Big Kini

Big Kini came out a few years ago at the annual game fair at Essen, Germany, and was well received at the time. It was from a small publisher. It didn't become a mainstay or a classic. A few years later today, the game is rarely mentioned. However, having played it now, it actually reminds me a lot of another game which is considered a modern classic - The Settlers of Catan. The mechanics are actually very different. Where they give a similar feel is how you start out will few people and resources, and you gradually grow your small village to an empire.

I remember Big Kini's original theme was building a space empire. At the time, the publishers probably felt a sci-fi theme wouldn't sell well, so the theme was changed to exploring and controlling tropical islands. I think the sci-fi theme would have been much better and would have fit the mechanics much better. When I played the game, I had a hard time trying to not think of the space theme. It just fit so well.

In Big Kini, each player starts on an island group (3 islands) with some people and some money. The three islands on your island group each provides you a different ability - to create more people (I'm not sure whether to think of this as recruiting employees or making babies), to make money, and to travel to other island groups. There are many face-down island group tiles waiting to be discovered. During the game, you have babies, you send them out to occupy and control new island groups, and you collect trade goods. Controlling island groups is an important aspect of the game, and this is done via elections. Any island group with at least 2 people can hold an election, where players will try to win the position of baron for the island group. There are three types of positions available for your people in an island group. The baron position can only be won by election, and allows you to make use of the powers of all 3 islands in the group. The fatman (I forget the real name) position can be occupied on a first-come-first-served basis, and it allows you to use the powers of 2 islands. The oldman (I also forget the real name) position is also first-come-first-served, and it only allows you to use the power of 1 island.

This summary sheet shows all the ways of scoring. The positions of baron, fatman and oldman give you 5, 2, 1 victory points respectively. Each set of 3 different trade goods gives you 3 points, every $8 is 1 point, and every island group you discover is worth 2 points.

There are only 12 rounds in the game, and you only have 2 actions per round. Each type of action (there are 6) can only be taken up to 3 times by any player in a round. The first player to select a particular action is allowed to do it twice. The third player to select it has to pay $2. So there is an incentive to do something that noone else has done yet for that round.

This is the set-up for a 3-player game. That board on the top left is the action selection board. You place your round marker on the appropriate spot when you take your action.

The most lucrative way of scoring is in capturing the baron positions. So it is important to have many people and send them out to hold elections. This is the area majority aspect of the game. There can be negotiations with other players during elections. You can offer some benefits (a better word for bribe) in exchange for their votes. Sometimes you can also increase your vote count by paying trade goods.

In our game, I did a lot of discovery and earned many points from there. Unfortunately I didn't do so well in establishing control via elections. Both Chong Sean and Michelle did better at the elections. In the end Michelle won the game, because Chong Sean and I kept squabbling over the same island groups. 鹤蚌相争，渔人得利.

Round 6 in the game. Chong Sean (yellow) was already at my (green) doorstep.

Around game end.

Close-up.

Big Kini is a territory expansion game. No direct conflict, but there is a race to populate the islands quickly and to control them. How important the baron positions are seems to make the game a little single-dimensioned. However, to get to the point of holding a successful election (i.e. one that you win), there are many things you need to do - having babies, sending them out, earning money (movement costs money, discovering new island groups costs money), collecting trade goods which may help with some elections. Diplomacy didn't really come into play in our game. All our elections were between two parties, so there was no negotiation to be done. Maybe it will happen more in 4-player games.

Formula D

Formula D is an old game, formerly called Formula De, and only recently republished. It is quite well-liked and I have been interested to try it for some time. I finally got to play this at Carcasean boardgame cafe on 28 Jun 2009 with Chong Sean and Michelle. We each played two cars, and we played the Formula 1 side of the board. The other street racing side of the board has some variant rules, which I wanted to leave out for the moment.

This is a race game, so whoever crosses the finishing line first wins. We only played 1 lap, so no pit stops. You car has gears 1 to 6, each corresponding to a different die. To move, you roll the appropriate die depending on which gear your car is in. Each die has a different number range and distribution.

The most important aspect of the game is the corners. At each corner, your car must "stop" a certain number of times. This forces you to slow down enough to ensure you car stops enough times. If you fail to stop enough times, your car takes damage. There can be many types of damage, and if your car hits bottom on any aspect, you crash and you are out of the game. So managing the damage that your car takes is another important part of the game.

Tyre damage comes from overspeeding around corners. Brake damage comes from braking too hard, usually when you are trying to slow down at corners, but sometimes also when you are trying not to hit the car in front. Gear box damage comes from when you shift gear down by more than 1 step. Body damage comes from accidentally knocking your car against other cars.

So the game is actually quite thematic. When I played I kept making engine sounds. The table next to ours was probably wondering whether I was nuts. Chong Sean has played before, and did well. He wasn't reluctant to take some damage occasionally, and tried to keep his cars at higher gears. I think that is indeed the right strategy. Afterall, the game is about speed. I had a number of very lucky rolls, allowing me to stop at exactly the right times at the right corners. However when it came to the last stretch, Chong Sean's car beat mine hands down, because he came out of the last corner at one gear higher than me. So, there is much strategy and much control in the game, despite the many die rolls.

I like this more than Um Reifenbriete. I'm generally not a fan of the racing theme though, so I probably won't buy it. I'm happy to play this again, and I wouldn't hesitate to make silly engine sounds again!

The start of the race. Michelle (red) used a street-racing car (the last one) so that it was easier to tell apart.

Character card on the left, and gear box + damage tracker on the right. Looks really good.

Chong Sean and Michelle. The board is huge, and the cars are tiny. The board is quite good looking.

One of the corners. The area boxed in by the bold red line is the corner area, in which you much stop a certain number of times. That red token means there had been a minor clash, and some car components had fallen off. If you go through that space, your car might get damaged.

Top view of the same corner.

Some of the dice in the game.

Galaxy Trucker Big Expansion

Galaxy Trucker is an unusual and innovative game. Players compete in real time to build a spaceship, and then they make a treacherous trading trip to try to earn as much money as possible. Sometimes the spaceships get badly damaged. Sometimes they don't even survive. They get hit by meteors, shot at by pirates, suffer epidemics etc. When I bought it, I worried whether the game would be just a gimmick, that the novelty would wear off quickly. It turned out to be better than I had expected. The game continued to be interesting and fun even after the newness had worn off. However, as I got better and better at the game, it started to become less challenging. I don't crash and burn anymore, at least not often and not badly. So, maybe I need Galaxy Trucker: The Big Expansion.

This expansion comes with a number of different modules, most being optional, and you can mix and match, depending on what you like. There are many new types of spaceship components. This interests me the most. You get cannon boosters which allow you to increase your firepower once, but after that your cannon is destroyed. You get a fridge module (I forget the actual name) which can store 4 hibernating/frozen astronauts (normal cabins store 2 active astronauts), who can be waken up in case you lose some of your crew. There is even a shield thing which cannot be damaged by anything, including heavy cannon fire and big meteors.

There are components for a 5th player. There are Evil Machination cards, which are bad events that players draw secretly and plant secretly into the event deck. There are Rough Roads cards, which introduce special rules and scenarios that make life tough in space. These are announced before you start building your ship, giving you a chance to prepare your ship accordingly. There is a new type of alien. There are new spaceship types.

Chong Sean told me he found the base game to be rather easy, that he always seems to survive the game pretty well. It is probably because he tends to play with more players, and the other players are often new to the game, thus he tends to do better than them. So he wanted more challenge.

Chong Sean wanted to play with the Rough Roads. I persuaded him to just start with the new spaceship types and new spaceship components. We only added Rough Roads for the 3rd (of 3) ship / voyage.

The first spaceship was the "bad luck" ship, i.e. Class I-A ("One A"). The original Class I ship was small, so if you are lucky to roll higher or lower than average when being under cannon fire or meteor strikes, your ship may completely avoid being hit. With Class I-A, this will not happen. Every die roll outcome from 2 to 12 (two dice) will hit some part of your spaceship. Thankfully, all 3 of us survived the first voyage.

The second voyage used the Class II-A template, an unusual one. Your ship is actually a pair of ships. Both sides need their own pilots, and engines, and batteries. When counting engine power (i.e. speed), you count the slower ship, because the other ship has to wait for the slower brother. When counting firepower, you add up the firepower for both ships, because, of course, they can shoot at the some time.

My Class II-A ship. The round blue things at the front are the indestructible components, which can be used as shields. On the lower right you can see a cannon+engine component. These are new components in this expansion.

Chong Sean's ship.

Michelle's ship, before being fully populated by crew. She had to replace that blue alien at the top left with 2 human astronauts before take-off, because your pilots must be human. That round green thing near the top right is a shield booster. If attached to a shield, it can boost the power of the shield and make it protect you against big meteors and heavy cannon fire.

The blue aliens (sorry they turned out to look green under this lighting) and their corresponding card. Blue aliens are specialists. If you employ one, you get to pick 1 out of 5 special abilities.

During our flight, one rather nasty event came up...

I bid a big amount to win control of this event, and picked a coordinate to destroy which caused both Chong Sean and Michelle to lose one of their ships. This was because those components at that specific coordinate were the only cabin with humans remaining on those ships. Once you lose your last human crew, you lose your ship. I bid high because I also had one such vulnerable ship and I was desperate not to lose it.

Michelle lost her ship on the left, which still had many batteries.

Chong Sean lost his ship on the right, which had a purple and a brown alien.

It was costly for me to be able to retain both of my ships, but I think in the end it was worthwhile. Both my ships were able to survive the rest of the voyage too.

Then we played our 3rd voyage. This time we added two Rough Roads cards. These were drawn and announced up front before we even started to construct our spaceships. The two cards that we drew worked like this: 1. Whenever you decide to land on a planet to pick up goods, you get shot at by the locals. 2. Whenever a spaceship loses a component, the component lost falls towards the other spaceships flying behind, becoming effectively big meteors. Because of the 2nd card, we were frantic in our ship-building, hoping to be the one to finish first so that we didn't have to fly behind the others. I have rarely built such an ugly ship with so many odd incomplete ends hanging out.

My Class III-A spaceship. 5 exposed connectors. Near the top left you can see a special furnace connected to a battery compartment. This can convert goods into batteries. The orange coloured cabins and luxury cabins. They can only accomodate one rich human, who pays $1/2/3 for voyages 1/2/3, if he survives.

When I saw this Class III-A board I kept insisting to Chong Sean that it was a new board that came with the expansion. It looked like the starship Enterprise from Star Trek. Later I realised I was wrong. The Class III-A board was always like this, just that I had never realised that it looked like the Enterprise, despite having played it so many times.

The 3rd voyage was tough. Chong Sean didn't even manage to last until the end. So I guess he got his wish of a more challenging game.

This expansion adds many interesting things to the game, and makes it very exciting again. I'm going to buy it. If you like the base game, and are starting to find it easy, then I recommend this expansion.

When playing with Chong Sean, I also learned that I have been playing a few rules wrong all this while. Your start cabin must always be occupied by humans and not aliens. I thought it didn't matter, as long as you have humans on board. Also, when you gain or lose flight days (i.e. move your ships on the flight path determining who is in front and who is behind), the order of moving ships does matter, and there are rules about who should move first. When gaining flight days, the ship in front moves first. When losing flight days, the ship behind moves first. I had incorrectly thought that the order doesn't matter. Another important rule that I missed is when you are forced to lose goods and you don't have any, you are then forced to lose your batteries. Ouch...

Container

I played Container on 26 Jun 2009 at Carcasean boardgame cafe. It was a 5-player game, the ideal number I believe, with Chong Sean, Choo, Kevin, and Kevin's girlfriend (forgot to ask her name). I think it was the first time for all of us. I have read the rules before so I explained the game.

In Container, each player can produce goods. These goods can be bought and prepared for shipping. Then they are bought to be loaded onto ships, to be eventually shipped to a foreign island. So, only 4 steps - production, first sales transaction from a factory store to a harbour store, second sales transaction from a harbour store to the ship, and third sales transation from ship to foreign island. Where it gets interesting is these steps must be done by different players. If you produce the goods, you can't buy them yourself from factory store to harbour store. You price them and hope someone else will buy from you. Similar, if you have bought someone else's goods from his factory store to be placed at your harbour store, you can't ship them yourself. You have to price them, and hope someone else will send his ship to come buy the goods from your harbour store. When the ship containing (no pun intended) goods reaches the foreign island, the goods are sold via blind bidding. The seller can decide whether to sell to the highest bidder, which will earn him twice the highest bid, because the bank also pays a matching amount, or he can decide to reject the offer, and pay the same amount to have the goods for himself. It is usually better to not do the latter, because it will likely make you very cash poor, as opposed to being quite cash rich. So normally, goods in the game go through three change of hands - manufacturer to packager (I invented this title) to shipper to consumer.

My player board. From front to back: (1) the factory machines - you can have at most four, and each must be of a different colour, i.e. produce different goods. Numbers in circles are the costs to buy the next machines. (2) Factory store. The numbers indicate the price you want to sell your goods at. Factory store capacity is double that of your number of machines. (3) Warehouses. You start with one and can buy more to increase your harbour store capacity. Numbers on roofs are the costs to buy the next warehouses. (4) Harbour store. Again, the numbers are the prices you want to set for your goods. I didn't have any goods in my harbour store at this time. The capacity of your harbour store equals the number of warehouses you have. (5) The harbour, which only allows other players' ships to enter, and never your own.

The currency in the game. Graphic design is by Mike Doyle, and I think his work on Container is very good. Functional, and I love the money.

My ship.

The objective of the game is to be the richest. Other than earning money via the various transactions in the game, the containers that you own at game end probably makes the biggest impact. At game end you sell them based on a secret pricing card which you receive at the start of the game. Everyone gets one, and the 5 different coloured containers are worth different values to different players. So part of the game is trying to guess which colours your opponents want. There are some twists in the container values rules: (a) If you have containers of all 5 colours, one of the colours is worth $10 instead of $5 (prices range from $1 to $10, so $10 is a high price), (b) You must discard the containers of the colour of which you have the most (which means you can't just collect heaps of your $10-value containers).

When we started our game, we didn't have much idea what to do. In fact I did a very stupid move of sending my ship to Chong Sean's harbour, hoping to buy some goods later, forgetting that it was a complete waste. When you move to a harbour, you also buy goods in the some move. Since Chong Sean didn't have any goods then, I should not have sent my ship there and should have just waited for when he had goods. The poor lady next to me wasn't sure what to do, and did the exact same thing. Later when I realised my poor move and explained it to everyone we had a good laugh and I had to apologise to her.

Money was quite tight in the game. So we were rather stingy most of the game. You can say we were downright cheap. Most of us priced our goods very cheap to attract buyers. Once one player (and everyone would agree it was Choo!!!) started flooding the market with cheap products, the floodgate was open. The rest couldn't resist and had to sell at competitive (a better name for "dirt cheap") prices. Container is very much about group psychology and group dynamics, about supply and demand. The game mechanism itself seems rather dry, but it is actually all about how you play the players. It is about the mini economy that you and your fellow players create during the game. So it's all about how you interact with the group.

With Choo being the big manufacturer producing many goods and selling them cheap, Kevin decided to specialise in another field. He tried the big harbour store strategy. He built more warehouses, to allow himself to buy and store more goods, which would in turn allow ships to pick up more goods at one go. Ships have a capacity of 5, so if you can buy 5 goods at one harbour rather than 3 and 2 separately at two harbours, that's usually preferred. Unfortunately the warehouses were rather expensive, and in our cheap-skate game, this strategy didn't quite work out for Kevin.

Chong Sean and I were the ones who were earlier and more aggressive in buying the final goods, realising that they were a good deal. Everyone was being cheap, and prices were low, including for those final deliveries to the foreign island. But those containers were worth a lot at game end. Soon everyone was busy with shipping and buying the end products. However overall I still felt the prices offered were lower than they should be. That was good for me, because although there were a few times I paid much more than the second highest bidder to buy the goods, it also meant I managed to buy quite many batches of goods. I think this was the key to my victory later.

Once we started to have a grasp on the game, the game suddenly seemed to speed up. The game ends when two container types are exhausted. The game was not short. It probably took 1.5 - 2 hours. But we were very engrossed in the game and didn't feel the time passing.

Kevin (black T-shirt) and Choo (grey T-shirt) had some informal trade agreement during the game. Chong Sean (right) advising Choo on how to price his goods.

The containers and the warehouses.

Two ships parked at my harbour, and the still rather empty foreign island in the background. My (green) ship was the first to visit the island to sell the first batch of containers.

Kevin's warehouse strategy. He was the only one to have bought 5 warehouses. That's why he could have 5 containers at his harbour store.

The foreign island was getting rather busy.

Choo's very obvious manufacturer strategy. He was the only one with four (max) machines. All his goods were priced at a measly $1.

Container seemed a little dry when I read the rules, but it turned out to be more interesting than I had expected. Probably because we had a 5-player game, which I think is the ideal number. I likely won't buy it, because I rarely get to play 5P games. But I'd gladly play a 5P game again.

Arkadia

26 Jun 2009 at Carcasean boardgame cafe. Chong Sean, Kevin, Choo and I played Arkadia. This game is often described as a stock market game. You can manipulate the market, changing the values of stocks, and you try to cash in at the right time. In the game, you collect seals in four different colours, and there are 5 opportunities throughout the game (4 times during your turn, and once at game end) for you to sell your seals at whatever value they are worth at those times. The rest of the game is all about how to collect seals and how to manipulate their values.

On your turn you can other choose to place a building or to place people. Mostly you are doing the former. The buildings are Tetris-like pieces. You have a hand of 4 cards, and you play a card to place a building as depicted on the card. You also place a seal of the colour indicated on the card. If you choose to place people, you place your people (and also neutral people) next to buildings. When a building is surrounded, whether by other buildings or by people or both (often both), it awards seals. The person who "completed" the building gets the seal on the building itself, and every pawn next to the building collects a seal for its owner. That's how you collect seals. For each building you complete, you get to place a palace block. This is what affects the prices of the seals. If you look at the palace from the top, the number of seals visible in a certain colour indicates the value of the seals of that colour. So that's how you manipulate the seals' values.

Your pawns are scarce. You start with 3, and will have at most 11 throughout the game. There are four times during the game that you can use a flag (you only get four of them) to sell seals and/or collect two pawns. You need to time the sale of your seals when you think they are at the best price. You also need to remember the colours of the seals your opponents are collecting, so that you can try to push down the prices of those colours. Seals and pawns of players are concealed behind player screens.

Our game was probably a very strange game. I have not seen photos of Arkadia where people played the way we did. I blame it all on Chong Sean, since he was the only one who had played the game before and he started the funny moves. We basically played the game like Tetris. We constructed buildings right next to each other, minimising the spaces for our pawns. I think normally pawns and buildings are interspersed. Chong Sean started the first such "Tetris-move", and after that we kept doing the same. The building cards were exhausted very quickly, and there was still much space left on the board. Many buildings could not be completed.

In our game, I made one very big cash-in of black seals, right after collecting a whole lot of them. They were priced at $6 then. That probably was the decisive turn for me that lead to me to eventually win the game. I think both Chong Sean and Choo were holding many red seals, and both were prepared to drive up their value. However I tried to keep their value down, and it never went up by too much.

The good looking player screen, where you can hang your four flags. Pawns in the foreground. They are quite small.

This was stage 1 (of 3) of the game, where we could only place palace pieces on the first level. Effectively there are only two stages in the game, because stage 3 only lasts one round. Notice the seals on the "unfinished" buildings.

See how Tetris-styled we played. We were at stage 2 now, since the palace building was now at the second level. This is about when I made the big black seals sale. I used 3 pawns to surround the small L-shaped building on the top left, collecting 5 black seals for it (4 for my pawns, and 1 for completing the building itself).

The purple pieces look rather blue here.

Top view of the palace, which is basically a fancy stock market TV monitor.

Behind my player screen - card back, my pawns and neutral pawns, one red seal, and the money tokens, a $10 stack and a $1 stack.

Arkadia turned out to be better than I had expected. I didn't really plan to play it, and suggested it only because I happened to see it on the shelf. I had expected "just another boring Euro". Well, it was "just another Euro", but at least it wasn't boring. I don't need to own this, but if suggested I would gladly play again.

Civilization, second clash

Previous blog entry on Civilization is here.

On 29 Jun 2009 I played a 4-player, 5-hour game of Civilization at Carcasean boardgame cafe, with Han, Chong Sean and Wong (Han's colleague). We actually managed to complete the game in one night. We had expected to play it over two sessions. We played from about 7pm to 12am. Han originally wanted to do a 5P game. That would probably push us to 1am, if we wanted to finish the game in one sitting. The players from another table (playing different games) kept coming over and asking, "What? You're still at the first game?".

With 4 players, we played a different two-region combination from last time, when we only had 3 players. A bit more space for expansion and city building. This time we also corrected some rules that we had played wrong. City sites are basically not accessible by people, unless they are going in to battle. Else they'd just die of starvation. This creates restrictions to movement, limits space availability and also forces you to think more carefully where to build your cities so that you don't hinder yourself.

We also played the Civil War disaster correctly now, and it was now even more devastating. It was the most feared disaster, so much so that we'd rather postpone building our 5th city, so that we wouldn't be the one to pick it up (it has a different card back and is always in Stack 5, so we know it when it turns up).

Han (white), being game owner and game teacher, generously offered to start at Crete, which is a tough place to start. It's a two-province island, and you are forced to buy a ship early in order to expand. This is balanced somewhat by having a lower technological advancement requirement to win the game (1200, as opposed to others which can be as high as 1400). Wong (blue) started in the northwest, Chong Sean (black) north, myself (green) east. I was Babylon. Babylon's colour is actually not green, but I wanted to play green, my designated colour. Too bad my green was not close enough to the game board to allow me to pull some stealthy moves...

Slightly more expanded. Han (white) had two ships and had landed in Greece and Turkey. I only ever built one ship, and it was in that little pond on the eastern edge. I only used it for one turn to ship one person across the pond, before dismantling the ship. And that very turn I found that I was $1 short to buy a tech I wanted, the very $1 that I had paid to maintain the ship. Arrgghhh...

Han, Wong and Chong Sean. I brought a calculator to Carcasean (where my empty seat is), knowing it would be handy.

I didn't want to build on the Mediterranean coast, fearing Han's navy. He was the main aggressor in the game, due to his tough starting position. Wong was quite cornered in the northwest section of the map. Both Han and Wong were slower in gaining techs and building cities in the earlier stages of the game. Chong Sean and I did better. We built cities quicker and had more goods to trade, and to buy techs with.

The view from Babylon.

Han's fearsome navy making an amphibious assault.

The trade card decks. The red one in Stack 5 is the Civil War disaster card. To avoid picking this up, Han and I actually postponed building our 5th city, so that it would be Chong Sean who would pick up the card, since at that time he was the only one with more than 5 cities. The Civil War is that bad.

My green people and city were at these locations because of the Civil War disaster that hit Chong Sean. Because of the civil war, some of his armies and cities left his empire and joined mine. I ignore these defectors and they eventually got killed by disasters or other empires. I don't even remember which.

I was hit by civil war too, and it crippled my empire for a few turns. From a mighty 9-city (if I remember correctly) empire, I dropped to just 3 or 4 cities. And Wong gained many of my people and my cities. Unlike me, he continued to grow his people and used them for waging war. It took me some time to finally rid my homeland of these heretics. Him attacking Chong Sean in the north helped me indirectly. He probably pitied me and didn't attack me much. I guess appearing weak (actually I was very weak) was a good thing.

On the right, the only ship I have ever built. I only wanted to use it to ship a small army from the northern shore to the southern shore, to occupy that capacity 2 province.

One big battle between Han (white) and Chong Sean (black). Han sent a huge stack of armies to attack Chong Sean's city on the beach, and Chong Sean also sent in reinforcements.

Chong Sean hit by Civil War and I took over many of his armies in the north and northeast. My Babylonian empire was growing strong again, and I had almost wiped out Wong's blue pieces from my homeland. This was near game end. Wong had been hit by quite a number of disasters, and at one stage lost all his cities. This was a fatal blow, because losing all cities meant you actually had to go backwards one step on the civilisation advancement table, which is worse than stalling. Chong Sean was near his goal, but unfortunately his empire was weak now and he couldn't accumulate goods quickly enough to buy the last technology he needs. Han was close to winning, because his empire of Crete needed a score of 1200 to win, which is less than mine or Chong Sean's. He had more flexibility to buy cheaper techs. My mostly peaceful Babylonian empire had gradually recovered from the mid game catastrophe to regain its past glory. Making use of gold (which can be purchased at $18 if you have the cash), I managed to buy the last tech I needed to win. I think from the moment I had 4 or 5 cards, I already had to plan almost exactly which tech cards I needed to buy, else it would have been very hard to reach the required score for winning. Babylon had a good location, in a protected corner with good city sites, thus the higher score requirement.

My 11 technology cards at game end.

The game board at game end.

I quite like Civilization. I still think the most important emphasis is on trading and buying techs, and everything else that you do are to support these. How to handle disasters, e.g. who to target, who to drag down with you if you are hit, are important to hinder others and to minimise damage to yourself. Warfare and diplomacy are important, because you need to be able to expand and to build cities, in order to collect trade cards. But everything still eventually leads to your techs. I think this is a good thing, to make sure the game does not emphasise too much on the military aspect. Battle resolution is very simple. You don't gain a lot or very directly when you win battles. So waging war is always just a tool or just part of a greater plan, and not an objective in itself. I think it's a positive thing. One thing that I sometimes dislike about the Civilization computer game series is sometimes wars just get too tedious.

The only drawback (to me) is it takes quite long, and I think you need more players for the game to be good. I can't play this as a 2P game with Michelle. 3P is OK, but 4P or more is better.

Civilization, first contact

Han, Chong Sean and I played a 3-player game of Civilization on 24 Jun 2009. I usually use the British spelling - civilisation, but since this is the name of a game, I shall use the American spelling. Civilization is an 1980 game and a true classic. I think it inspired the computer game series by Sid Meier, which I used to play a lot (a lot of Civ2, some Civ3, some Civ4). The game is played on a map of the eastern Mediterranean Sea, covering Italy, Greece, Turkey, Middle East, and North Africa. Players start with a single tribe. They grow their population, build cities, produce goods, trade, develop technologies, and advance their civilisations. The first player to advance his civilisation past a certain level (measured primarily by technologies and can be boosted by trade goods on hand) wins.

The components in the game are very simple. Each player has round people/money tokens (they can be used to represent either), 4 ship tokens and 9 square city tokens. Movement on the board is quite simple. Population growth is simple. Fighting is also simple and deterministic. The map is quite straight-forward. The game has quite a long action sequence every round, like in Die Macher, but individually the actions are quite simple, more so than in Die Macher because when you first learn Die Macher, it can be challenging to see the implications of your actions. In Civilization, it seems to be easier to appreciate the implications, maybe because the theme is more intuitive. When a province is overpopulated, people die of starvation. When two cultures occupy the same province which doesn't have enough resources to support them, they fight until there are few enough people remaining that the land can support. Han has player reference sheets which list down the action sequence, and I think this is very necessary to learn the game well.

My game pieces. Square pieces are cities. Surf board pieces are ships. Round pieces can represent either people/armies or money.

Movement of people, city building, fighting, building ships to travel further and settle further - these are nothing very unusual to set Civilisation apart from other games. Where the game gets interesting is the trading, the disasters, and the technological advancements. These are the core of the game.

When you own cities, you get to draw cards. For each of your (up to nine) cities, you draw a goods card from a different stack. Stacks 1 and 2 each have two different types of goods, but from Stack 3 onwards, there is only one good type, which means you'll know exactly what you are going to draw. Each good is worth some money, but the more you get of the same good type, the more they are worth when used together. It is very lucrative to monopolise a good type. So you trade with other players. When trading, you need not be exactly honest, and you need not disclose all information of what you are offering. Only certain information is mandated to be announced truthfully before a trade. What makes this interesting is the disasters. Among the goods cards are some disaster cards. Some disasters are played immediately when drawn. Some can be traded away to inflict disasters on your trading partners. That's the sneaky part. You can put out a great offer, while sneaking in a horrible disaster. On the other hand, sometimes when you are desperate to trade, you can't convince anyone to trade with you no matter how good your offer is because everyone thinks you're holding a terrible disaster card.

Trading is important because every round you can only carry over 6 cards. You have to discard the rest. You are pressured to trade because you'd be wasting cards if you don't use them efficiently.

My trade goods in the early game. If you have 1 papyrus, it's worth $2, 2 papyrus is $8, 3 papyrus is $18, etc.

The disasters in the game are devastating. Usually they affect more than the "targeted" player. Some can wipe out half your civilisation, sometimes worse. So don't get attached to your people or your cities. A civil war can make you lose half your country to your neighbour (or some joker on the opposite side of the map). Don't be so cocky when you play a disaster on your enemy, often he can "share the joy" with you. In Civilization, you really see empires rise and fall, cities get razed, washed away by flood, destroyed by volcanoes or earthquakes, people die of famines and epidemics. Then the cities get rebuilt, and population grows again.

That's a disaster card on the left. If you have a city next to a volcano, you lose that city completely (volcanic eruption). Else you pick a city to suffer an earthquake. City is destroyed and converted to population, and the number of people you have left depends on the fertility of the province. In both cases, you can choose a neighbour's city which is right next to yours (if any) to "share the joy".

Then there's the techs. This is where you need to keep your eyes on. This is the goal. Everything else is mostly the means to this end. You use trade goods and cash to buy technologies. All techs provide some form of benefit to your civilisation. The success of your civilisation is measured by the total value of your techs. You are allowed to have at most 11 techs. To win the game, you need to achieve a certain tech total, depending on which civilisation you are playing. Every round, there is this era track (not sure what the actual name is) that you advance on. It tells you whether your civilisation is in the Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age etc. At certain points on the track, you can only advance if you fulfill a certain criteria, e.g. techs of 3 different types, or total 7 techs. So it is important to plan ahead to minimise any pause in your progress.

The technology cards. There are a few different groups (different colours). Most cards give some form of discount to a group of cards or to specific cards. Most cards also give some form of benefit.

The whole board. Bottom left is the advancement table. To progress past each bold line you need to have met certain criteria. The table to its right is the census table, for recording your total population. This is just for convenience to determining turn order during movement. Also useful when you need to quickly check whether you have enough population to build a new city or cities. On the bottom right are the trade goods cards you can draw. 9 stacks, because you can have at most 9 cities. You can draw one card from one stack for each city you control.

The whole table. Chong Sean likes to use the card holder from 10 days in Europe to hold his cards. It's pretty handy indeed. The calculator (bottom right) is almost essential.

Since Han, Chong Sean and I played a 3-player game, we only used a small section of the board. Han had originally intended to arrange a 5-player game, but 2 other players couldn't make it. 5-players would probably have been more interesting, but certainly would have taken much longer. Even with 3 players it took us 4.5 hours, including rules explanation. With 5 players, we probably would have had to split the game into two sessions over two days. The 3-player game is actually quite interesting, but I am sure more players will be more fun. There'll be more permutations in the trading aspect, which I think is a very important part of the game.

Han started at the eastern side of the map (eastern Turkey), Chong Sean the west (Italy), and I the north (Hungary?). I moved southwards and eventually settled in roughly Greece. Chong Sean took Italy and most of the Balkans. Han controlled Turkey. There were some skirmishes, but none of us spent much effort in warfare. The focus was mostly on techs. When the disasters start turning up, it really made me go "Whoa!". The first disaster wiped out about half my cities. It was a revelation to me how big an impact disasters have.

I did poorly in trading and buying techs, falling behind Han and Chong Sean. I realised that I should have tried to acculumate more goods of the same type, in order to make them more valuable, to be able to buy more expensive techs. I should have kept more goods from turn to turn, instead of trying to use them up every turn. Due to my people being rather backward, I was twice unable to progress on the era chart. Not good. I was never able to catch up. Han missed an advance only once, and Chong Sean never missed one. Chong Sean won the game.

Early in the game. My civilisation (blue) started from the northern edge. Chong Sean's red civilisation started in Italy. The numbers on the provinces indicate the maximum population that can be supported. Excess population will die of starvation.

With 3 players, we only play the pink and orange regions. My civilisation gradually migrated southwards to Greece.

Getting more crowded.

Han and Chong Sean.

I had just suffered a bad disaster and got half my civilisation wiped out. Note that it's wrong to have people (round) tokens stacked on top of city (square) tokens. City sites are not accessible by people, unless they are coming to conquer or to defend the city. We played this wrong in this game.

The provinces with the darker patches are flood risk areas (e.g. where Cairo is and where Venice is). They will be hit if the flood disaster occurs.

I quite like the game, despite how long it is. When we first started playing, the actions seemed rather simple and we wondered why this game is always famed for being a long game. Then when we had more goods, and started trading and buying techs, we realised how these activities can take up so much time. Trading is going to be even slower with more players. When buying techs, you really need a calculator to help determine which ones you can afford. Everyone should be equipped with a calculater. You also need it to make sure your total tech value can satisfy the winning condition of your civilisation.

We played quite a number of rules wrong. In the early game Chong Sean kept complaining that he had too much population and they kept dying because the land could not support them. Then we realised he had been giving birth to too many babies, more than the rules allowed. This was corrected during the game. Another important rule that we played wrong was that a province with a city is considered fully occupied and can no longer support any other people / armies. We have been moving people into provinces with cities rather freely. We also played the civil war disaster wrong. It is actually worse than what we thought it is.

One game that Civilization reminds me of is Roll Through the Ages, which is inspired by Civilization. The goods collection mechanism is similar, and the techs too. I think Matt Leacock (designer of Roll Through the Ages) is quite successful in creating a simplified version of Civilization. In contrast, I actually find Civilization quite different from Through the Ages, another long civilisation building game. Civilization has fewer mechanisms and fewer facets. Through the Ages is richer and has many more aspects, despite not having a map. However Through the Ages plays faster. I wouldn't mind owning both. They are suitable for different numbers of players. Through the Ages for 2 - 4 (may be too long for 4), Civilization for 3 - 7 (my not-very-educated guess is best with 4 - 6). If this game ever gets republished, I will most likely buy it.

I wonder what Advanced Civilization is like. I actually quite like Civilization as it is, and it is already quite long.