhaps its comparative obscurity is in part because Tresham, unlike Meier, kept his name off the box, leaving the generic mononym.

Here’s the thing though, even though you are looking at different resources and barbarian starting locations and of course the way the terrain is set up……you are seeing the same tired old grasslands, mountains, forest, hills and deserts over and over again.Reddit and its partners use cookies and similar technologies to provide you with a better experience. 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). 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 culture event cards has many different effects, ranging from killing enemy figures to collecting resources for free. Is it sufficiently lengthy that you might as well just play Through the Ages which has the better "street cred"? There is a tech dial that you spin every time you use your technology card to advance your age once you get so far.The next problem that I had with this game came with being able to easily recognize what was going on. It doesn’t take up all that much space and all that’s on the board are your little city minis and the little control tokens that are used to show what land you have under your control. Each city grants a trade card to the owner, one of eleven commodities, such as iron, salt and grain.

All cities are either "resourced" (because the territory had a terrain marker) or not (because it didn't).

The great people token is applied to one of the city's outskirt square, generating new better effects. Instead of having certain technologies which are prerequisites to other technologies, Civilization had a concept of a "technology pyramid". During setup you plop down 3 of them and the first player to complete one task on each of the 3 cards wins! I really think a lot of the mechanics of the battle system are awesome, but I must confess that how this worked in practice made me so angry during the game that I was very tempted to quit and walk away.