Advanced Civilization - Mon 27/04/15 16:32 UTC
One of my favorite board games ever, even though it is now old and not considered as shiny and polished (and balanced) as later-generation games.
I got a chance to play a full game to completion last night, for the first time in probably 20 years. When I pulled my copy off the shelf in preparation for the game, I realized I'd bought it many, many years ago after playing someone else's copy, and had never even punched the tokens or taken the shrink wrap off the cards. It was practically a pristine copy - do you know how much like-new copies of Advanced Civilization are going for on eBay?
But, games are meant to be played, so we broke it in.
It was a seven-player game. I decided I wanted to play the oft-maligned Crete. No Barbarian Hordes for me!
The early part of the game went very well for me. I never even built cities on my main islands, but proceeded to colonize Asia Minor and the Greek mainland without any pressure from my neighbors.
Alas, I fell victim to one of the flaws in ACiv - a really bad Calamity phase that can practically knock you out of the game. I was hit by Civil War and Slave Revolt on the same turn, which reduced me from seven to two cities and triggered that most ignoble of events - I had to move backwards on the AST chart.
I might have been able to recover, but a combination of a succession of Calamities in subsequent turns (Pirates kept taking all the cities I rebuilt) and some mediocre trading rounds kept knocking me back. I was still keeping up with most of the other civs, but was never able to catch up with the front-runners.
At a little over 9 hours, in the final turn, we conceded the game to Italy, who was the first to reach the final space on the AST track and clearly had more Victory Points than anyone else. Since it was late, we did not bother to actually finish the turn and tally up scores (though I would have liked to have seen how I actually did, relatively, in the end).
Here is the board, just before the glorious Cretan civilization was wracked by civil war and revolting slaves.
Some years ago, I GMed a PBF game of Advanced Civ here on Dreamlyrics. Maybe we should try a game again (with someone else as GM this time!). As I recall, it took about a year to finish.
I got a chance to play a full game to completion last night, for the first time in probably 20 years. When I pulled my copy off the shelf in preparation for the game, I realized I'd bought it many, many years ago after playing someone else's copy, and had never even punched the tokens or taken the shrink wrap off the cards. It was practically a pristine copy - do you know how much like-new copies of Advanced Civilization are going for on eBay?
But, games are meant to be played, so we broke it in.
It was a seven-player game. I decided I wanted to play the oft-maligned Crete. No Barbarian Hordes for me!
The early part of the game went very well for me. I never even built cities on my main islands, but proceeded to colonize Asia Minor and the Greek mainland without any pressure from my neighbors.
Alas, I fell victim to one of the flaws in ACiv - a really bad Calamity phase that can practically knock you out of the game. I was hit by Civil War and Slave Revolt on the same turn, which reduced me from seven to two cities and triggered that most ignoble of events - I had to move backwards on the AST chart.
I might have been able to recover, but a combination of a succession of Calamities in subsequent turns (Pirates kept taking all the cities I rebuilt) and some mediocre trading rounds kept knocking me back. I was still keeping up with most of the other civs, but was never able to catch up with the front-runners.
At a little over 9 hours, in the final turn, we conceded the game to Italy, who was the first to reach the final space on the AST track and clearly had more Victory Points than anyone else. Since it was late, we did not bother to actually finish the turn and tally up scores (though I would have liked to have seen how I actually did, relatively, in the end).
Here is the board, just before the glorious Cretan civilization was wracked by civil war and revolting slaves.
Some years ago, I GMed a PBF game of Advanced Civ here on Dreamlyrics. Maybe we should try a game again (with someone else as GM this time!). As I recall, it took about a year to finish.