Hi everyone,

I once owned the old SM: CIV BG from 2010. Can anyone elaborate on the major differences between those two -probably completely distinct- games? A new dawn seems to be a bit less complex, which would be nice for my gaming group. But that's all I can see at a glance at BGG. Has anyone really compared those two?

TIA

The two are completely different games in mechanics, scope and game length.

The 2010 version is rather complex, has a tech pyramid where when you research a tech, you have it for the rest of the game. Military is used through army figurines that move on the map and combat is fought with unit cards. The game also has many rules and multiple ways to victory that make grasping it a bit hard since it's easy to forget some rules. With expansions, start of turn, city management and movement phases turn into a slog at the end game. Though the game is still rather intense since what players do and when has a great importance.

The New Dawn is a simplish, abstract area control game with a civilization theme. Every turn is a lot simpler than in the 2010 game. You basically have five possible actions you can choose one to perform each turn. Each action is represented by a card and they're on a line. The more right the action you do is, the more powerful it is. And then it's moved to the left of the line. Technology advancement is done by upgrading one of these action cards. When you research a new tech, you get a "better" version of the action card and it replaces the old one. Going through the map is done by placing down influence tokens and then creating cities. In the 2010 game, you can only have 3 cities max. New Dawn doesn't have that restriction but the number of cities themselves isn't as crucially important as in Civ 2010 where it was pretty much the number of actions you could perform each round. In the New Dawn, you cannot build buildings into your cities while on the 2010 version, you place them around the city, almost like districts though you can have multiple copies of the same building in one city. Fighting is done through the military action and you can attack barbarians or other players if they're close enough to your influence tokens. You get bonuses from the military action, the defending player gets bonuses from the terrain, city and adjacent influence tokens. Then you both roll dice. The dice roll + bonuses is what your combat power is. The one with the larger number wins (and defender wins ties). So, it's a lot faster albeit a less nuanced combat than in the 2010 game. As for winning the game, Civ New Dawn has agenda cards, each of them with two conditions. To win, you have to meet one condition on each card. These are randomized at the start of the game, so you never know exactly what you get. Alternatively you can win by eliminating all other players. The 2010 version has static win conditions with economy (get 15 coins), science (research Space Flight), cultural (get to the end of the cultural track) and military victory (conquer another player's capital city) conditions.

So, that's a short description on their differences. The 2010 is a more complete Civilization game with more of the Civ feeling. It does take from 2-6 hours to play depending on the number of players and if they're prone to analysis paralysis. The Civ feeling, the crucial difficult decisions are the big pluses of the game. The game length and downtime are minuses. The New Dawn is a faster, far more streamlined and abstract game. It almost feels like an abstract game but with Civ theme. The absolute best part of the New Dawn is the focus row and the action mechanics. However, I feel that it lacks on every other area. The technologies, with the exception of military, are not always better than their previous versions and the game is really unbalanced. The 2010 game suffers from inbalances as well and we always play it with a ton of house rules to make it more balanced but the New Dawn is heavily leaned towards military. I get that the designer's intention is to make city flipping common but it is frustrating nevertheless. Attack cards give you bonus power for attacking as well as multiple attacks. While the defender doesn't get bonuses like these. You can build wonders in your city and those go with the city when the city is conquered. From these, the military wonders are the most powerful ones and economy wonders come second. In our games, we haven't really bothered with the rest.

For me, the New Dawn was a disappointment because of the military heavy game and just how out of balance everything is. So far the expansion seems to just introduce a bunch of new mechanics and ideas but I would be more excited if it fixed issues with the base game.