Overview

This 2010 game… is currently COMPLETELY out of print (we found an Italian expansion for $140)! So this Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game review is a little bit different in terms of scope and depth: we’re deciding to cover ALL the expansions in one go, and of course we can’t talk about EVERYTHING with regards to balance and whatnot.

Oh, the game immediately ends whenever any of these victory conditions are achieved:

1. Military - You destroy someone’s capital.

2. Technology - Research the highest tech, Space Flight.

3. Cultural - Move all the way up on the culture track.

4. Economic - Gather 15 of the ‘coin’ resource.

Pros

Sid Meier’s Civilization just looks great, with Civilization 4 inspired art that gets you looking at a fairly realistic board, where mountains, deserts, created rivers, and even lakes/rivers look impressive. You’ll see art for things from the Zulu, to the Statue of Liberty, to even Super Computers!

As for the actual game, let’s talk about the 4 win conditions. There is SO much great spill-age with these, where you can often go for 2, or maybe 3 at the same time! You can very easily pivot, and go, hey, I’m gonna suddenly use my super tech’d out civilization for cultural purposes… or MILITARY.

There is just so much DYNAMIC stuff going on in Civ with the sudden win conditions, and there’s lots of ways to promote negotiation everywhere. Maybe one person has an unlucky fight, and then is the one preyed upon by everyone else, as killing anyone’s capital immediately ends the game! You always need to be on your toes militarily… but then upgrading units starts to get very expensive without a proper economy!

From getting new technologies to spur your economy with THEIR own abilities, to building new cities, to grabbing culture cards with their own benefits, this is nothing short of epic.

To put Civilization in board game terms, this civilization formula technically has a lot of high conflict Euro, with tons of city and resource management, then layered on top of this deck-building swingy fighting system. The 4xness comes in for the random in person continents for all sorts of negotiation where the map feels smaller as everyone gets stronger.

Maybe you’ll unleash Nuclear Energy late game, or stop your opponents’ actions with hidden Spies. Cities will blow up, armies continue to get stronger, and the tense race for one of the 4 victory conditions is ongoing.

Cons & Nitpicks

But hey, that sweeping nature isn’t always so great when you fall behind. Like, remember how one of the win conditions lets anyone win the game if they take ANY capital? That can put HARD targets on crippled players, where if they don’t have the hang of diplomacy, or have some poor turns, they can pretty much be flailing for many hours.

There’s imbalance that doesn’t help this: from the base game having wacky combat cards (please buy Wisdom and Warfare if you can), to the factions definitely being tier’d: we don’t recommend playing Zulu at all.

This game is showing its 2010 FFG age, where there really should have been an introductory game of some kind, and a lot of things visually could be cleaned up.

More Thoughts

Really, when getting into this sweeping, epic game, you need to be DEDICATED to keeping up with all the rules/components, and letting players take their time with the info-dump of technologies from right off the bat. If you like the computer game, will you still like that type of management, as scaled down as it is here, on a table? Do people play Civilization the video game for cutthroat politics, competitive swings, or do they simply love the feeling of progression?

This Civilization board game isn’t like Twilight Imperium 4, where you’re sometimes encouraged to attack your opponent’s base; in Civilization, everyone is constantly encouraged to destroy your ruthless enemies’ capitals.