by Kevin Wilson

We’ve talked a fair amount about technology and culture so far, but I glossed over the details a bit to concentrate on the big concepts. In this article I want to talk about the economic victory, and that means I have to delve a bit into the nitty-gritty of the game.

In most editions of Civilization, you build cities that ‘harvest’ resources from a certain area around them. Thus, it’s important to choose a good spot when building a new city.

I wanted this concept represented in a form that was straightforward, but which took advantage of the modular map to create new and interesting situations every game. I had some false starts, including tracking city size and population, but eventually I trimmed things down to the image you see below.

In Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game, the space in which you build your city (which I call the “city center”) produces nothing. Instead, the eight spaces around it (the “city outskirts”) produce all of the resources for the city.

An example of of a City Center, with arrows
indicating the spaces from which it collects
resources. For example, this city would
generate nine Production (see below).

The various icons that might be in a space include:

Trade: All of the trade that a player’s cities produce is added to the player’s trade dial each turn. Trade is primarily used to research new technologies, and I’ll talk a bit more about it in a minute.

Production: If a city takes a ‘build’ action (one of three actions a city can take), these icons are used to determine what the city can build. If a city has 7 production, for instance, it can build any one item that costs 7 production or less.

Culture: If a city takes an ‘art’ action, these icons are used to determine how much culture the city generates. A city generates 1 culture plus 1 for each culture symbol it has. Culture is spent to advance up the culture track (see my last designer’s diary.)

Special Resources: If a city takes a ‘gather’ action, it may generate 1 special resource token of a type found in its outskirts. So if a city had both iron and wheat in it, it could only generate one or the other with a single action.

The icons for Silk, Wheat, Incense, and Iron

And finally...

Coins: Coins represent economic power and are kept track of on the player’s economic dial. Unlike most other icons, coins aren’t a form of income. Rather, if you have 7 coins in spaces you control, then you simply have 7 coins, and if you want more, you’ll have to build new buildings or acquire them some other way.

Which brings me to the economic victory. As I touched on briefly in my first designer diary, a player who accumulates a total of 15 coins wins with an economic victory. These coins can come from the board, as described, or from certain tech cards. Specifically, these tech cards:

As you can see, this is quite an eclectic selection of tasks to perform in order to gain coins. That’s because the economic strategy is designed to appeal to players who like to dabble in various parts of the game. Without a “dabbler’s” victory path like this, players would have to buckle down into a specific victory condition very early in the game, and it takes a chunk of fun away from the exploration process.

So, what are coins good for during the game? Well, to explain that I need to delve into specific game mechanics again – this time paying for tech cards. We’ve already discussed the tech pyramid and how to tell if you’ve got a legal spot to put a tech card in, but in order to actually acquire the tech card, you have to spend trade. Here’s an assembled civilization sheet:

The large dial on the right side of the sheet is used to track your current total trade. If you look carefully, you’ll see Roman numerals along the track at various points, starting at where the ‘6’ should be. These numerals correspond to the 5 levels of tech and act like a sign at an amusement park ride: “You must be at least this tall to ride this ride.” Or, in other words, you must have at least 6 trade to learn a level I tech, 16 trade to learn a level III tech, etc. Whenever you research a tech, you drop to 0 trade, no matter how much trade you had at the time. So, if you have 27 trade and learn a level I tech, you drop to 0 trade.

And this brings me to how coins tie into technology. For every coin you have, you keep 1 trade after researching. If you have 4 coins, you’ll have 4 trade left after learning a new tech. In this way, a good economic base can wind up accelerating your civilization’s tech by several turns, which in turn can translate into an increase in efficiency across the board.

Join me next time when I talk about military might in Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game. Until then, leave a comment and give me your two cents!