...and spill 'em fast!

I second the motion!! How was it ??????

thirded

looked good. I wanted to buy it and was disapointed to find out it will not be available until this winter. Good looking game, simple combat...well ok combat, looked a little simple to me but I did not demo, just watched and chatted with the developer later in the day.

ive read from a board game geek forum that it is alot like civilization: revolution for the 360. I dont have a 360 but i can download the civ: rev app for the ipad if it is similar to the 360.

I played the demo at Gencon so here's a really quick breakdown. There are multiple countries, each with unique abilities. In a four player game, there are 16 4x4 map tiles, one starting tile for each country in the corners, and enough facedown tiles to make an unexplored square map. Cities occupy a space, and each building in a city replaces a space adjacent to the city, but is generally superior to the replaced area. There are two types of movable units, armies and scouts. Armies are combat units and can explore goody huts, scouts can found new cities. There are multiple levels of techs, and any 2 level 1 techs can act as prereqs for a single level 2, creating a tech pyramid. You can win by conquest, culture, or tech. Combat is handled with a deck of combat cards, which have strengths that depend on your tech level; i.e., you buy "infantry" and they use swords or guns depending on how far along you are. There is a slight element of paper rock scissors to combat which gives "first strike" to the dominant unit. Combat is only slightly random, you draw a hand and then choose units from that hand to fight. Feel free and ask any questions, I'll do my best to remember.

I played the beta version they had a GenCon. This was a true beta with paper laminate glued onto whatever piecemeal tokens they happened to have on hand. This beta version did not include the ability to construct Wonders. I don't know if that is because the rules for Wonders aren't done yet, or if they just didn't have time to make mock-ups of them for the beta.

You don't assign worker pools or populations to various tasks. Cities simply collect all the resources/trade/production in the 8 squares around them. Beta version, final version may be different.

Play each round starts with the First Player. FP executes his phase I tasks, then 2nd player, etc around the table. FP then executes his phase II tasks, then 2nd player, etc around the table. This continues until a round is complete and then the First Player marker (a Civ column) is passed to the player on the left (clockwise).

You only have two cities at most, no more. Again, this was in the Beta version at GenCon, who knows what this will be in the final version of the game.

The trade icons around your starting city are HUGE. Makes research go much faster; players with more trade icons will have a big advantage. Scouts can send production and/or resources back to cities by camping on them.

Managing your gold flow will be huge in this game, so the Pottery tech is a big one. The dial to track your gold sits on top of the dial to manage your trade. Ugh. This was a pain in the ass, so hopefully they change this dial layout for the final version and give you two separate dials, ie- not one sitting directly on top of the other.

Buildings are placed on tile spots around your city, not in the city. Interesting.

Combats are simple, and dominated by your tech tree. Just like any other civ game... ever.

Map tiles are revealed in 8x8 square sections. There is an arrow pointing on each map tile. That arrow aligns with the direction the explorer that flipped the tile came from. That is a big one. Why? Because the map layout will change drastically based on who revealed the tile, from what direction and when.

There are four ways to win. Conquer, Trade, Space and Culture.

Any other questions out there? If so, I will try to answer them based on what I remember.

Awesome breakdown. Thanks!

I have the old Eagle Games civ game, and I'm wondering how it compares in certain ways. For example, the thing I disliked the most about the Eagle version is that the tech tree for everyone was connected to every other player. So, player one discovered pottery, and every other player also benefited from it, but they didn't get the points and had to pay the player for benefits.

What I really liked about the Eagle version is the city improvements, resources, and happiness elements.

And, I know it's beta, so hopefully some things will change. Only two cities per civ? I don't like that. It makes the idea of a world conquering civ underwhelming. And why have the buildings outside of the city.

Each player has their own tech tree, unlike the Eagle games version. I was playing Russia during the demo, and they had an ability to steal tech that I never really got to try (demo did not last long enough to get to other players' cities). We each had a capital and two other city tokens, but that might have been a component limitation from playing with paper markers glued onto Arkham Horror tokens. I specifically asked about the Eagle version and was told this one is much shorter - around 3 hours or so. There were a lot of features about the Eagle version I didn't personally care for.

Building are sort of a combination of buildings and tile improvements from the PC game. I can't exactly remember the numbers but I built a harbor which turned the sea tile it was on from 1 trade to 2 or three.

CrowOfPyke said:

One of the devs (can't remember who it was I was talking to at the time, might have been Kevin) said that the resource dials they tested at the company worked really well, but the cheap cardstock they used at GenCon didn't work anywhere near as well. It's the same layout (one dial on top of the other one), but the top dial should "stick" a lot better with real cardboard.

They also said that a game should last about 15 or so turns (maybe a little more), so the limits on cities makes a bit of sense. Each city controls its own square and all 8 squares surrounding it, and two cities can't be built close enough to share controlled squares, so the limits on cities make a bit of sense.

The buildings going outside the city will probably make more sense when the full rules are out. If you build a building, it covers up the tile and you get the building's resources instead of the base tile's. Since the buildings are generally a lot more useful than the normal board, this will probably benefit you, but it might be worthwhile to not build a building if a nearby tile does something special. Or maybe the "theme" is that you're reshaping the land to make room for your buildings, so you don't get what was there. Again, probably have to wait for the full rules.

Which nations/political leaders are represented in the game?