Civilization 1: No, not the computer game

I'm going to try something a bit different here and start a deep dive into a classic game, looking at some of the things that make it great and some of the things that I might want to change, and thinking about how I might create a game that takes some of its ideas and implements them according to my own design aesthetics. This may or may not turn into a playable game, but we'll see how things go.

The game I want to look at is Civilization, an epic game about the ancient peoples of the Mediterranean basin, designed by Francis Tresham and first published in 1981. To be clear about my own credentials with the game, I am not an expert in it, having only played it a handful of times, and not for a good few years now. Part of the reason for this is that, while I very much enjoyed every time I played, the game is huge and long - the back of the box I own says that the full game takes 6 to 8 hours, and I feel that range is optimistic if any of the players are inexperienced. This is a game that I would normally say that you should start in the morning and not plan anything for the evening. 

My copy of Civilization: box, board, and photocopy of rules from a different edition.

And to be absolutely double clear, I am not trying here to "fix" Civ, or make a new, better version. I'm just taking a closer look at something that has been stuck in my brain for quite a while now to see if I can learn anything from it. There are whole communities of people out there hacking the game in all sorts of ways and there is no way I can compete with their knowledge, so if you want to see what the real fans have got up to, Board Game Geek's forums for the game might be a good place to start looking.

Anyway, this is all way too much for a single post, so I'll just look into some aspects of the game this time, and hopefully continue in future posts and see where it takes us.

The version of the game that I own is the late-80's Gibsons edition, but with a missing rulebook that got replaced at some point by a photocopy of the rules from one of the Avalon Hill editions. I don't think it matters that much (apart from things like tokens being different shapes to what is described). I'll be basing this discussion on that edition (though I might go looking online for more material) and not on any expansions or other developments of the system like Advanced Civilization or Mega Civilization. If you think I'm missing out on something important because of this, please comment to let me know.

By way of overview, Civ is a "sweep of history" game for up to 7 players, set in the area around the Mediterranean Sea, and takes players from a period of growing tribal kingdoms up to a period around the time when the Republic of Rome were developing a significant beef with Carthage and Archimedes was advancing scientific knowledge by taking baths. The game sees players expand the influence of their nation by settling (and sometimes fighting for) new lands, forming cities, trading goods with each other, developing new technologies, and withstanding calamities that strike from time to time. This takes place over a series of rounds, and at the end of each, time moves on and, if they have achieved certain goals, the players all move along the snappily titled "Archaeological Succession Track" - and whoever gets to the end of the AST first is the winner!

Where to start?

Sidebar, kinda: I've been sitting on this topic, and then this particular post in an unfinished form for quite a long time. What if the post isn't interesting? What if I get bits wrong? What if I just look like a clueless idiot? Eventually I just figured, what the heck? Plenty of my posts in the past have probably been interesting to nobody but myself, but then some of the ones I though uninteresting resulted in someone contacting me to say thanks for introducing them to something. So I guess the real message is to not listen to that voice in my head that keeps questioning and being negative: if I just write stuff down, then I at least have thought something through and can move on, and there is always a chance of being useful or interesting to someone. Anyway, sorry for the digression (this post is partly about thought processes, though!), and on with the actual plot...

I guess the board is a good place to kick off. It is a map, divided into land and sea areas, with the land areas further divided into regions, different combinations of which are used for the game depending on player count, which can look a bit weird during play, but works well to keep gameplay tight regardless of how many of you are playing. The areas vary dramatically in physical size, in an attempt to mimic the effects of real life geography, which does mean that tokens can get very crowded in some locations.

To get more tokens on the board (you start with one in your home area) there is population expansion: at the start of each round, you add tokens to locations where you already have tokens, which represent your population (though they represent your economy too, as we'll get to later). You can move each token by one space on the board during the movement phase. Then later in the round, any locations with more tokens in than the location's population limit (as marked on the map) loses the additional tokens.

So far, so straightforward. There are boats too, which can be important, but I don't think I need to go into them for the line of discussion I am on here. The area movement and population limits thing is simple, easy to explain, and quick to do in practice. 

Conflict, then, and this is another element that is shockingly straightforward. Different players can coexist in an area, but if the total number of tokens in an area is greater than the population limit, then tokens get removed, one at a time, starting with the player with the fewest tokens, and continues until the population limit is met. In principle, players can coexist all over the board without much in the way of conflict, but in practice, this doesn't happen much due to the drive towards cities...

Cities are quite literally essential for progress in the game - you need an ever increasing number of cities to move along the aforementioned Archaeological Succession Track, and cities provide you with trade cards which provide the currency to acquire civilization cards, which provide helpful advantages to your people as well as forming part of the final victory conditions - but I'll leave discussing all that for a later date.

If you gather either 12 or 6 tokens in a location (the number depends on which location you are in), you can remove them and replace them with a city token, thus getting tokens back into your supply, which brings us to one of the really clever and subtle parts of the game which feels like it belongs in a far more modern Eurogame: the tax phase, which occurs at the start of each round, before population expansion, once cities are in play.

When not on the board, you store your tokens on a player mat that has two areas: treasury and stock. For the most part, tokens move between the board and the stock area. During the tax phase, you must move two tokens from stock to treasury. If you are unable to do this, your "untaxed" cities revolt and get taken over by another player, which is a pretty brutal punishment for miscalculating, but I don't remembering it happening often. 

A player mat and a bunch of tokens, cities and ships.

These treasury tokens can then be used towards purchasing civilization cards or for building ships, in which case they go back to stock, and as the game develops you will need to make sure this happens, in case you become rich but unable to collect taxes. This does sometimes lead to the weird phenomenon of players cycling their tokens by scrapping and rebuilding ships, which I think is a kink in what I think is an otherwise smooth and awesome mechanism. I think that if I made use of this system in a game, I would want to make the treasury tokens more generally useful than they are.

Anyway, that brings us pretty much full circle on a round, other than the little, clunky matter of the census phase, which involves counting up tokens on the board in order to determine who goes first in the movement phase. This makes sense (it means smaller nations can react to the movements of their larger neighbours) but a few minutes of everyone simultaneously counting tokens on the board is not much of a good time. 

The stuff I have discussed so far is actually pretty much all you need to know for the first couple of rounds or so (I absolutely love that!), but once cities come into play you get those trade cards, which opens up the rest of the game and most of the complicated stuff, which I'll discuss another time, as and when I have the spoons.

So far I've only really been thinking about the game from a mechanical point of view, but of course, its theme, and the way the theme is expressed through mechanisms, is a whole other kettle of fish that I might get into later, but if you are interested, Georgios Panagiotidis wrote an interesting critique of the game a few years ago, picking up on a load of stuff, both thematic and mechanical, that he found jarring.

Until next time...