Everybody wants to rule the world; visions of grandeur, absolute power and the authority to steam-roller anyone who gets in your way. Unfortunately these things take a long time and frankly I don’t have that kind of patience. How about a trial run instead, for say for an afternoon or evening? And if I like it, I can always start small and conquer Monaco for example and go from there.

World domination vision aside, Fantasy Flight Games’s Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game (not to be confused with the Eagle Games version produced in 2002) aims to capture as much of the familiarity of its computer game namesake and turn it into a board game experience for up to four players (or five with the Fame and Fortune expansion).

There are four victory conditions in Civilization. The first player to fulfil the requirements for one of these victory conditions wins the game.

• Scientific Victory: Discover Space Flight via building up a technology tree.
• Military Victory: Conquer any other player’s starting city (also known as their Capital).
• Cultural Victory: Achieve enlightenment via the culture track.
• Economic Victory: Earn 15 coins through fulfilling a variety of smaller operations.

Players start by selecting a Civilization from six available (ten if you include the expansion). Like the computer game each civilization grants a set of unique skills, often suggesting an advantage towards one of the four victory conditions. For example, the Chinese awards culture bonuses for exploring the world whilst the Russians have the ability to steal technology from other civilizations.

The game board is set up via a series of tiles representing the world. Apart from the tiles that players have their Capital city on, these tiles start off face down. As players explore the world, they will be able to plan their strategy, settle new cities and utilise what natural resources lay nearby. Of course there will be tension as players race to settle their civilization over valued areas and then back up their claims with their armies. It’s a small world after all.

Depending on the experience of the players, the game can last between 10 and 20 turns. Each turn is divided into phases that all players partake in (a Start Player marker moves around to dictate the turn order in which players carry out their actions).

The phases are:

Start of Turn: Players can change government and/or settle new cities (using scouts)

Trade: Players can negotiate and swap commodities with each other.

City Management: For each city a player has (each player is only allowed a maximum of three cities in the entire game), they can take one action with that city:

• Harvest Resources from the map
• Build a building (to improve city efficiency)
• Devote to the arts (for culture)
• Build armies and scouts

Movement: Players can move army and scout figures on the map, discovering new territories, engage in battle with each other or attempt to conquer villages and cities.

Research: Each player may then research one technology they have met the requirements for and add it to their tech tree.

The board game uses a lot of different mechanics to simulate the aspects found within the computer game. In addition, the game also uses a lot of different commodities, which can be confusing for beginners.

• Trade: Trade is used to pay for research and for advancing up the culture track.
• Production: Production is used to build buildings, armies and scouts
• Culture tokens: Culture tokens are used to advance up the culture track.
• Resources: Resource tokens are harvested from the map and used to pay for abilities found on technology cards.

As a general rule these commodities are not interchangeable (e.g. Production can’t be used towards culture and so on). Therefore it is important during the trade phase of the turn for players to work out what they are missing and barter for them.

Culture victory is represented by a track on the game board. Players can advance up the track by spending culture tokens and trade that they have earned. Reaching the end of the track signifies a culture victory.

The Technology tree is an elegant design represented by the players building up a pyramid layout of cards:

Various technology cards (and certain buildings) give players coins for fulfilling mini conditions. For example, Pottery allows the player to spend two unused resource tokens to gain a coin. Code of Law awards a coin if you win a battle for the first time each turn. By concentrating on aspects of the game where coins are awarded, a player wins the game by earning 15 coins. During the game coins are also used to grant discounts towards technology costs.

Military Victory is achieved by conquering another player’s Capital City. Combat is simulated through the use of army cards (purchased via City actions). There are three primary types of army cards (Infantry, Artillery and Cavalry) which operate on a rock-paper-scissor strength basis. For example, an army comprising mainly of infantry units will likely suffer when confronted by artillery units. The fourth type (Flight) is an advanced technology that is equally powerful against the other three. When two armies engage (or a village on the map is attacked), a battle occurs. The army cards are played one at a time starting with the defending player. Cards can be played either to create a standalone ‘front’ or to attack an enemy’s existing ‘front’ (in which case the two cards battle). When all possible cards have been played, the total strength of all surviving cards are totalled up (including any combat bonuses) and the player with the highest strength wins that battle.

Other features in the game include the ability to recruit famous Great People into your civilization, the ability to construct Wonders and change governments (for all different sorts of bonuses and in-game advantages).

How Civilization plays as a game

Civilization is a relatively heavy game, though not as heavy compared to Twilight Imperium for example. Even so, a lot of the game mechanics have been designed to be as flavourful to the computer game as possible whilst trying to streamline the game's experience to under three or four hours. For a game this complex, it makes a worthy attempt, but can incur a few frustrating experiences for players trying to learn the game.

Fundamentally, the game requires you to be highly strategic and have the ability to commit to long term plans. With four victory conditions to choose from, you have to narrow down those choices as quickly as possible to one or two and then ensure everything you do contributes to those victory conditions. The problem is that there are many short term (tactical) actions that you can choose from that do not contribute significantly to that plan. If you end up doing too many of them, you simply end up losing the victory race. As a result it is not possible to radically switch from one victory condition and start another from scratch within the game.

This long term planning element is especially adamant even when trying to plan your purchases for each of your turns. Trading is only allowed during the trade phase of the turn so you need to make sure that you can account for everything you need for the rest of that turn. A slight miscalculation can delay or even destroy your intentions, so be aware.

There is an effect that these opportunities for multiple mistakes may cancel out between players of similar skills, but for a more experienced player this often all that is needed to win the game. Slowing down an obvious early leader through a combined effort can and does work with Civilization, but again this often brings about the use of valuable city actions that do not contribute towards the race for victory.

A major criticism with the game is that economic victories may be a bit too strong in the original version. To be able to win by dabbing in all aspects of the game without the level of commitment needed for the other victory conditions is appealing, but detracts from the spirit of the game. This has been partially addressed with the recent expansion Fame and Fortune and brings additions to the base game with the following features:

• Four new Civilizations to choose from
• New technology cards and Wonders
• The ability to invest coins in exchange for new abilities
• Introducing a deck of cards to give additional abilities to Great People tokens.

The addition of a fifth player doesn’t really add anything other than time to the game: the ideal of added more value to the trade phase with the extra player is negated by the fact that trade dries up towards the end of the game when players are extremely wary of conducting a trade that directly enables a victory for the opponent. The game plays best with three or four players.

From personal experience however, I think this is a game that does have significant replay value, but for slightly the wrong reasons. The aim of Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game is to race towards your chosen victory condition as fast as possible. Because there is no concept of victory points (unlike similar games such as Through the Ages: A Story of Civilization), it can be difficult to determine how far you were away from achieving your victory condition if you did not win. It is also hard to spot where your mistakes were: did you build the wrong building, research the wrong technology or chose the wrong action on turn X?

It feels that a sense of game satisfaction can be achieved from Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game in being able to develop a set of different broad strategies (depending on victory conditions/starting Civilization) from multiple plays of the game, rather than from an individual game victory (though I’ll admit to not having won a game of Civilization yet).

My recommendations for this game are:

• If your group enjoys the experience from replaying a board game several times over (e.g. playing the same game once a month), I think this is a great game to have in that group.
• If your group has a tendency to go through a lot of different board games and/or players (favouring variety and variance), then it can be hit and miss. The true experience of playing Civilization comes from learning what works and doesn’t work across multiple plays.
• If you enjoy Through the Ages, this game warrants picking up for a different experience for a Civilization-type game. There is a lot more hidden information in Sid Meier’s Civilization and the presence of a physical world map and different victory setting.

Now if you will excuse me, I need to work out how to blackmail Switzerland into joining my take-over-the-world campaign.