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...

Thinking about a couple of games I played today...

While it's fresh in my mind, I just wanted to make a note about a couple of games I played today.  I had a nice day at OxCon in Oxford today, and the day was dominated by two fairly heavy games that ran for about 3 hours each.  I don't get to play bigger games often, so it is interesting when they come up.

The first was Svea Rike, a game from the late 90's, covering the fortunes of noble families in Sweden over 300 years from the 16th to 19th centuries.  The game has some really interesting features, with game play switching between two different modes of play depending on whether the country is at peace or at war with one of its neighbours, this state being determined randomly at the start of each round.  The rules are remarkably straightforward and play actually zips along quite nicely so the fairly lengthy play time didn't seem to drag.  There is a lot to think about, with a few possible paths to victory and interesting twists in the way wars resolve.  However, the game relies on many forms of random chance: the overall events taking place on each turn, card flips to determine the strength of an enemy (non-player) army and dice rolling to resolve the conflict, plus event cards that players can use to manipulate play.  It is the event cards that prevented me from really enjoying the game as much as I would have otherwise: many of them are, either directly or indirectly, "take that!" attacks on other players, and some can swing the game massively, while others are just utterly irrelevant.

I would really like to see Svea Rike reworked with a lot of attention paid to rethinking the event deck.  Constrained a little bit, the game could be something really special.  Mind you, from comments and forum threads I have seen, I know that some people totally love the chaos of the event deck.  My argument would be that these factors can be a lot of fun in a 30 minute game, but when the game runs for 3 hours, they just get in the way and can be frustrating.

The other game was Mac Gerdts' Imperial 2030, which is a complex worldwide conflict where players are financial illuminati, manipulating the actions of 6 world powers for personal gain.  The interesting thing here is that who controls each of the major nations changes as the game progresses: in our 4-player game, one player spent a chunk of the game controlling three of the nations -- and he did not actually end up winning!  This is a massively complex game with so many factors and moving parts in play, but it is one where clever game design has reigned all this in so that none of the individual mechanisms are at all complicated, and just about all the rules you need to know are written on one side of a player aid card, about A6 in size.

I am coming to the conclusion (rather later than many others, it would seem) that Mac Gerdts is a bleeding genius.  The other one of his games that I have played, Concordia, is another huge heap of complex interacting systems held together in such a way that it only takes a few minutes to explain all the rules, and from then the mechanisms of the game are just perfectly straightforward and intuitive, so you stop worrying about them and spend all your time trying to execute a decent strategy.  (Note to self: I really need to play more of his games.)

So, what do I take away from all this?  Well, there are several of the mechanisms in Svea Rike that I would like to experiment with, and the way the game offers simple, interlocking systems is really rather neat.  And in the case of Imperial 2030, I just aspire to the craftsmanship Gerdts shows in making the very complex very accessible.

Four Houses on Trafalgar Square

I have, for many years, been quite forthright in my dislike of the classic board game Monopoly.  I am also aware that this is a majority view within the hobby games community, so my view is not exactly shaking the foundations of the establishment.  Another view I have often expressed is that I would far rather play a bad game in good company than vice versa.  So this weekend when I was at a games evening at the local civic hall and I was sitting with a group who fancied playing Monopoly, I figured I should hold myself to my own standards and play the game and try to enjoy it.

Image by William Warmy yoinked from flickr.

The last time I had played Monopoly must be something close to 20 years ago, and I have a feeling that the game was played in the Welsh language (which none of those around the table knew more than a small amount of) and involved quite a lot of alcohol.  Memories of that particular play are somewhat hazy.  Having now tried the game again, I feel I can, and should, think about what does and does not work for it.

Many criticisms of Monopoly centre on its "roll and move mechanic": you simply roll the dice and move accordingly.  I think that this is indeed a weakness, but it isn't as bad as I had remembered.  Sure, you are at the whim of the dice and have no control over where you end up (the only decision you make regarding movement is whether or not to buy your way out of Jail), but the focus of the game is not really movement around the board: this is effectively just a random event generator.

Thinking a little deeper about the dice rolling, it becomes clear that the interest actually comes when you are considering on which properties to build houses, as if you have a limited budget for development, you look at where your opponents are most likely to land on their next turn.  If you can put a house on a space that is seven away from another player, that would be a strong place to build.

That said, you cannot underestimate the level of frustration when you, for the second time in a row, land on Income Tax and have to pay back the £200 you have just collected for passing Go.

The other sources of randomness are the Chance and Community Chest cards.  These just tend to compound the chaos from the dice, and effectively mean that six squares have many different personalities that may help or hinder you on the whim of the fickle finger of fate.

As an aside, there is another old game (the Game of Nations, first published in the 1970's) that I played quite a bit as a teenager, which has no random elements other than a deck of event cards which you can easily avoid all game should you wish.  I was never entirely sure about these cards, but they were an interesting twist in that they only really made sense to use if you were doing poorly, as they gave you a chance to get some bonuses, at the risk of maybe having something nasty happen to you.  They were justified because they were an opportunity for losing players to have one last chance to keep in the game, while very rarely overturning skillful play.  Just saying.

Back to Monopoly, and we're at the point where I have to say that the real core of the game is pretty good.  Buying and collecting sets of properties, having the freedom to cut deals and trade with other players, and increasing the value of properties by building houses, all works well and is a compelling focus for a game.  And the oft-overlooked rule that if a player declines to buy a property then that property is sold to the highest bidder ensures that the pace of the game ramps up quickly and it is not long before most, if not all, of the properties have been purchased.

BUT...

When it comes down to it, there is only really one strategy: buy whenever you can, and mortgage if you need to as it is better to own a heap of mortgaged properties than for those properties to belong to other players.  That's about it other than to ensure you get a monopoly on a set of properties as quickly as you can, then start building houses.  All else is just minor detail, like many houses is generally better than hotels as it prevents your opponents from accessing the limited pool of buildings.

So there aren't multiple paths to victory, just that one.  And this is not my biggest problem with the game.  The game is long, and can continue for ages after a winner is obvious (our group called an end when a couple of players needed to go home and I got to the point where I was all but unstoppable), and a player can be knocked out way before it finishes, and all that is seriously problematic, but again this is not what rubs me up the wrong way the most.

My biggest problem with Monopoly is that, if you want to win (and you do, right?), you need to ruthlessly bully the weakest player.  You need to force another player into a position where they are forced to give you all their properties.  It's not just about bullying, it is often about looking magnanimous while you do it, but basically you have to be mean to succeed.  In our game, other than myself there was one guy who was playing assertively, plus a couple of women who were a bit less certain.  The other guy hussled one of the women into making a trade against her interests, and she soon ended up having to mortgage most of the rest of her properties to pay him rent, leaving her nothing but hope.  Soon she landed on one of my heavily developed properties and I kindly agreed to take all her mortgaged properties in lieu of rent, leaving me controlling 2/3 of the board and having a huge stack of cash; game effectively over, thanks to my rival getting too greedy and me being able to pick over the bones.

I have nothing against games where play is ruthless and competitive, but this is a game where you need to bully and manipulate the weakest.  Either that or the game goes on for many hours as you all slowly chug along accumulating stuff -- particularly if you are using that terrible Free Parking house rule.  If you are playing in an environment where everyone is equally aggressive in play style and have the same desire to win, that is not necessarily a problem, but in a social gaming setting this seems like the very opposite of fun.  Even as the de facto winner of the game I gained no pleasure from it, knowing that my choices were either to grind the weak into the dust, effectively concede to the other competitive player, or allow the game to run inconclusively into the middle of next week.  I felt like a total shit for taking the opportunities I did, but I felt like the alternatives were no better.

I think that in future, if a similar situation occurs, I will just have to try a load harder to offer alternatives in the form of different games to play.  Maybe it's just me being selfish, but I don't want that sort of experience again.  Mind you, the experience has given me a nice little learning opportunity, so it's not all bad.