The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Fantasy Flight is not known for their amazing boxes or inserts and honestly is the one biggest thing they need to improve about their games. With every civilization having their focus card acting as an alternative to the original focus cards, you will now have an extra tool to play with and provides a differential that was absent in the base game. You’ve got tough decisions on what you need to do next, but the game doesn’t overwhelm you with information, and the focus row guides you into suggested actions if you’re stuck.

With the right expansion releases down the line, a custom made game to suit your style and needs is very plausible and would really open the game up to a wider audience,from the casual gamer to more civilization-building veterans. The strong points: I never expected to see a mechanic like the Overlord's River from Conan being ported to not just a civ-game, but a civ-game named after Sid Meier, yet here we are. On the other hand, when you need to errata an actual Leader Sheet with a clarification that is not obvious, then something went wrong in playtesting.

Focus rows are visible to everybody; each civilization knows what the others can do, and how efficiently. The industry focus cards allow a player to build either a new city or a world wonder, which grants a powerful ability to the player who controls it. And combat certainly is a way to victory; there are a couple ways to score VP with combat, killing barbarians gets you lots of trade goods, and hey – sometimes it’s easier to invade someone else’s city than to build your own. Fans of the original may turn their noses up at this version, but I’d suggest they’re depriving themselves of a real treat: this game is fun, quick, and does a grand job of getting across that feeling of expanding your empire in a relatively short time frame.

But it is a clever and challenging strategy game with a brilliant core that looks and feels fun to play. Designs aren’t color-oriented either, so I don’t imagine colorblindness is an issue (feel free to correct me in the comments if I’m wrong). Players complete the agendas given on victory cards by accomplishing tasks in five different focus areas: culture, science, economy, industry, and military.There are a few mechanical issues I could complain about, the most important being the game's fatalistic nature. These potential agendas are detailed on victory cards, three of which are set beside the map at the beginning of the game. With its innovative ‘focus bar’ mechanism, and considerably shortened playing time —4 players can comfortably finish a game within 2 hrs— this is without doubt an easy game to recommend, whether you’re a fan of the original, or just intrigued to see what they’ve done with the franchise. More powerful Culture cards let you add more control tokens, and place them further away from your cities. There are strategies aplenty, and while natural wonders will provide ongoing additional resources (marble, oil, mercury or diamond) that can be used towards building world wonders, those same world wonders offer ongoing additional benefits to your civilization as a whole, and thus are usually worth pursuing when the opportunity arises.

Players race to become the first to accomplish one agenda on each of these victory cards, spreading throughout the world and ensuring their civilization’s place as the greatest world power.

Due to this restriction, you are constantly stuck in a crossroad situation as the event dial reaches closer to the government space. Playing cards from the first slots of the Row is not optimal, at some points however you might be left without a choice. How much time does the publisher think gamers have to swim through all that, and for how long does it expect their interest to last? Common sense would suggest that you try and maximise your gains by always using the card under the fifth slot (Mountain), but things are never that easy, since using a card will send it back to the first slot (and weaken its ability). In other words, you might have Nuclear Power in Science and still win without progressing to Steam Power or Capitalism under Economy.