Civilization Epic Strategy Board Game for Adults | Francis Tresham | Build A Powerful Empire | Gibsons Games | Game play 4+ Hours | Age 12+

A superb game and a great way to learn about and if you want to, change history!

Loved that this brought our Son away from civilisation games on the computer. Rules were complex but once you got intoIt simple enough. No dice and easy to have a breakAnd come back to

It's one of the best games ever. You need a whole day (7+ hours) to play it, but the game starts easy (expanding but not meeting others) and slowly develops. By the time you are exposed to all of it, you have got the hang of the basics, so even a new player can win. Lots of chances to catch up if you are losing. You can replay it from time to time, so it becomes value for money. Also takes 7 players, which many games can't cope with.

I originally bought this in 1982 (for more than I paid now). Simp[y the best board game ever! Buy it and enjoy! But expect it to take 6+ hours.

Well. This is a classic. This means it WILL take six to seven hours to play, and that you DO need seven players to make it really shine (less than that, and somebody will probably end up outside the main area of conflict, and thus collect lots and lots of advancement cards while everybody else is trying to kill each others) but in my college years, that was a Sunday well spent. I wonder where I will get six people who has the time nowadays, but I partly bought it out of nostalgia.However, the game is great. You start as a neolithic tribe around 8000 BC, and you hope to conquer the Mediterranean before 300 BC. Meanwhile you collect resources, and by trading these you're getting able to get civiliization advances. Also disasters. One of the tricks is deciding when an advance actually is worth taking a disaster.I like this game a lot, but it certainly isn't for people in a hurry. Neither is it for people who take offense at backstabbing; while it is not nearly as mean as for example Diplomacy, everybody wants to win for themselves and you really shouldn't trust your fellow player a lot. Or at all.To sum it up, a great classic game from the time before board games became cool. I definitely recommend it, and I can't wait for the new edition of DUNE!

Great old school boardgame. If you don't like tactics and patience avoid it. If you manage to find enough friends it is a trip. It can last 8 hours! Best boardgame ever

This is a great game, one of my favourites (and I have played hundreds of different games). Very sophisticated, yet surprisingly easy to teach newcomers. It's greatest drawback is that you need at least six hours. That said, the time invested is worth it. The game starts easy, as your population grows and you just spread out to establish your homeland. Once your population reaches a certain size, you want to establish cuties to reach an urban level of civilisation. This costs population counters, but that just recycles them for future population growth phases. Cities give you commodities produced, which you can trade. Cities also cause taxation, which gives you treasury money but takes population counters out of circulation temporarily. Each turn you can trade commodities, which is the activity I love the most. The more of each specific commodity you have, the more (exponentially) the set is worth. This is the key to progress in th game, as commodity sets are cashed in for real civilisation advances. For example, Astronomy is a science civilisation and costs 80. The commodity Salt is worth 3 for one card, but 12 for a pair, and 27 for a set of three cards and 48 for a set of four cards. The calculation is (the number of cards held squared) multiplied by (the card face value) so a set of four Salt cards is 4 x 4 x 3 = 48. For high value cards or cards where you can gather a set of six or seven cards, the set value can be high, enough to purchase high cost civilisation advances like literacy, engineering, law, democracy or philosophy.You can get discounts on civilisation cards by holding other cards in the same category, be that crafts, arts, science etc. There is a sometimes a requirement to obtain more basic civilisational competences before you can acquire the very advanced cards e.g. literacy is needed to develop law etc.The aim of the game is to score the highest civilisation rating, mostly based on the value of the civilisation cards acquired over the game.Essentially the game is a constructive race. But there are other factors at play. Competition for space on the map will produce border wars, at least, which are resolved by a simple mechanism. This is not a war game, although there is scope for some marginally clever strategies. But it is almost impossible for a player to be wiped out, so everyone is involved all the way through and some clever balancing measures mean that disaster in one epoch is usually forgotten by the next. The game mechanic within the commodity/trade cards means that disasters strike, fairly randomly and periodically. These tend to hurt the leaders more than the trailing players, which is a nice mechanism. Players need to be resilient, but can quickly rebuild what has been lost.The game feels like it is writing the history of the Middle East/Mediterranean over several millennia, so each game is a different story line. It is great to be able to steer the destiny of the Ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks, Persians and others over the dawn of history.Fabulous, a must-have for any serious games collection and an experience not to be missed.

This is quite simply one of the best board games ever made. I spent many Sundays back in the 80s playing this as part of a university games club.It really shouldn't be played without the full complement of players though and it will take a full day (6-7 hours) to play a game.