Civolution Unboxing

Board game publishers are beginning to take heed when we say we want a sane way to put their products away, instead of just cramming everything into a series of unmarked dime bags. Here, Pegasus Spiele has put a good amount of thought into their new game Civolution, which not only has pre-assembled boxes to hold its components, but it includes a rebox diagram on the side of the box AND a footprint diagram in the box liner. The thoughtful addition of card separators make this the best box i’ve opened in a long time, so it’s hard to dock points for that final “just throw everything else in here” box that publishers seem so fond of.  But dock points i will, because i am incredibly hard to please. Still, it’s comforting to know that i’ll only have to 3d print a single insert piece for that one messy box, instead of  blowing a whole roll of PLA keeping everything organized.

Not for the Faint of Heart

If you read that Civolution is a 4x game and you’re excited about that aspect of it, i’m here to tamp down your expectations: increasingly, board games billed as such are “4x” in name only. Is there eXploring? Yes. eXpanding? Yes. eXploiting? Yes. eXterminating? Not… really. But just because a game ticks all four “X” boxes, it doesn’t mean it will have the feel of what 4X games really go for. Master of Orion III, this ain’t.

But what it IS is an unabashed points orgy where everything you do bumps you farther and farther along the score track, to the point where a stack of “100 pt” markers awaits your many turns around the loop. This is the kind of game that deliberately includes opportunities to discover absolutely broken combos that let you rack up so many points that it feels like cheating. But if you’re keen on a game where you can stop another player’s runaway engine, this isn’t that: the player interaction is minimal, and throwing a wrench in someone else’s gears comes at a cost of seriously derailing your plans. Your best bet is to find your OWN broken combo and run it fiendishly; in that way, it feels like a longer, heavier version of something like Res Arcana, where the game is to build a strong enough engine as early as possible, and run it so hard that you demoralize everyone at the table.

This was described to me as “Castles of Burgundy on steroids,” and it seems an apt description. Fans of well-themed games will be disappointed, but fans of games where you can play hard and earn a decisive victory will have a great time.

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