https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/Leading publisher of board, card, and roleplaying games.en2016 Asmodee North AmericaTue, 09 Jun 2026 00:21:12 -0000https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2014/11/7/about-wisdom-and-warfare/ <div class="blog-detail"> <div class="blog-header"> <img class='blog-visual device-break' src='https://images-cdn.fantasyflightgames.com/filer_public/e4/18/e418091b-c29a-4bbe-9a74-95a86e018b82/ci03_preview.jpg' /> <div class="blog-head"> <div class="blog-meta"> <span class="meta-date float-left"> Published 7 November 2014 </span> <span class="visible-desktop" style="padding: 5px;">|</span> <span class="meta-productline"><a href="/en/products/civilization/">Sid Meier&#39;s Civilization</a></span> </div> <div class="blog-titlelead-container"> <div class="blog-titlelead"> <h1>About Wisdom and Warfare</h1> <div class="blog-lead"> <p>Learn More About This Expansion for Civilization: The Board Game</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class="blog-content"> <div class="blog-end"></div> <a href="/edge_foros_temas.asp?efid=90"> <div class="forum-btn"> <i class="fa fa-comments"></i> <div class="forum-btn-txt">Discuss this article <br class="hidden-tablet"/>in our forums!</div> </div> </a> <div class="legal-text"> <p>The copyrightable portions of <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</i> is © 1991–2013 Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. and its subsidiaries. <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization, Civ, Civilization</i>, Firaxis Games, the Firaxis Games logo, 2K, the 2K Games logo, and Take-Two Interactive Software are all trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. in the United States and/or foreign countries. Fantasy Flight Supply is a trademark of Fantasy Flight Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved to their respective owners.</p> </div> </div> </div>https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2014/11/7/about-wisdom-and-warfare/https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2014/11/7/fame-and-fortune-description/ <div class="blog-detail"> <div class="blog-header"> <img class='blog-visual device-break' src='https://images-cdn.fantasyflightgames.com/filer_public/e9/19/e919ba13-91cb-4e5b-aa75-18778cb276c6/ci02_preview.jpg' /> <div class="blog-head"> <div class="blog-meta"> <span class="meta-date float-left"> Published 7 November 2014 </span> <span class="visible-desktop" style="padding: 5px;">|</span> <span class="meta-productline"><a href="/en/products/civilization/">Sid Meier&#39;s Civilization</a></span> </div> <div class="blog-titlelead-container"> <div class="blog-titlelead"> <h1>Fame and Fortune</h1> <div class="blog-lead"> <p>Learn more about this Sid Meier's Civilization expansion</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class="blog-content"> <div class="blog-end"></div> <a href="/edge_foros_temas.asp?efid=90"> <div class="forum-btn"> <i class="fa fa-comments"></i> <div class="forum-btn-txt">Discuss this article <br class="hidden-tablet"/>in our forums!</div> </div> </a> <div class="legal-text"> <p>The copyrightable portions of <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</i> is © 1991–2013 Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. and its subsidiaries. <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization, Civ, Civilization</i>, Firaxis Games, the Firaxis Games logo, 2K, the 2K Games logo, and Take-Two Interactive Software are all trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. in the United States and/or foreign countries. Fantasy Flight Supply is a trademark of Fantasy Flight Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved to their respective owners.</p> </div> </div> </div>https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2014/11/7/fame-and-fortune-description/https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2013/8/19/reach-new-heights-of-power-and-influence/ <div class="blog-detail"> <div class="blog-header"> <img class='blog-visual device-break' src='https://images-cdn.fantasyflightgames.com/filer_public/f1/02/f1026f73-5dd6-450a-a791-ccfd7c315143/ci01_preview.jpg' /> <div class="blog-head"> <div class="blog-meta"> <span class="meta-date float-left"> Published 19 August 2013 </span> <span class="visible-desktop" style="padding: 5px;">|</span> <span class="meta-productline"><a href="/en/products/civilization/">Sid Meier&#39;s Civilization</a></span> </div> <div class="blog-titlelead-container"> <div class="blog-titlelead"> <h1>Reach New Heights of Power and Influence</h1> <div class="blog-lead"> <p>Sid Meier's Civilization: Wisdom and Warfare Is Now Available</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class="blog-content"> <p class="flavortext"><i style="line-height: 1.6em;">“The truest wisdom is a resolute determination."</i><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">     –Napoleon</span></p> <p>Guide your civilization to new heights of power and influence with <a href="/edge_npm.asp?epmi=s&amp;eidm=193"><i>Wisdom and Warfare</i></a>, a new expansion for <a href="/edge_minisite.asp?eidm=128"><i>Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</i></a>, now available at local retailers and online through <a href="http://store.fantasyflightgames.com/productdetails.cfm?sku=CI03">our webstore</a>!</p> <p>The <i>Wisdom and Warfare</i> expansion features new unit cards which make combat more tactical and dynamic than ever, while the addition of Social Policies helps to shape the direction of your growing civilization and refine your government. You’ll also be able to use six brand new civilizations, new map tiles, and more to shape your civilization in ways greater than you ever imagined!</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img vspace="10" align="middle" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/wisdom%20and%20warfare/CI03-layout.png" hspace="10" alt=""></p> <h2>Warfare</h2> <p><i>Wisdom and Warfare</i> introduces optional replacement unit cards, which bring a new level of battlefield tactics to <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</i>. These replacement units have both Strength and Health values, which lead to even deeper strategic decision-making.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img vspace="10" align="middle" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/wisdom%20and%20warfare/CI03_Cards-CombatFan.png" hspace="10" alt=""></p> <p>In the base game, combat value is determined by the strength of surviving units plus the combat bonus card value. With the alternative combat cards from <i>Wisdom and Warfare</i>, however, combat value is determined by the total health value of surviving units, minus wounds suffered, plus combat bonus card value. Thus, wounds that don’t kill units can still impact the outcome of a battle, and players must account for this new strategic consideration while playing units and opening new fronts!</p> <h2>Wisdom</h2> <p>The <i>Wisdom and Warfare</i> expansion also affords you the opportunity to adopt Social Policies, which help determine your growing civilization’s path to greatness and add new options for long-term strategizing.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img vspace="10" align="middle" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/wisdom%20and%20warfare/CI03_Cards-SocialPolicyFan.png" hspace="10" alt=""></p> <p>As an example, the adoption of Rationalism decreases the cost of learning new tech. This is especially helpful since the <i>Wisdom and Warfare</i> expansion has new tech cards for your civilization to research while pursuing a tech victory!</p> <h2>Structure Your Society<a href="/media/ffg_content/civilization/wisdom%20and%20warfare/new/CI03_WW_Rulebook.pdf"><img vspace="10" align="right" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/wisdom%20and%20warfare/new/CI03_DLC-THM.png" hspace="10" alt=""></a></h2> <p>With its alternative combat cards, Social Policies, six new civilizations, twelve new map tiles, two new relics, and more, the <i>Wisdom and Warfare</i> expansion for <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</i> provides great new options as you seek to build your civilization to incredible new heights. You can learn more about <i>Wisdom and Warfare</i> by <a href="/edge_npm.asp?epmi=s&amp;eidm=193">reading our previews</a> and downloading the expansion’s <a href="/media/ffg_content/civilization/wisdom%20and%20warfare/new/CI03_WW_Rulebook.pdf">rules</a> (pdf, 3.3 MB) from the game’s <a href="/edge_minisite_sec.asp?eidm=128&amp;esem=4">support page</a>.</p> <p>Then head to your retailer today to pick up your copy of <i>Wisdom and Warfare</i>!</p> <div class="blog-end"></div> <a href="/edge_foros_temas.asp?efid=90"> <div class="forum-btn"> <i class="fa fa-comments"></i> <div class="forum-btn-txt">Discuss this article <br class="hidden-tablet"/>in our forums!</div> </div> </a> <div class="legal-text"> <p>The copyrightable portions of <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</i> is © 1991–2013 Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. and its subsidiaries. <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization, Civ, Civilization</i>, Firaxis Games, the Firaxis Games logo, 2K, the 2K Games logo, and Take-Two Interactive Software are all trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. in the United States and/or foreign countries. Fantasy Flight Supply is a trademark of Fantasy Flight Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved to their respective owners.</p> </div> </div> </div>https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2013/8/19/reach-new-heights-of-power-and-influence/https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2013/7/22/wisdom/ <div class="blog-detail"> <div class="blog-header"> <img class='blog-visual device-break' src='https://images-cdn.fantasyflightgames.com/filer_public/f1/02/f1026f73-5dd6-450a-a791-ccfd7c315143/ci01_preview.jpg' /> <div class="blog-head"> <div class="blog-meta"> <span class="meta-date float-left"> Published 22 July 2013 </span> <span class="visible-desktop" style="padding: 5px;">|</span> <span class="meta-productline"><a href="/en/products/civilization/">Sid Meier&#39;s Civilization</a></span> </div> <div class="blog-titlelead-container"> <div class="blog-titlelead"> <h1>Wisdom</h1> <div class="blog-lead"> <p>A Preview of Sid Meier's Civilization: Wisdom and Warfare Expansion</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class="blog-content"> <p class="flavortext"><i style="line-height: 1.6em;">"I am sometimes a fox and sometimes a lion. The whole secret of government lies in knowing when to be the one or the other.</i><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">" – Napoleon Bonaparte</span></p> <p><i>Recently, we announced </i><a href="/edge_npm.asp?epmi=s&amp;eidm=193">Wisdom and Warfare</a><i>, an expansion for </i><a href="/edge_minisite.asp?eidm=128">Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</a><i>. The </i>Wisdom and Warfare<i> expansion features new unit cards which make combat more tactical than ever, while the addition of Social Policies helps to shape the direction of your growing civilization and refine your government. Six brand new civilizations, new map tiles, and more will help your civilization become greater than you ever imagined. </i></p> <p><i>In today’s preview, guest writer El-ad David Amir discusses the Wisdom elements of the new expansion, highlighting the new social policies and how they impact the game. Let’s hear form El-ad: </i></p> <p>Science and society are two crucial pillars upon which empires are borne. In <i>Wisdom and Warfare</i>, the upcoming expansion to <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</i>, players will encounter new social policies to help them better navigate the fates of their civilizations. Additionally, the sky is no longer the limit as several new mechanics allow for rapid acquisition of techs, making the Space Flight victory more achievable than ever. An able leader will need to incorporate both of these tools in order to ensure the triumph of his or her people.</p> <h2>Shape Your Civilization With Social Policies<img vspace="10" align="right" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/wisdom%20and%20warfare/new/CI03_SocialPolicyFan01.png" hspace="10" alt=""></h2> <p>Social policies are cards that provide a unique continuous ability. Players can use them to further tailor their civilization to a specific strategy or to cover weaknesses in their game plan. For example, Pacifism gives a bonus culture token at the start of each turn and allows scouts to explore huts, while Military Tradition rewards its civilization with a free unit the first time an army figure is built each turn. Each player begins the game with one social policy of his choice and can adopt an additional one whenever he founds a city (to a maximum of three social policies). However, the cards are double-sided, and once you adopt a social policy and choose one of its sides, you cannot easily reverse your decision. This creates interesting dilemmas: if you start the game with Natural Religion, giving your armies +1 movement and thus making exploration more efficient, then you will miss out on the coin bonus of Organized Religion later.</p> <p style="text-align: left;">Fortunately, a few mechanics (such as the new Bureaucracy tech) break this restriction and allow switching policies, giving you the freedom to shift gears when the time is right. The French, led by Napoleon, exploit social policies to the fullest by starting the game with two social policies instead of one. The different possible combinations offer many early-game options for this civilization: blitz your opponents by choosing Natural Religion and Military Tradition, dig through the Culture deck using Pacifism and Patronage, or prepare for the long haul with Expansionism and Urban Development.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img vspace="10" align="middle" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/wisdom%20and%20warfare/new/CI03_Reference-Sheet_French.png" hspace="10" alt=""></p> <p>Later in the game, the French are the only civilization that can adopt four policies, gaining a plethora of bonuses that provide a definite edge. Appropriately, their second ability, a combat bonus, encourages this flexibility. The bonus accommodates an offensive stance and also complements other approaches by reinforcing the French defense and facilitating the conquest of villages. The French versatility encourages thinking outside of the box and finding creative strategies to defeat your foes.</p> <h2>Race to Space With New Tech Options</h2> <p>The new social policies are just one facet of the social reform included in <i>Wisdom and Warfare</i>. The seven governments available in the game have been redesigned. As a rule of thumb, the new governments provide the equivalent of a city action each turn, either directly (such as Monarchy, which doubles your capital’s city actions) or indirectly (as in Fundamentalism, which has a combat bonus and supplies its civilization one culture token each turn for each built army figure).</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img vspace="10" align="middle" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/wisdom%20and%20warfare/new/CI03_GovernmentFan.png" hspace="10" alt=""></p> <p>Even Despotism, the starting government of most civilizations, has been updated with a global production bonus. A byproduct of the new governments and social policies is that research priorities have significantly changed. Monarchy and Communism, which were often neglected in the past, now offer powerful governments in addition to potent abilities. On the other hand, many players felt obliged to get certain techs, such as Code of Laws and Irrigation, in order to maximize their civilization’s success; with these updated governments, there are now several alternatives to each, expanding the options available dramatically.</p> <p><img vspace="10" align="right" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/wisdom%20and%20warfare/new/CI03_WonderFan.png" hspace="10" alt="">These new decisions cascade through the game and unlock new choices. Going for a tech victory is one such choice that takes center stage thanks to Wisdom and Warfare. The expansion includes many small additions that are both exciting in their own rights and form a magnificent tech engine when combined. Rationalism, a social policy, allows you to spend some of your trade during the start of turn phase in order to acquire a level one tech, a level two tech, or both, in addition to the regular research phase. Supply Drop is a culture card that provides a significant trade bonus while The Great Lighthouse increases the trade produced by your water tiles. The Notre Dame allows its civilization to double its research each turn, gaining two techs instead of one. Finally, Education, a new tech, brings research to the city management phase through an ability that lets you gain a tech by paying with resources rather than trade. The civilization that combines two or three of these mechanics would quickly reach the coveted space launch, winning the game.</p> <p>Ruling a nation is a complex endeavor that involves juggling conflicting priorities. The new social policies and governments give leaders opportunities to take a step back and examine the big picture: will you value tradition or innovation? Which system of government will provide you with the resources that you can utilize most efficiently? Whatever you choose, remember to always aim for the stars with the upcoming <i>Wisdom and Warfare</i> expansion.</p> <p><i>Thanks El-ad! Keep checking back here for more information about the upcoming Sid Meier’s Civilization: Wisdom and Warfare expansion, and get ready to propel your fledgling empire to greater heights than ever before!</i></p> <p> </p> <div class="blog-end"></div> <a href="/edge_foros_temas.asp?efid=90"> <div class="forum-btn"> <i class="fa fa-comments"></i> <div class="forum-btn-txt">Discuss this article <br class="hidden-tablet"/>in our forums!</div> </div> </a> <div class="legal-text"> <p>The copyrightable portions of <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</i> is © 1991–2013 Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. and its subsidiaries. <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization, Civ, Civilization</i>, Firaxis Games, the Firaxis Games logo, 2K, the 2K Games logo, and Take-Two Interactive Software are all trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. in the United States and/or foreign countries. Fantasy Flight Supply is a trademark of Fantasy Flight Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved to their respective owners.</p> </div> </div> </div>https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2013/7/22/wisdom/https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2013/7/10/an-updated-faq/ <div class="blog-detail"> <div class="blog-header"> <img class='blog-visual device-break' src='https://images-cdn.fantasyflightgames.com/filer_public/f1/02/f1026f73-5dd6-450a-a791-ccfd7c315143/ci01_preview.jpg' /> <div class="blog-head"> <div class="blog-meta"> <span class="meta-date float-left"> Published 10 July 2013 </span> <span class="visible-desktop" style="padding: 5px;">|</span> <span class="meta-productline"><a href="/en/products/civilization/">Sid Meier&#39;s Civilization</a></span> </div> <div class="blog-titlelead-container"> <div class="blog-titlelead"> <h1>An Updated FAQ</h1> <div class="blog-lead"> <p>FAQ 2.0 for Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game is Now Online</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class="blog-content"> <p><i style="line-height: 1.6em;">As great cities rise to dominate the landscape, armies clash in battle, and societies begin to take shape in <a href="/edge_minisite.asp?eidm=128&amp;enmi=Civilization">Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</a>, it is only natural that questions should arise. What is the best way to lead a people to greatness? How best to defend from enemies? The time has come to reflect on what has been learned throughout the creation of a powerful civilization, and figure out what it means to be great in the context of history. Designer Lukas Litzsinger explains what will be covered in version 2.0 of the FAQ.</i></p> <p>Greetings <i>Civ</i> players!</p> <p>In anticipation of the release of the upcoming expansion <i>Wisdom and Warfare</i>, we have released a new FAQ that clarifies questions in both the base game and the <i>Fame and Fortune</i> expansion. You will find answers about great person cards, techs, culture events, and more. The timing of a battle turn has been established, and the loot rules that were introduced in the <i>Fame and Fortune</i> expansion have been included so that players with just the base game can use them. We have also issued some errata, the most important relating to two techs from the core game, and two cards from <i>Fame and Fortune</i>.</p> <p>The first errata switches the coin on the Metal Casting to Railroad. This change makes Railroad a much more appealing level III tech, and Metal Casting is no longer the obvious choice that it was. The <i>Fame and Fortune</i> errata changes the "Leonidas" great person card to only function on defense, making it impossible to use him as an offensive weapon. "Leonidas" could single-handedly turn the tide of the game, with little recourse available to other players. Finally, the Endowment for the Arts investment card made a culture victory too fast in relation to the other victory paths. It has been changed to make it more difficult to get the culture discount early in the game, but it also takes fewer coins to get the full benefit of the card. Replacement Metal Casting, Railroad, Leonidas, and Endowment for the Arts cards are included in the <i>Wisdom and Warfare</i> expansion.</p> <p>Finally, the advanced tiebreaker has been improved and moved to an "Advanced Va<a href="/media/ffg_content/civilization/news/Civilization%20FAQ_v2.0.pdf"><img vspace="10" align="right" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/news/CI-FAQ2p0-prev.png" hspace="10" alt=""></a>riants" section. This section is perfect for experienced players who want less randomness in the game, and more control over its result. </p> <p>Thank you for playing <i>Civilization</i>!</p> <p>Lukas</p> <p>Thanks Lukas! <a href="/media/ffg_content/civilization/news/Civilization%20FAQ_v2.0.pdf">Download the FAQ</a> (pdf, 5.8 MB) for <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</i> at our <a href="/edge_minisite_sec.asp?eidm=128&amp;esem=4">support page</a> . Then, keep checking back here for more news about <i>Civilization</i>, including the upcoming <a href="/edge_npm.asp?epmi=s&amp;eidm=193"><i>Wisdom and Warfare</i></a> expansion.</p> <div class="blog-end"></div> <a href="/edge_foros_temas.asp?efid=90"> <div class="forum-btn"> <i class="fa fa-comments"></i> <div class="forum-btn-txt">Discuss this article <br class="hidden-tablet"/>in our forums!</div> </div> </a> <div class="legal-text"> <p>The copyrightable portions of <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</i> is © 1991–2013 Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. and its subsidiaries. <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization, Civ, Civilization</i>, Firaxis Games, the Firaxis Games logo, 2K, the 2K Games logo, and Take-Two Interactive Software are all trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. in the United States and/or foreign countries. Fantasy Flight Supply is a trademark of Fantasy Flight Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved to their respective owners.</p> </div> </div> </div>https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2013/7/10/an-updated-faq/https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2013/7/3/warfare/ <div class="blog-detail"> <div class="blog-header"> <img class='blog-visual device-break' src='https://images-cdn.fantasyflightgames.com/filer_public/f1/02/f1026f73-5dd6-450a-a791-ccfd7c315143/ci01_preview.jpg' /> <div class="blog-head"> <div class="blog-meta"> <span class="meta-date float-left"> Published 3 July 2013 </span> <span class="visible-desktop" style="padding: 5px;">|</span> <span class="meta-productline"><a href="/en/products/civilization/">Sid Meier&#39;s Civilization</a></span> </div> <div class="blog-titlelead-container"> <div class="blog-titlelead"> <h1>Warfare</h1> <div class="blog-lead"> <p>A Preview of Sid Meier's Civilization: Wisdom and Warfare Expansion</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class="blog-content"> <p class="flavortext"><i style="line-height: 1.6em;">“God has given such brave soldiers to this Crown that, if they do not frighten our neighbours, at least they prevent us from being frightened by them.”</i><span style="line-height: 1.6em;"> – Elizabeth I</span></p> <p><i>Recently, we </i><a href="/edge_news.asp?eidn=4133"><i>announced</i></a> Wisdom and Warfare<i><a href="/edge_npm.asp?epmi=s&amp;eidm=193">,</a> an expansion for </i><a href="/edge_minisite.asp?eidm=128">Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</a><i>. The </i><a href="/edge_npm.asp?epmi=s&amp;eidm=193">Wisdom and Warfare</a><i> expansion features new unit cards which make combat more tactical than ever, while the addition of Social Policies helps to shape the direction of your growing civilization and refine your government. Six brand new civilizations, new map tiles, and more will help your civilization become greater than you ever imagined. </i></p> <p style="text-align: center;"><i><img vspace="10" align="middle" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/wisdom%20and%20warfare/CI03-layout.png" hspace="10" alt=""></i></p> <p><i>In today’s preview, guest writer El-ad David Amir discusses the Warfare elements of the new expansion, focusing on the new Navy tech, as well as the new combat system. Let’s hear form El-ad:</i></p> <p>A strong military leader knows that victory comes from a combination of strength and flexibility. <i>Wisdom and Warfare</i> introduces changes that make combat in Civilization more varied and exciting. It gives players new options to complement their chosen strategy by either strengthening their defense or allowing a more vicious offense.</p> <h2>Two if by Sea</h2> <p><img vspace="10" align="right" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/wisdom%20and%20warfare/Warfare%20preview/overlay-sheet.png" hspace="10" alt=""><i>Wisdom and Warfare</i> features the new Navy tech, which offers two versatile additions to its civilization’s arsenal. It enables production of the Shipyard, a new limited building that serves as an alternative to the Barracks; gone are the days when a few civilizations would hog all combat bonus buildings. At five production, the Shipyard is one of the cheapest buildings in the market, guaranteeing that even the most remote coastal city will be able to afford it. The additional production provided by the Shipyard is a valuable advantage and plays well with the new building program city action. Furthermore, Navy grants its civilization an amazing mobility boost, as distant armies are immediately transported to the front lines. A surprised opponent could be facing a stack of two or three armies where none stood before. Together, these abilities mark Navy as an intimidating research choice throughout the game.</p> <p>The Royal Navy has been the pinnacle of English warfare for more than four hundred years and so it is only appropriate that Navy is the English starting tech. Navy complements the English well, providing them with the strength and maneuverability that made them an empire. The English are natural traders and their army figures double as scouts by sending trade, production, culture, and resources back to their cities; as they lay siege to an enemy, they add insult to injury by sending blockaded squares back home! Furthermore, by combining their ability to move over water with an early movement bonus (such as Horseback Riding or the new Natural Religion social policy), the English can quickly set up a network of armies and accumulate a large number of icons. This advantage gives them a daunting map presence and great flexibility in their choice of strategy, making them a force to be reckoned with.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><b><img vspace="10" align="middle" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/wisdom%20and%20warfare/Warfare%20preview/navy.png" hspace="10" alt=""></b></p> <h2>Bolster Your Army</h2> <p>A great civilization is only as powerful as its army, and what is an army if not its troops? <i>Wisdom and Warfare</i> includes replacement unit cards that dramatically alter the scope of combat. As in the base game, units have a Strength value: the amount of wounds the unit deals. In addition, units now also have a Health value: the amount of wounds a unit can take before dying. This subtle addition has tremendous implications.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img vspace="10" align="middle" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/wisdom%20and%20warfare/CI03_Cards-CombatFan.png" hspace="10" alt=""></p> <p>First and foremost, players are no longer at the mercy of the deck. Low Strength units are balanced by having higher Health — they deal less damage but take more punishment. This allows skilled generals to “lock” a front by causing a situation where neither unit kills the other. Playing to survive combat (without outright winning) becomes a viable strategy, allowing your units to live in order to fight another day. Finally, battle-related technologies, such as Mathematics and Animal Husbandry, attain a greater role as dealing and healing wounds have much more influence on the fate of combat. The new system maintains the elegance of the base game while adding Health as a new tactical element to consider.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img vspace="10" align="middle" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/wisdom%20and%20warfare/Warfare%20preview/red-combat-card.png" hspace="10" alt=""></p> <p>The Japanese, led by Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu, exploit the new combat system well. Japanese Infantry have a strength bonus, making them much more apt at slaying the opposition. A high Health Spearman, for example, could survive the blow of an Archer while still dispatching his opponent, while a high Strength Pikeman becomes a paragon at slaying Cavalry. The Japanese begin the game with Chivalry, upgrading their Cavalry and improving their initial military further. Chivalry also gives them Feudalism as a starting government, with its ability to harvest a resource for free at the start of each turn. Iron is a tempting choice as its role in battle-oriented technologies will solidify the Japanese aggressive position. However, their last ability, a trade discount on research, might lead to another choice; since the Japanese are likely to research every turn, they might want to diversify their resources in preparation for an Education-fueled tech victory. Either way, the Japanese are a diverse civilization that can triumph through many different paths.<img vspace="10" align="right" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/wisdom%20and%20warfare/Warfare%20preview/tokugawa-art.png" hspace="10" alt=""></p> <p>War has always been a central part of civilization games and <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</i> is no exception. <i>Wisdom and Warfare</i> has an extensive arsenal for an aggressive general. Fortunately, a defensive leader would also be able to wield these weapons. The Logistics tech, for example, unlocks all second tier units, providing a shortcut to significantly increasing the prowess of its civilization’s army. Such a sweeping upgrade could serve as a decisive defensive move. Since attaining it now requires just a single tech, it leaves the option to dedicate future research to peaceful pursuits such as Printing Press. Many of the military-oriented mechanics in the expansion could be utilized by civilizations aiming for a bloodless victory.</p> <p>Whether by land, by sea, or by air, <i>Wisdom and Warfare</i> offers many tools for cultures to clash. However, conflict is only one possible route to glory. In the next preview article, we will discuss noble Social Policies and their role in furthering the good of mankind (but furthering your civilization the most, of course).</p> <p><i>Thanks El-ad! Keep an eye out for more information and upcoming previews of </i>Wisdom and Warfare<i>, the newest expansion for </i>Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game!</p> <p> </p> <div class="blog-end"></div> <a href="/edge_foros_temas.asp?efid=90"> <div class="forum-btn"> <i class="fa fa-comments"></i> <div class="forum-btn-txt">Discuss this article <br class="hidden-tablet"/>in our forums!</div> </div> </a> <div class="legal-text"> <p>The copyrightable portions of <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</i> is © 1991–2013 Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. and its subsidiaries. <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization, Civ, Civilization</i>, Firaxis Games, the Firaxis Games logo, 2K, the 2K Games logo, and Take-Two Interactive Software are all trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. in the United States and/or foreign countries. Fantasy Flight Supply is a trademark of Fantasy Flight Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved to their respective owners.</p> </div> </div> </div>https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2013/7/3/warfare/https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2013/5/10/wisdom-and-warfare/ <div class="blog-detail"> <div class="blog-header"> <img class='blog-visual device-break' src='https://images-cdn.fantasyflightgames.com/filer_public/f1/02/f1026f73-5dd6-450a-a791-ccfd7c315143/ci01_preview.jpg' /> <div class="blog-head"> <div class="blog-meta"> <span class="meta-date float-left"> Published 10 May 2013 </span> <span class="visible-desktop" style="padding: 5px;">|</span> <span class="meta-productline"><a href="/en/products/civilization/">Sid Meier&#39;s Civilization</a></span> </div> <div class="blog-titlelead-container"> <div class="blog-titlelead"> <h1>Wisdom and Warfare</h1> <div class="blog-lead"> <p>Announcing a New Expansion for Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game!</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class="blog-content"> <p><span style="text-align: left; line-height: 1.6em;">You have created towering wonders to stand the test of time, built vast cities populated by the greatest minds in history, and tamed sprawling wilderness in the name of progress. Now, prepare to guide your civilization to new heights of power and influence.</span></p> <p>Fantasy Flight Games is pleased to announce<i> <a href="/edge_npm.asp?epmi=s&amp;eidm=193">Wisdom and Warfare</a></i>, the latest expansion for <a href="/edge_minisite.asp?eidm=128"><i>Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</i></a>! The <i>Wisdom and Warfare</i> expansion offers players exciting new options to enhance their experience as they work to build their civilization from the ground to greatness. New relics, new culture cards, a new city action, and much more await!</p> <p style="text-align: center;"> <b><img vspace="10" align="middle" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/wisdom%20and%20warfare/CI03-layout.png" hspace="10" alt=""></b></p> <h2>Forge Your Path to Victory</h2> <p><i>“Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”</i></p> <p>– Napoleon</p> <p>True to the Warfare element of its name, optional replacement unit cards bring a new level o<img vspace="10" align="right" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/wisdom%20and%20warfare/CI03_Cards-CombatFan.png" hspace="10" alt="">f battlefield tactics to <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</i>. Units now have both Strength and Health values, which allows for even deeper strategic decision-making.</p> <p>In the base game, combat value is determined by the strength of surviving units plus the combat bonus card value. <i>Wisdom and Warfare</i>, however, adds a new level of strategic depth with its alternative combat cards. Now, combat value is determined by the total health value of surviving units, minus wounds suffered, plus combat bonus card value. This means that wounds that do not kill a unit still impact the outcome of a battle, so players must strategically account for this when playing units and opening new fronts!</p> <p>What’s more, your civilization can now adopt Social Policies, which help determine its path to greatness and increase options for long-term strategizing. For example, the adoption of Rationalism decreases the cost of learning new tech. This is especially helpful since the <i>Wisdom and </i><i>Warfare</i> expansion has new tech cards for your civilization to research while pursuing a tech victory!</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img vspace="10" align="middle" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/wisdom%20and%20warfare/new/CI03_Cards-SocialPolicyFan.png" hspace="10" alt=""></p> <h2><i><img vspace="10" align="right" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/wisdom%20and%20warfare/CI03-chr-2.png" hspace="10" alt=""></i>Expand Your Horizons</h2> <p><i>“Let thy step be slow and steady, that thou stumble not.”</i> – Shogun Ieyasu Tokugawa</p> <p>In addition to increasing the variety of land to be conquered, the new map tiles add two new relics to the game; the Ark of the Covenant, for example, offers two free advances on the culture track. Six new wonders, like Notre Dame, provide a testament to the greatness of your civilization, as well as powerful abilities like Research. With the Notre Dame wonder, you may spend six extra trade to learn an additional tech of the same or lower level when researching a tech. Six new culture events, such as the arrival of colonists, ensure that your citizens become more diverse than ever before. Meanwhile, building programs and city-states provide production, trade, culture, and other bonuses for your civilization.</p> <p>The addition of six new civilizations means players can conquer everything in their path with Genghis Khan and his Mongols, or explore new lands with Montezuma and the Aztecs. Perhaps you’ll charge into battle as the legendary Napoleon and his French forces. Whichever you choose, new civilizations offer exciting new ways for you to become victorious and reign supreme.</p> <p>With twelve new map tiles, two new relics, nearly one hundred and fifty new cards, and more, the <i>Wisdom and Warfare</i> expansion for <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game </i>provides great new options to help build your civilization to incredible new heights.</p> <p>Visit the <i>Wisdom and Warfare</i> website to learn more about this upcoming expansion. Then, keep checking back for previews of <i>Wisdom and Warfare</i>, and look for it on store shelves in the third quarter of 2013!</p> <p> </p> <div class="blog-end"></div> <a href="/edge_foros_temas.asp?efid=90"> <div class="forum-btn"> <i class="fa fa-comments"></i> <div class="forum-btn-txt">Discuss this article <br class="hidden-tablet"/>in our forums!</div> </div> </a> <div class="legal-text"> <p>The copyrightable portions of <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</i> is © 1991–2013 Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. and its subsidiaries. <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization, Civ, Civilization</i>, Firaxis Games, the Firaxis Games logo, 2K, the 2K Games logo, and Take-Two Interactive Software are all trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. in the United States and/or foreign countries. Fantasy Flight Supply is a trademark of Fantasy Flight Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved to their respective owners.</p> </div> </div> </div>https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2013/5/10/wisdom-and-warfare/https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2011/11/10/fame-and-fortune-is-on-sale/ <div class="blog-detail"> <div class="blog-header"> <img class='blog-visual device-break' src='https://images-cdn.fantasyflightgames.com/filer_public/f1/02/f1026f73-5dd6-450a-a791-ccfd7c315143/ci01_preview.jpg' /> <div class="blog-head"> <div class="blog-meta"> <span class="meta-date float-left"> Published 10 November 2011 </span> <span class="visible-desktop" style="padding: 5px;">|</span> <span class="meta-productline"><a href="/en/products/civilization/">Sid Meier&#39;s Civilization</a></span> </div> <div class="blog-titlelead-container"> <div class="blog-titlelead"> <h1>Fame and Fortune is On Sale</h1> <div class="blog-lead"> <p>Pick up the expansion for Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game today</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class="blog-content"> <p class="flavortext"><i style="line-height: 1.6em;">“Whoever wants to be happy, let him be so; of tomorrow there’s no knowing."      –Lorenzo de’ Medici</i></p> <p><a href="/edge_npm.asp?eidm=102"><i>Fame and Fortune</i></a>, the expansion for Kevin Wilson’s <a href="/edge_minisite.asp?eidm=128&amp;enmi=Civilization">acclaimed board game</a> of century-spanning empire building, is now on sale at your local retailer and on our <a href="http://store.fantasyflightgames.com/productdetails.cfm?SKU=CI02">webstore</a>! With exciting new game options, new map tiles, and components for a fifth player, <i>Fame and Fortune</i> will deliver your civilization to remarkable new heights.</p> <p>This comprehensive addition to one of last year’s most popular board games brings a host of enhancements. Great person cards provide the powerful assistance of Marco Polo, Hannibal, and scores of other great historical figures, while investment cards allow you to spend your hard-earned coin to reap lasting benefits. Discover ancient relics, expand your capital city into a metropolis, and bolster your cities with temporary fortifications or trade caravans to edge out your rivals. Are you prepared to guide your people to greatness?</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img vspace="10" align="middle" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/fame-and-fortune/civ-layout.png" hspace="10" alt=""></p> <h2>Harness your culture’s greatest assets</h2> <p>Among the many new options and additions introduced by the <i>Fame and Fortune</i> expansion are metropolises, massive cities designed to spread your culture’s influence. By researching a newly included tech card, players can expand their capitals into population centers twice the size of cities, expanding their available outskirts to ten squares. What’s more, metropolis tokens confer an extra combat bonus when defending them, and produce a base of two culture rather than one!</p> <p>But a city is only as powerful as its people, so <i>Fame and Fortune</i> introduces a new deck of Great Person cards that allows players to recruit the aid of specific great people from history, such as Joan of Arc, Hannibal, or even Gustavus Adolphus. These noteworthy figures offer potent abilities before fading into the annals of history. Can you harness their greatness for your own ends?<img vspace="10" align="right" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/fame-and-fortune/civ-sheets-greeks.png" hspace="10" alt=""></p> <h2>Four new civilizations</h2> <p><i>Fame and Fortune</i> also brings four new civilizations into the mix, including the trade-savvy Arabs, seafaring Spanish, and learned Greeks. Players can commit resources to long-term strategies with new investment cards, or even scour the earth for relics of past cultures. All this (and more), along with components for a fifth player, will bring exciting new enhancements to your <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</i> experience.</p> <p>Download the <a href="/media/ffg_content/civilization/support/fame-and-fortune/civ-fame-and-fortune-rules.pdf">rules for <i>Fame and Fortune</i></a> (pdf, 3.1 MB) from our <a href="/edge_minisite_sec.asp?eidm=128&amp;esem=4">support page</a>, and check out Kevin Wilson’s <a href="/edge_news.asp?eidn=2788">informative designer diary</a>. Then, head to your local retailer to grab your copy today!</p> <p> </p> <div class="blog-end"></div> <a href="/edge_foros_temas.asp?efid=90"> <div class="forum-btn"> <i class="fa fa-comments"></i> <div class="forum-btn-txt">Discuss this article <br class="hidden-tablet"/>in our forums!</div> </div> </a> <div class="legal-text"> <p>The copyrightable portions of <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</i> is © 1991–2013 Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. and its subsidiaries. <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization, Civ, Civilization</i>, Firaxis Games, the Firaxis Games logo, 2K, the 2K Games logo, and Take-Two Interactive Software are all trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. in the United States and/or foreign countries. Fantasy Flight Supply is a trademark of Fantasy Flight Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved to their respective owners.</p> </div> </div> </div>https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2011/11/10/fame-and-fortune-is-on-sale/https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2011/11/1/holding-out-for-a-hero/ <div class="blog-detail"> <div class="blog-header"> <img class='blog-visual device-break' src='https://images-cdn.fantasyflightgames.com/filer_public/f1/02/f1026f73-5dd6-450a-a791-ccfd7c315143/ci01_preview.jpg' /> <div class="blog-head"> <div class="blog-meta"> <span class="meta-date float-left"> Published 1 November 2011 </span> <span class="visible-desktop" style="padding: 5px;">|</span> <span class="meta-productline"><a href="/en/products/civilization/">Sid Meier&#39;s Civilization</a></span> </div> <div class="blog-titlelead-container"> <div class="blog-titlelead"> <h1>Holding Out for a Hero</h1> <div class="blog-lead"> <p>A preview of the Fame and Fortune Expansion for Civilization by Kevin Wilson</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class="blog-content"> <p><a style="line-height: 1.6em;" href="/edge_npm.asp?eidm=102">Fame and Fortune</a><i style="line-height: 1.6em;">, the expansion for </i><a style="line-height: 1.6em;" href="/edge_minisite.asp?eidm=128">Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</a><i style="line-height: 1.6em;">, will be on store shelves late next week, and </i><a style="line-height: 1.6em;" href="/media/ffg_content/civilization/support/fame-and-fortune/civ-fame-and-fortune-rules.pdf"><i>its rules</i></a><i style="line-height: 1.6em;"> (pdf, 3.1 MB) are already available on </i><a style="line-height: 1.6em;" href="/edge_minisite_sec.asp?eidm=128&amp;esem=4"><i>our support page</i></a><i style="line-height: 1.6em;">. Among its many enhancements, </i><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">Fame and Fortune</span><i style="line-height: 1.6em;"> introduces Great Person cards, which represent some of the world’s most influential people. Today, we’re pleased to present a designer diary by Kevin Wilson in which he further explains this exciting addition.</i></p> <p>As the <i>Fame and Fortune</i> expansion for <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</i> approaches, I thought I'd share a designer diary. Those of you with sharp eyes may remember that way back in one of my articles for the base game (<a href="/edge_news.asp?eidn=1673"><i>Pinkies Out!</i></a>), I dropped a major hint about my eventual plans for great people:</p> <p><i>“As for the great people, I wanted them to be simple without ruling out the possibility of doing something more complicated with them later on, so I designed them to operate like a really good building that could be moved around sometimes.”</i></p> <p>I knew I wanted to eventually have specific great people such as William Shakespeare and Albert Einstein running around the game, but as I looked over the amount of components in the box, I knew I’d have to wait until later. So, I put those thoughts in the back of my head and invented a simple great person system that would be easy to hook into later when I got around to it. Well, I’ve gotten around to it now, and I think it’s a strong addition to the game that adds a lot of variety and strategy.</p> <h2>The sky’s the limit<img vspace="10" align="right" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/fame-and-fortune/preview-1/orville-wright.png" hspace="10" alt=""></h2> <p>At the start of the game, you turn the great person markers face up and (if you wish), sort them by type. You then shuffle the new great person deck and place it next to the great person markers. Then, during the game, whenever a player gains a great person, they draw a card from the great person deck, which will look something like the one on the right.</p> <p>The picture in the upper left and the name at the bottom of the card show you that Orville is a great builder/inventor, so you reach into the pile of great person markers and pull out the appropriate marker.</p> <p>This marker is used just like great people originally worked in the base game, except Orville also gives you the 1-use ability to build an aircraft unit for free, even if you haven’t unlocked aircraft units yet. Want to send Kitty Hawk out hunting barbarians early in the game? Now you can. Best of all, Orville’s card stays facedown until you use it. So, the other players know that you have a great builder, but not which of the 7 great builders it is.</p> <p>But what if all of the great builder markers are already in play? Well, you simply discard Orville and draw again until you get a great person corresponding to an available marker. If a great person is killed on the board, then you must check to make sure that you don’t have too many great person cards of that type, and discard down (your choice which) if you do.</p> <p>Since there are 7 each of the 6 types of great people, the great person deck adds more surprises and twists to the game. Canny players will save their 1-shot great people for just the right moment, making a bid for victory or foiling another player’s plans at the last second.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img vspace="10" align="middle" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/fame-and-fortune/preview-1/marie-curie.png" hspace="10" alt=""><img vspace="10" align="middle" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/fame-and-fortune/preview-1/joan-of-arc.png" hspace="10" alt=""><img vspace="10" align="middle" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/fame-and-fortune/preview-1/hannibal.png" hspace="10" alt=""></p> <h2>On the shoulders of giants</h2> <p>Actually, designing the great person deck was a lot of fun. Not only did it allow me to bring a lot of fun and unique effects into <i>Civilization</i>, it also allowed me to pay a small homage to some of my personal heroes. In addition, it was an interesting challenge trying to find a quote that I felt communicated something important about that great person. Sometimes, I wasn’t able to get quote and mechanics to mesh together as well as I would like, but there are a few cards in the deck that I’m extremely proud of in this regard.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img vspace="10" align="middle" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/fame-and-fortune/preview-1/sir-isaac-newton.png" hspace="10" alt=""><img vspace="10" align="middle" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/fame-and-fortune/preview-1/captain-james-cook.png" hspace="10" alt=""><img vspace="10" align="middle" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/fame-and-fortune/preview-1/adam-smith.png" hspace="10" alt=""></p> <p>Overall, the great person deck strengthens the appeal of the culture track a bit, adds new twists and turns to the game, and increases replayability. It’s a mechanic that I think players will greatly enjoy.<i> </i></p> <p><i>Thanks, Kevin! <a href="/media/ffg_content/civilization/support/fame-and-fortune/civ-fame-and-fortune-rules.pdf">Download the rules</a> for more, and look for </i>Fame and Fortune<i> on store shelves next week.</i></p> <p> </p> <div class="blog-end"></div> <a href="/edge_foros_temas.asp?efid=90"> <div class="forum-btn"> <i class="fa fa-comments"></i> <div class="forum-btn-txt">Discuss this article <br class="hidden-tablet"/>in our forums!</div> </div> </a> <div class="legal-text"> <p>The copyrightable portions of <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</i> is © 1991–2013 Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. and its subsidiaries. <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization, Civ, Civilization</i>, Firaxis Games, the Firaxis Games logo, 2K, the 2K Games logo, and Take-Two Interactive Software are all trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. in the United States and/or foreign countries. Fantasy Flight Supply is a trademark of Fantasy Flight Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved to their respective owners.</p> </div> </div> </div>https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2011/11/1/holding-out-for-a-hero/https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2011/10/25/your-guide-to-fame-and-fortune/ <div class="blog-detail"> <div class="blog-header"> <img class='blog-visual device-break' src='https://images-cdn.fantasyflightgames.com/filer_public/f1/02/f1026f73-5dd6-450a-a791-ccfd7c315143/ci01_preview.jpg' /> <div class="blog-head"> <div class="blog-meta"> <span class="meta-date float-left"> Published 25 October 2011 </span> <span class="visible-desktop" style="padding: 5px;">|</span> <span class="meta-productline"><a href="/en/products/civilization/">Sid Meier&#39;s Civilization</a></span> </div> <div class="blog-titlelead-container"> <div class="blog-titlelead"> <h1>Your Guide to Fame and Fortune</h1> <div class="blog-lead"> <p>The rules for the expansion to Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class="blog-content"> <p class="flavortext"><i style="line-height: 1.6em;">“We have…beheld in the ocean, huge waves like mountains rising in the sky, and we have set eyes on barbarian regions far away hidden in a blue transparency of light vapors...”       –Zheng He</i></p> <p>Guide your people to greatness with <a href="/edge_npm.asp?eidm=102"><i>Fame and Fortune</i></a>, the expansion for <a href="/edge_minisite.asp?eidm=128&amp;enmi=Civilization"><i>Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</i></a>! <a href="/media/ffg_content/civilization/support/fame-and-fortune/civ-fame-and-fortune-rules.pdf">The rules</a> (pdf, 3.1 MB) are now available on <a href="/edge_minisite_sec.asp?eidm=128&amp;esem=4">our support page</a>. Look them over, then head to your local retailer to place your pre-order.<a href="/media/ffg_content/civilization/support/fame-and-fortune/civ-fame-and-fortune-rules.pdf"><img vspace="10" align="right" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/support/fame-and-fortune/fnfrules.png" hspace="10" alt=""></a></p> <h2>Harness your culture’s greatest assets</h2> <p>This comprehensive addition to one of last year’s most popular board games brings a host of enhancements. Great person cards provide the powerful assistance of Marco Polo, Hannibal, and scores of other great historical figures, while investment cards allow you to spend your hard-earned coin to reap lasting benefits. Discover ancient relics, expand your capital city into a metropolis, and bolster your cities with temporary fortifications or trade caravans to edge out your rivals. The world is yours for the taking!</p> <p> </p> <div class="blog-end"></div> <a href="/edge_foros_temas.asp?efid=90"> <div class="forum-btn"> <i class="fa fa-comments"></i> <div class="forum-btn-txt">Discuss this article <br class="hidden-tablet"/>in our forums!</div> </div> </a> <div class="legal-text"> <p>The copyrightable portions of <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</i> is © 1991–2013 Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. and its subsidiaries. <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization, Civ, Civilization</i>, Firaxis Games, the Firaxis Games logo, 2K, the 2K Games logo, and Take-Two Interactive Software are all trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. in the United States and/or foreign countries. Fantasy Flight Supply is a trademark of Fantasy Flight Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved to their respective owners.</p> </div> </div> </div>https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2011/10/25/your-guide-to-fame-and-fortune/https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2011/9/15/fame-and-fortune/ <div class="blog-detail"> <div class="blog-header"> <img class='blog-visual device-break' src='https://images-cdn.fantasyflightgames.com/filer_public/f1/02/f1026f73-5dd6-450a-a791-ccfd7c315143/ci01_preview.jpg' /> <div class="blog-head"> <div class="blog-meta"> <span class="meta-date float-left"> Published 15 September 2011 </span> <span class="visible-desktop" style="padding: 5px;">|</span> <span class="meta-productline"><a href="/en/products/civilization/">Sid Meier&#39;s Civilization</a></span> </div> <div class="blog-titlelead-container"> <div class="blog-titlelead"> <h1>Fame and Fortune</h1> <div class="blog-lead"> <p>Announcing an expansion for Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class="blog-content"> <p class="flavortext"><i style="line-height: 1.6em;">“I had the ambition to not only go farther than man had gone before, but to go as far as it was possible to go.”       – Captain James Cook</i></p> <p>A great, wide world awaits your burgeoning empire...and with the <a href="/edge_npm.asp?eidm=102"><i>Fame and Fortune</i> expansion </a>for <a href="/edge_minisite.asp?eidm=128&amp;enmi=Civilization"><i>Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</i></a>, the world has grown even larger!</p> <p>Fantasy Flight Games is thrilled to announce the upcoming release of <i>Fame and Fortune</i>, an expansion for Kevin Wilson’s acclaimed board game of century-spanning empire building. With exciting new game options, new map tiles, and components for a fifth player, <i>Fame and Fortune</i> will deliver your civilization to remarkable new heights.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img vspace="10" align="middle" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/fame-and-fortune/board-tiles.png" hspace="10" alt=""></p> <p>This comprehensive addition to one of last year’s most popular board games brings a host of enhancements. Great person cards provide the powerful assistance of Marco Polo, Hannibal, and scores of other great historical figures, while investment cards allow you to spend your hard-earned coin to reap lasting benefits. Discover ancient relics, expand your capital city into a metropolis, and bolster your cities with temporary fortifications or trade caravans to edge out your rivals. Are you prepared to guide your people to greatness?</p> <h2>Sprawling metropolises and their greatest people</h2> <p>Among the many new options and additions introduced by the <i>Fame and Fortune</i> expansion are metropolises, massive cities designed to spread your culture’s influence. By researching a newly included tech card, players can expand their capitals into population centers twice the size of cities, expanding their available outskirts to ten squares. What’s more, metropolis tokens confer an extra combat bonus when defending them, and produce a base of two culture rather than one!<img vspace="10" align="right" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/fame-and-fortune/relic-tokens.png" hspace="10" alt=""></p> <p>But a city is only as powerful as its people, so <i>Fame and Fortune</i> introduces a new deck of Great Person cards that allows players to recruit the aid of specific great people from history, such as Joan of Arc, Hannibal, or even Gustavus Adolphus. These noteworthy figures offer potent abilities before fading into the annals of history. Can you harness their greatness for your own ends?</p> <h2>New civilizations, a fifth player, and more</h2> <p>Looking for even more? <i>Fame and Fortune</i> brings four new civilizations into the mix, including the trade-savvy Arabs, seafaring Spanish, and learned Greeks. Players can commit resources to long-term strategies with new investment cards, or even scour the earth for relics of past cultures. All this (and more), along with components for a fifth player, will bring exciting new enhancements to your <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</i> experience.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img vspace="10" align="middle" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/fame-and-fortune/civ-sheets-greeks.png" hspace="10" alt=""></p> <p><a href="/edge_npm.asp?eidm=102">Visit our detailed <i>Fame and Fortune</i> website </a>to learn more, and keep checking back in the coming weeks as we offer detailed previews (including designer diaries from Kevin Wilson himself). Then, in the fourth quarter of 2011, prepare to guide your people to greatness!</p> <p> </p> <div class="blog-end"></div> <a href="/edge_foros_temas.asp?efid=90"> <div class="forum-btn"> <i class="fa fa-comments"></i> <div class="forum-btn-txt">Discuss this article <br class="hidden-tablet"/>in our forums!</div> </div> </a> <div class="legal-text"> <p>The copyrightable portions of <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</i> is © 1991–2013 Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. and its subsidiaries. <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization, Civ, Civilization</i>, Firaxis Games, the Firaxis Games logo, 2K, the 2K Games logo, and Take-Two Interactive Software are all trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. in the United States and/or foreign countries. Fantasy Flight Supply is a trademark of Fantasy Flight Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved to their respective owners.</p> </div> </div> </div>https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2011/9/15/fame-and-fortune/https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2010/12/7/a-few-of-my-favorite-things/ <div class="blog-detail"> <div class="blog-header"> <img class='blog-visual device-break' src='https://images-cdn.fantasyflightgames.com/filer_public/f1/02/f1026f73-5dd6-450a-a791-ccfd7c315143/ci01_preview.jpg' /> <div class="blog-head"> <div class="blog-meta"> <span class="meta-date float-left"> Published 7 December 2010 </span> <span class="visible-desktop" style="padding: 5px;">|</span> <span class="meta-productline"><a href="/en/products/civilization/">Sid Meier&#39;s Civilization</a></span> </div> <div class="blog-titlelead-container"> <div class="blog-titlelead"> <h1>A Few of My Favorite Things</h1> <div class="blog-lead"> <p>A Designer Diary for Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class="blog-content"> <p><b>by Kevin Wilson</b></p> <p>Greetings! We’re back one last time for a bonus installment of my <a href="/edge_minisite.asp?eidm=128&amp;enmi=Civilization"><i>Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</i></a> designer diary series. As I write this, the game is in stores and players around the world are enjoying it. With that in mind, I wanted to write about a lighter topic this week. Instead of explaining deep strategies or expanding on things I’ve already discussed, I’d just like to talk about some of my favorite parts of <i>Civilization</i> – the parts that really make me happy as a designer.</p> <p>The first of my favorite things has to be the scout figures. Scouts are used to create new cities and they send the resources and other icons in the square they’re in back to one of their owner’s cities each turn. So, a scout sitting in a forest can send 2 production home to one of its owner’s cities.</p> <p>The reason I like scouts so much is that they were one of those moments in a design where a lot things fell into place and solved a number of problems all at once. Early on, there was no distinction between armies and scouts – there were simply ‘presence’ figures which served as a general indicator of a player’s presence in a square on the board – whether military or not. However, that felt too abstract, so I tried separating them. Then I had the problem that scouts (settlers at the time) felt too useless. It wasn’t until a conversation with my playtesters about the issue that a particularly clever tester suggested letting the scouts ‘mail’ resources home.</p> <p><img vspace="10" align="right" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/news/preview6/civ-scout.png" hspace="10" alt="">It was such a good idea that I immediately added it in and tried it out. This worked incredibly well. So well, in fact, that players built them in preference to just about anything else. In the end I took away the scout’s ability to explore huts and made killing them in combat valuable in order to bring scouts and armies into more of a balance. Still, even with those changes, scouts turned out to be one of my favorite mechanics in the game, allowing players a lot more flexibility and creating a great point of interaction. That just goes to show you the value of keeping an open mind during playtests.</p> <p>My second favorite thing has to be the way that trade is spent in the game. We’ve talked about how this works already in my preview <a href="/edge_news.asp?eidn=1712"><i>Counting Your Chickens</i></a>, but not the reasoning behind it. One of my goals in <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</i> was to reduce how many piles of tokens the players had to keep track of. Now, I know you look at all the components in the game and laugh at that statement, but believe me, boiling a big, meaty computer game like <i>Civilization</i> down into board game form wasn’t an easy task.</p> <p><img vspace="10" align="left" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/news/preview4/civ-icon_production.png" hspace="10" alt="">Over the course of testing I tweaked many mechanics to streamline bookkeeping as much as possible. Production was one such tweak (again, as described in <i>Counting Your Chickens</i>), and spending trade was another. The key breakthrough concept was a simple one, really, but it made a lot of difference to the flow of the game, and that was the idea that whenever you research a new tech, you drop to 0 trade. That meant that players didn’t have to figure out change when researching, and it also meant that hoarding trade was largely pointless. Just like with scouts, this was an instance where one idea cleared up a number of issues I was having. Players suddenly had a resource that they were more willing to trade back and forth, and it greatly increased interaction during the trade phase.</p> <p>The final tweak to the trade mechanic was having coins let you save 1 trade each after researching, thus tying the two strategies together in an elegant, simple manner. Why tie them together, you ask? Well, one of my central concepts was that each of the four victory conditions should support the others in various ways. That way, a military player (for instance) would have reasons to pursue tech, culture, and economics as well. Everything is always valuable to every player, just not equally so, and it’s one of the players’ challenges to work out what’s most valuable to them at any given time. I came up with the diagram you see below.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img vspace="10" align="middle" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/news/preview6/civ-diagram(2).png" hspace="10" alt=""></p> <p>My third and final favorite thing I want to talk about is the exploration mechanic. It took a lot of experimentation to get the map to a size and style that I liked. I tried revealing one square of terrain at a time, and hated it. I tried having a visual range on the armies to determine what got turned over, and hated it. I tried a lot of things. In the end, I found that creating large (5”) square tiles and dividing them into 16 smaller squares each gave me an excellent balance between fiddliness and the feeling of exploration that I wanted to create. But for awhile, it still wasn’t clicking just right - it still took too long. And in the end, it was a marvelously simple solution from a friend (once again) that brought it together for me. You see, the problem was that when people turned over a new tile, they would spend a ridiculous amount of time deciding how to orient it, and this simple choice added up to about an extra 20-30 minutes per game! My friend scratched his head at my frustration and just suggested that I just mark which side the player enters through with an arrow.</p> <p>...the sound of my forehead slap echoed throughout the building.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img vspace="10" align="middle" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/map-tiles-front.png" hspace="10" alt=""></p> <p>Yeah, I know, it was ridiculously simple, but it’s easy to lose sight of the simple solutions when you’re waist-deep in design. After that, the other part of my exploration mechanic, the hut and village tokens, started falling into place with the special resource tokens that players spend to activate abilities on tech cards. Then, exploration became a favorite activity of players, with everyone scrambling to be the first to grab the ‘candy’ around them on the map. When everything comes together in the end like that and links up, it’s one of the most incredibly satisfying experiences a designer can have, and honestly, that’s the way I feel about the entire game system in <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</i>. It’s a design I’m incredibly proud of, and one I hope everyone will enjoy.</p> <p> </p> <div class="blog-end"></div> <a href="/edge_foros_temas.asp?efid=90"> <div class="forum-btn"> <i class="fa fa-comments"></i> <div class="forum-btn-txt">Discuss this article <br class="hidden-tablet"/>in our forums!</div> </div> </a> <div class="legal-text"> <p>The copyrightable portions of <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</i> is © 1991–2013 Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. and its subsidiaries. <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization, Civ, Civilization</i>, Firaxis Games, the Firaxis Games logo, 2K, the 2K Games logo, and Take-Two Interactive Software are all trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. in the United States and/or foreign countries. Fantasy Flight Supply is a trademark of Fantasy Flight Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved to their respective owners.</p> </div> </div> </div>https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2010/12/7/a-few-of-my-favorite-things/https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2010/11/30/answers-to-mans-greatest-questions/ <div class="blog-detail"> <div class="blog-header"> <img class='blog-visual device-break' src='https://images-cdn.fantasyflightgames.com/filer_public/f1/02/f1026f73-5dd6-450a-a791-ccfd7c315143/ci01_preview.jpg' /> <div class="blog-head"> <div class="blog-meta"> <span class="meta-date float-left"> Published 30 November 2010 </span> <span class="visible-desktop" style="padding: 5px;">|</span> <span class="meta-productline"><a href="/en/products/civilization/">Sid Meier&#39;s Civilization</a></span> </div> <div class="blog-titlelead-container"> <div class="blog-titlelead"> <h1>Answers to Man's Greatest Questions</h1> <div class="blog-lead"> <p>The FAQ for Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game is now online</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class="blog-content"> <p style="text-align: center;"><img align="middle" vspace="10" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/logo-civilization.png" hspace="10" alt=""></p> <p>When guiding a culture from its meager roots to its technological apex, a few questions are bound to arise. Find answers in the <a href="/media/ffg_content/civilization/support/civ-faq.pdf">FAQ for <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</i></a> (pdf, 408 KB), now available on the <a href="/edge_minisite_sec.asp?eidm=128&amp;esem=4">support page</a>! Also included is a new "advanced tiebreaker" variant, an alternative way to resolve close games.</p> <p></p> <div class="blog-end"></div> <a href="/edge_foros_temas.asp?efid=90"> <div class="forum-btn"> <i class="fa fa-comments"></i> <div class="forum-btn-txt">Discuss this article <br class="hidden-tablet"/>in our forums!</div> </div> </a> <div class="legal-text"> <p>The copyrightable portions of <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</i> is © 1991–2013 Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. and its subsidiaries. <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization, Civ, Civilization</i>, Firaxis Games, the Firaxis Games logo, 2K, the 2K Games logo, and Take-Two Interactive Software are all trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. in the United States and/or foreign countries. Fantasy Flight Supply is a trademark of Fantasy Flight Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved to their respective owners.</p> </div> </div> </div>https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2010/11/30/answers-to-mans-greatest-questions/https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2010/11/18/the-dawn-of-civilization/ <div class="blog-detail"> <div class="blog-header"> <img class='blog-visual device-break' src='https://images-cdn.fantasyflightgames.com/filer_public/f1/02/f1026f73-5dd6-450a-a791-ccfd7c315143/ci01_preview.jpg' /> <div class="blog-head"> <div class="blog-meta"> <span class="meta-date float-left"> Published 18 November 2010 </span> <span class="visible-desktop" style="padding: 5px;">|</span> <span class="meta-productline"><a href="/en/products/civilization/">Sid Meier&#39;s Civilization</a></span> </div> <div class="blog-titlelead-container"> <div class="blog-titlelead"> <h1>The Dawn of Civilization</h1> <div class="blog-lead"> <p>Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game is now available</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class="blog-content"> <p><img align="right" vspace="10" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/support/box-right-civilization-1119.png" hspace="10" alt="">Before you lies a vast bounty of land, ripe for the plucking. Your meager beginnings will influence the paths you must take. Lead your people well and they will take you to infinite heights of greatness. If your civilization manages to endure the ages, your name will hang in every whisper of its legacy...</p> <p><a href="/edge_minisite.asp?eidm=128&amp;enmi=Civilization"><i>Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</i></a> is now on sale at your local retailer and our <a href="http://store.fantasyflightgames.com/productdetails.cfm?SKU=CI01">webstore</a>! Forge an empire to stand the test of time using innovative game mechanics with multiple paths to victory.</p> <p>Will you lead the greatest army in the world to conquer your foes? Or will you be the first to journey to the stars, becoming the most technologically advanced civilization known to man? The choice is yours.</p> <p>Designed by Kevin Wilson, <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</i> is inspired by the legendary video game series developed by Firaxis Games, a 2K Games studio. Players are tasked with guiding an entire civilization throughout the ages, taking ownership of your people’s technology, economy, culture, and military, as well as all the choices that go along with them. There are four different paths to victory, and each is riddled with opposition.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img align="middle" vspace="10" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/game-layout-civilization.png" hspace="10" alt=""></p> <p>In <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</i>, 2-4 players take on the roles of famous leaders in charge of historical civilizations, each with their own abilities. Players will be able to explore a modular game board, build cities and buildings, fight battles, research powerful technology, and attract great people by advancing their culture. No matter what your play style is, there is a civilization for you!</p> <p style="text-align: left;">For more on this exciting new gaming experience, read designer Kevin Wilson’s series of previews: <a href="/edge_news.asp?eidn=1569"><i>Remaking History</i></a>, <a href="/edge_news.asp?eidn=1609"><i>On the Shoulders of Giants</i></a>, <a href="/edge_news.asp?eidn=1673"><i>Pinkies Out!</i></a>, <a href="/edge_news.asp?eidn=1712"><i>Counting Your Chickens</i></a>, and <a href="/edge_news.asp?eidn=1731"><i>War... What is it Good For</i></a>? You can also check out our <a href="/edge_minisite_sec.asp?eidm=128&amp;esem=1">description page</a>, <a href="/media/ffg_content/civilization/support/civilization-rules.pdf">download the rules</a> (pdf, 5.1 MB), or click the image below to view our in-depth video preview.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="/media/ffg_content/civilization/news/video/civ_web.mov"><img align="middle" vspace="10" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/news/video/civilization-video-thumbnail-1.jpg" hspace="10" alt=""></a></p> <p style="text-align: center;"><i>Click the above link to view the video.</i> <i>You can also see it on <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/FantasyFlightStudio">YouTube</a>, <a href="http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/fantasy-flight-games-hd/id334300143">iTunes</a>, and the <a href="/ffg_content/media/front-page-player/player.html">FFG Media Player</a>.</i></p> <p>Head to your local retailer and choose your path to glory!</p> <p></p> <div class="blog-end"></div> <a href="/edge_foros_temas.asp?efid=90"> <div class="forum-btn"> <i class="fa fa-comments"></i> <div class="forum-btn-txt">Discuss this article <br class="hidden-tablet"/>in our forums!</div> </div> </a> <div class="legal-text"> <p>The copyrightable portions of <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</i> is © 1991–2013 Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. and its subsidiaries. <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization, Civ, Civilization</i>, Firaxis Games, the Firaxis Games logo, 2K, the 2K Games logo, and Take-Two Interactive Software are all trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. in the United States and/or foreign countries. Fantasy Flight Supply is a trademark of Fantasy Flight Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved to their respective owners.</p> </div> </div> </div>https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2010/11/18/the-dawn-of-civilization/https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2010/11/12/a-roadmap-to-greatness/ <div class="blog-detail"> <div class="blog-header"> <img class='blog-visual device-break' src='https://images-cdn.fantasyflightgames.com/filer_public/f1/02/f1026f73-5dd6-450a-a791-ccfd7c315143/ci01_preview.jpg' /> <div class="blog-head"> <div class="blog-meta"> <span class="meta-date float-left"> Published 12 November 2010 </span> <span class="visible-desktop" style="padding: 5px;">|</span> <span class="meta-productline"><a href="/en/products/civilization/">Sid Meier&#39;s Civilization</a></span> </div> <div class="blog-titlelead-container"> <div class="blog-titlelead"> <h1>A Roadmap to Greatness</h1> <div class="blog-lead"> <p>The rules for Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game are now online</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class="blog-content"> <p> </p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img align="middle" vspace="10" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/support/box-right-civilization-1119.png" hspace="10" alt=""></p> <p>A great, wide world awaits your burgeoning empire. There are remarkable wonders to create, vast cities to build, and sprawling lands to discover. Can you lead your civilization to greatness?</p> <p>To choose your path to glory, you must first know where it lies. The <a href="/media/ffg_content/civilization/support/civilization-rules.pdf">rules for <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</i></a> (pdf, 5.1 MB) are now available on our <a href="/edge_minisite_sec.asp?eidm=128&amp;esem=4">support page</a>. Download them, and be ready for the imminent release of the season’s most anticipated new board game!</p> <p></p> <div class="blog-end"></div> <a href="/edge_foros_temas.asp?efid=90"> <div class="forum-btn"> <i class="fa fa-comments"></i> <div class="forum-btn-txt">Discuss this article <br class="hidden-tablet"/>in our forums!</div> </div> </a> <div class="legal-text"> <p>The copyrightable portions of <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</i> is © 1991–2013 Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. and its subsidiaries. <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization, Civ, Civilization</i>, Firaxis Games, the Firaxis Games logo, 2K, the 2K Games logo, and Take-Two Interactive Software are all trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. in the United States and/or foreign countries. Fantasy Flight Supply is a trademark of Fantasy Flight Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved to their respective owners.</p> </div> </div> </div>https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2010/11/12/a-roadmap-to-greatness/https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2010/11/4/warwhat-is-it-good-for/ <div class="blog-detail"> <div class="blog-header"> <img class='blog-visual device-break' src='https://images-cdn.fantasyflightgames.com/filer_public/f1/02/f1026f73-5dd6-450a-a791-ccfd7c315143/ci01_preview.jpg' /> <div class="blog-head"> <div class="blog-meta"> <span class="meta-date float-left"> Published 4 November 2010 </span> <span class="visible-desktop" style="padding: 5px;">|</span> <span class="meta-productline"><a href="/en/products/civilization/">Sid Meier&#39;s Civilization</a></span> </div> <div class="blog-titlelead-container"> <div class="blog-titlelead"> <h1>War...What is It Good For?</h1> <div class="blog-lead"> <p>A Designer Diary for Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class="blog-content"> <p><b><img align="right" vspace="10" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/news/designer-diary-1/civilization-box.png" hspace="10" alt="">by Kevin Wilson</b></p> <p>Welcome once again! As the boat approaches, laden heavily with copies of <a href="/edge_minisite.asp?eidm=128&amp;enmi=Civilization"><i>Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</i></a>, we find ourselves at the penultimate installment of this designer diary series. This time, we’re going to talk about the Big Stick itself - War. When I was designing the combat system for <i>Civilization</i>, I wanted something streamlined and fast, that nonetheless allowed technology to play an important role. After a lot of testing, here’s what I arrived at.</p> <p>The first thing to understand is the difference between armies and units. In <i>Civilization</i>, armies are represented by plastic flags on the board and show a player’s military presence in that square. The more flags in a square, the more military presence.</p> <p>However, an army figure can’t do that much by itself, and that’s where units come in. Units are cards representing artillery, infantry, mounted, or aircraft units. Units do the actual fighting in combat, but have no presence on the board without army figures. I like to think of it as “Units make up armies, which are located on the board.”</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img align="middle" vspace="10" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/news/preview5/civ-unit-cards.png" hspace="10" alt=""><img align="middle" vspace="10" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/news/preview5/civ-army-figures.png" hspace="10" alt=""></p> <p style="text-align: center;"><i>Unit cards (left) and Army figures (right)</i></p> <p style="text-align: left;">By themselves, armies are unlikely to win battles, and about all they can be used for is blockading opponents’ resources. You see, a player cannot collect any type of resource (trade, production, culture, silk, etc.) from a square that contains one or more enemy figures. So, it can be fun to let an opponent build a big juicy building and then send one of your armies to sit on it, denying him the building’s benefit. If you like, blackmail him during the trade phase to talk you out of occupying it. Better yet, send along a scout and take its resources for yourself. Ah, but I’m getting ahead of myself. We’ll talk about scouts next time.</p> <p><img align="right" vspace="10" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/news/preview5/civ-unit-knight.png" hspace="10" alt="">For now, let’s look a bit closer at unit cards. After all, they’re kind of funky-looking and at first they seem kind of complicated. I mean, they’re square and they have four sides, all with information. But don’t panic. First of all, you only ever use one side of a unit card at a time.</p> <p>Which side you use is determined by what sort of military techs you’ve learned. For instance, in the case at the right, the player has learned Chivalry, which has upgraded his mounted units to Knights, so he uses the highlighted side of the card. Aside from the picture and unit name, there are only two pieces of info on the unit card – its strength, and its trump symbol.</p> <p>The unit’s strength represents its ability to deal and withstand damage during combat. A unit’s strength starts out between 1 and 3, with 2 being the average, then goes up by 1 for each level of tech. For those of you who prefer dice-based combat, this starting value is actually the randomizer for combat. Just imagine that you only roll the dice one time when you build the unit, and that determines its strength for its lifetime.</p> <p>The unit’s trump symbol indicates what type of unit it’s good against (see below). A unit that trumps another unit in combat always has the advantage. Don’t worry, though, I’ll explain what trumping a unit is good for in a bit.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img align="middle" vspace="10" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/news/preview5/civ-trump-diagram.png" hspace="10" alt=""></p> <p>So, really, each unit card is four cards in one, and only has two pieces of important information on it. Okay, that seems easier, but what about combat itself? It’s also pretty clear if you just break it down one step at a time.</p> <p>First, each side in the battle assembles their battle force. This means that they draw three cards at random from the unit cards they own. There are ways to draw more cards (in particular, having more than one army figure in the battle) but I’m not going to go into that in detail. If you’re interested, check out <a href="/media/ffg_content/civilization/news/preview5/civ-hand-size.png">the list from the rules</a>.</p> <p><img align="right" vspace="10" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/leader-rome.png" hspace="10" alt="">Second, the players each figure out their combat bonus. Combat bonuses usually come from military buildings, great generals, and <a href="/media/ffg_content/civilization/news/preview5/combat-bonus.png">things like that</a>. We’re only interested in the difference between the two players’ bonuses, so we subtract the smaller bonus from the higher one. For instance, if one player has a +12 and the other has a +8, we’ll just consider the first player to have a bonus of +4.</p> <p>Now, we’ve drawn our cards, figured out who (if anyone) has the higher combat bonus, and we’re ready to engage in battle. Briefly, the two players (starting with the defender) now take turns playing unit cards into imaginary areas called fronts. When opposing units are in the same front (basically, when a unit is played to attack a specific enemy unit), they deal their strength in wounds to each other, with a trumping unit getting to attack first. Units that suffer as many wounds as their strength are killed.</p> <p>After both players play the units in their battle force, they add up the strength of their surviving units and the player with the higher combat bonus adds that in (remember the +4 from earlier?). Whoever has the higher total wins the battle (ties going to the defender), and any surviving units return to their owners.</p> <p>Afterwards, the winner collects some loot from the loser, and the game carries on (unless you’ve just conquered another player’s capital, in which case, you win!). Want the longer explanation with some examples? Consult these<a href="/media/ffg_content/civilization/news/preview5/civ-combat-rules.pdf"> pages from the rulebook</a> (pdf, 1 MB).</p> <p>Of course, although it is generally an elegant system, players can find themselves in complex tactical situations when taking into account differences in military tech, number and type of units, and special battle abilities granted by various techs (such as the ones below), but that’s all part of the fun when you go warmongering in <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</i>.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img align="middle" vspace="10" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/news/preview5/civ-card-metalworking.png" hspace="10" alt=""><img align="middle" vspace="10" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/news/preview5/civ-card-mathematics.png" hspace="10" alt=""></p> <p>The release of <i>Civilization</i> is almost upon us. Keep checking back in the coming days for the complete rulebook, then look for my final designer diary in which I talk about some of my favorite parts of the design and tell a couple of stories from the playtests!</p> <p></p> <div class="blog-end"></div> <a href="/edge_foros_temas.asp?efid=90"> <div class="forum-btn"> <i class="fa fa-comments"></i> <div class="forum-btn-txt">Discuss this article <br class="hidden-tablet"/>in our forums!</div> </div> </a> <div class="legal-text"> <p>The copyrightable portions of <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</i> is © 1991–2013 Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. and its subsidiaries. <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization, Civ, Civilization</i>, Firaxis Games, the Firaxis Games logo, 2K, the 2K Games logo, and Take-Two Interactive Software are all trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. in the United States and/or foreign countries. Fantasy Flight Supply is a trademark of Fantasy Flight Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved to their respective owners.</p> </div> </div> </div>https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2010/11/4/warwhat-is-it-good-for/https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2010/10/27/counting-your-chickens/ <div class="blog-detail"> <div class="blog-header"> <img class='blog-visual device-break' src='https://images-cdn.fantasyflightgames.com/filer_public/f1/02/f1026f73-5dd6-450a-a791-ccfd7c315143/ci01_preview.jpg' /> <div class="blog-head"> <div class="blog-meta"> <span class="meta-date float-left"> Published 27 October 2010 </span> <span class="visible-desktop" style="padding: 5px;">|</span> <span class="meta-productline"><a href="/en/products/civilization/">Sid Meier&#39;s Civilization</a></span> </div> <div class="blog-titlelead-container"> <div class="blog-titlelead"> <h1>Counting Your Chickens</h1> <div class="blog-lead"> <p>A Designer Diary for Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class="blog-content"> <p><img align="right" vspace="10" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/box-right-civilization.png" hspace="10" alt=""><b>by Kevin Wilson</b></p> <p>We’ve talked a fair amount about <a href="/edge_news.asp?eidn=1609">technology</a> and <a href="/edge_news.asp?eidn=1673">culture</a> 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.</p> <p>In most editions of <i>Civilization</i>, 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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>In <a href="/edge_minisite.asp?eidm=128&amp;enmi=Civilization"><i>Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</i></a>, 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.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img align="middle" vspace="10" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/news/preview4/civ-city-center2.png" hspace="10" alt=""> <i>An example of a City Center, with arrows indicating the spaces from which it collects resources. For example, this city would have five Production (see below).</i></p> <p>The various icons that might be in a space include:</p> <p><b><img align="left" vspace="4" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/news/preview4/civ-icon_trade.png" hspace="10" alt="">Trade</b>: 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.</p> <p><b><img align="left" vspace="4" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/news/preview4/civ-icon_production.png" hspace="10" alt=""></b><b>Production</b>: 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.</p> <p><b><img align="left" vspace="4" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/news/preview4/civ-icon_culture.png" hspace="10" alt="">Culture</b>: 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 <a href="/edge_news.asp?eidn=1673">my last designer’s diary</a>.)</p> <p><b>Special Resources:</b> 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.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img align="middle" vspace="10" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/news/preview4/civ-icon_silk.png" hspace="10" alt=""><img align="middle" vspace="10" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/news/preview4/civ-icon_wheat.png" hspace="10" alt=""><img align="middle" vspace="10" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/news/preview4/civ-icon_incense.png" hspace="10" alt=""><img align="middle" vspace="10" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/news/preview4/civ-icon_iron.png" hspace="10" alt=""> <i>The icons for Silk, Wheat, Incense, and Iron</i></p> <p>And finally...</p> <p><b><img align="left" vspace="10" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/news/preview4/civ-icon_coin.png" hspace="4" alt="">Coins:</b> 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.</p> <p>Which brings me to the economic victory. As I touched on briefly in <a href="/edge_news.asp?eidn=1569">my first designer diary</a>, 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:</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img align="middle" vspace="10" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/news/preview4/civ-lv1-code-of-laws.png" hspace="10" alt=""><img align="middle" vspace="10" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/news/preview4/civ-lv2-printing-press.png" hspace="10" alt=""> <img align="middle" vspace="10" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/news/preview4/civ-lv1-pottery.png" hspace="10" alt=""><img align="middle" vspace="10" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/news/preview4/civ-lv2-democracy.png" hspace="10" alt=""></p> <p>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.</p> <p>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:</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img align="middle" vspace="10" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/news/preview4/civ-russians.png" hspace="10" alt=""></p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>Join me next time when I talk about military might in <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</i>. Until then, leave a comment and give me your two cents!</p> <p></p> <div class="blog-end"></div> <a href="/edge_foros_temas.asp?efid=90"> <div class="forum-btn"> <i class="fa fa-comments"></i> <div class="forum-btn-txt">Discuss this article <br class="hidden-tablet"/>in our forums!</div> </div> </a> <div class="legal-text"> <p>The copyrightable portions of <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</i> is © 1991–2013 Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. and its subsidiaries. <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization, Civ, Civilization</i>, Firaxis Games, the Firaxis Games logo, 2K, the 2K Games logo, and Take-Two Interactive Software are all trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. in the United States and/or foreign countries. Fantasy Flight Supply is a trademark of Fantasy Flight Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved to their respective owners.</p> </div> </div> </div>https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2010/10/27/counting-your-chickens/https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2010/10/20/seen-through-time/ <div class="blog-detail"> <div class="blog-header"> <img class='blog-visual device-break' src='https://images-cdn.fantasyflightgames.com/filer_public/f1/02/f1026f73-5dd6-450a-a791-ccfd7c315143/ci01_preview.jpg' /> <div class="blog-head"> <div class="blog-meta"> <span class="meta-date float-left"> Published 20 October 2010 </span> <span class="visible-desktop" style="padding: 5px;">|</span> <span class="meta-productline"><a href="/en/products/civilization/">Sid Meier&#39;s Civilization</a></span> </div> <div class="blog-titlelead-container"> <div class="blog-titlelead"> <h1>Seen Through Time</h1> <div class="blog-lead"> <p>Presenting a video overview of Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class="blog-content"> <p style="text-align: center;"><img align="middle" vspace="10" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/logo-civilization.png" hspace="10" alt=""></p> <p>After several informative designer diaries by Kevin Wilson, we have seen how many of the mechanics in <a href="/edge_minisite.asp?eidm=128&amp;enmi=Civilization"><i>Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</i></a> work. In the past weeks we have looked at an overview and <a href="/edge_news.asp?eidn=1569">the multiple paths to victory</a>, <a href="/edge_news.asp?eidn=1609">how technology works</a>, and <a href="/edge_news.asp?eidn=1673">the advantages of a cultured society</a>.</p> <p>Today, Fantasy Flight Games is pleased to present you with a stunning video preview of this exciting new board game. Click below or visit <a href="/edge_minisite_sec.asp?eidm=128&amp;esem=4">the support page</a> to take your tour of <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</i>.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="/media/ffg_content/civilization/news/video/civ_web.mov"><img align="middle" vspace="10" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/news/video/civilization-video-thumbnail-1.jpg" hspace="10" alt=""></a></p> <p style="text-align: center;"><i>Click the above link to view the video.</i> <i>You can also see it on <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/FantasyFlightStudio">YouTube</a>, <a href="http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/fantasy-flight-games-hd/id334300143">iTunes</a>, and the <a href="/ffg_content/media/front-page-player/player.html">FFG Media Player</a>.</i></p> <p>Stay tuned for more information on <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</i>!</p> <p></p> <div class="blog-end"></div> <a href="/edge_foros_temas.asp?efid=90"> <div class="forum-btn"> <i class="fa fa-comments"></i> <div class="forum-btn-txt">Discuss this article <br class="hidden-tablet"/>in our forums!</div> </div> </a> <div class="legal-text"> <p>The copyrightable portions of <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</i> is © 1991–2013 Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. and its subsidiaries. <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization, Civ, Civilization</i>, Firaxis Games, the Firaxis Games logo, 2K, the 2K Games logo, and Take-Two Interactive Software are all trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. in the United States and/or foreign countries. Fantasy Flight Supply is a trademark of Fantasy Flight Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved to their respective owners.</p> </div> </div> </div>https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2010/10/20/seen-through-time/https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2010/10/14/pinkies-out/ <div class="blog-detail"> <div class="blog-header"> <img class='blog-visual device-break' src='https://images-cdn.fantasyflightgames.com/filer_public/f1/02/f1026f73-5dd6-450a-a791-ccfd7c315143/ci01_preview.jpg' /> <div class="blog-head"> <div class="blog-meta"> <span class="meta-date float-left"> Published 14 October 2010 </span> <span class="visible-desktop" style="padding: 5px;">|</span> <span class="meta-productline"><a href="/en/products/civilization/">Sid Meier&#39;s Civilization</a></span> </div> <div class="blog-titlelead-container"> <div class="blog-titlelead"> <h1>Pinkies Out!</h1> <div class="blog-lead"> <p>A look at culture in Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class="blog-content"> <p><b>by Kevin Wilson</b></p> <p><img align="right" vspace="10" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/box-right-civilization.png" hspace="10" alt="">One of the truly revolutionary elements of <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization</i> is that you don’t have to play the game as a warmonger if you don’t want to. Many computer games depict violent activities. <i>Civilization</i> is unusual in that it gives you several peaceful alternatives to conquering your neighbors. Those alternatives include perhaps my favorite strategy in <i>Civilization</i> – culture.</p> <p>A cultural victory represents making your civilization so enlightened and wonderful that other civilizations have no option but to acknowledge it as the greatest civilization in the world, forever cementing its place in history. Personally, I really like the idea of creating this utopia of art and science through my benevolent rulership.</p> <p>Like tech, this was another place during the design process where I wanted to choose the most elegant model available. Rather than having to keep your people happy, accumulating culture simply makes your civilization better off, and if you accumulate enough culture, you win the game.</p> <p>However, while tech came together very quickly for me, culture was a struggle for much of the early design process. I tested out at least five different major mechanics for it. I had the idea that I wanted culture to work like a victory point track, but in a more interesting fashion. What I finally picked was the current incarnation of the culture track.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="/media/ffg_content/civilization/news/preview3/civ-culture-track.png"><img align="middle" vspace="10" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/news/preview3/civ-culture-track-close.png" hspace="10" alt=""></a> <i>The Culture Track from the game board. Click the above image for an expanded view.</i></p> <p>The track is divided into three sections. In order to advance a space along the track, a player must spend the resources shown above that section. For instance, to advance into a space in the first section, it costs a player 3 culture. To advance into a space in the second section, it costs a player 5 culture and 3 trade (we’ll take a look at how you acquire each of these resources in future previews, but suffice it to say, these costs provide compelling strategic decisions). Originally, it was a flat 5 culture to advance into each space, but I found through testing that the track worked better if it followed the growth curve of the game more closely. Anyhow, when you enter a space, you receive the reward shown in that space (either a culture event card or a great person), and if you reach the end of the track, you win.</p> <p>So, what’s a culture event, you ask? Well, there are three decks of cards that correspond to the three sections of the culture track. Each deck has a mix of various action cards that can help a player out in a variety of ways. The first deck has the weakest events, while the third deck has the most powerful effects. Here are a few examples from the first (least powerful) deck:</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img align="middle" vspace="10" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/news/preview3/civ-we-love-the-despot-day.png" hspace="5" alt=""><img align="middle" vspace="10" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/news/preview3/civ-exchange-of-ideas.png" hspace="5" alt=""><img align="middle" vspace="10" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/news/preview3/civ-a-gift-from-afar.png" hspace="5" alt=""></p> <p>And below you can see how events grow more powerful from one deck to the next. Here are three levels of similar cards (note the icon at the bottom of each card indicating which deck it’s from):</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img align="middle" vspace="10" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/news/preview3/civ-defection.png" hspace="5" alt=""><img align="middle" vspace="10" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/news/preview3/civ-mass-defection.png" hspace="5" alt=""><img align="middle" vspace="10" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/news/preview3/civ-wholesale-defection.png" hspace="5" alt=""></p> <p>The culture events were a nice place to include events that I wanted players to be able to do sporadically (such as trading techs or killing figures without a fight) rather than all the time. When even Germany had a tendency to acquire a couple of culture event cards during the game, I knew I had that part of the design right where I wanted it.</p> <p>As for the great people, I wanted them to be simple without ruling out the possibility of doing something more complicated with them later on, so I designed them to operate like a really good building that could be moved around sometimes. And while we’ll get into the nuts and bolts of resources next time, this list of the various great people should start to give you an inkling of what they’re good for.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img align="middle" vspace="10" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/news/preview3/civ-great-people.png" hspace="10" alt=""></p> <p>The final major element of <i>Civilization</i> that is tied to culture is one of the most iconic parts of the computer games – wonders. Wonders are constructed like buildings from a shared market, and many wonders can be built for a discounted cost if the player building it knows a particular tech. Each wonder consists of a token to show where it is on the map and a card which has a special ability, such as the Hanging Gardens (below).</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img align="middle" vspace="10" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/news/preview3/civ-the-hanging-gardens-with-token.png" hspace="10" alt=""></p> <p>There are ancient, medieval, and modern wonders in the deck. All of the ancient wonders appear on the market first, then the medieval wonders, and finally the modern wonders. Ancient wonders are the weakest and least expensive, and they can be obsoleted through the use of certain techs by other players. An obsoleted wonder loses its special ability. Medieval wonders are more powerful, but can still be obsoleted by one higher level tech. Modern wonders, on the other hand, have the strongest abilities and cannot be obsoleted at all. Once modern wonders start showing up, the game is drawing to an end, one way or another. To allow you to compare a few wonders, here’s one from each era:</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img align="middle" vspace="10" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/news/preview3/civ-the-colossus.png" hspace="4" alt=""><img align="middle" vspace="10" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/news/preview3/civ-porcelain-tower.png" hspace="4" alt=""> <img align="middle" vspace="4" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/news/preview3/civ-statue-of-liberty.png" hspace="4" alt=""></p> <p>So, as you can see, culture in <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</i> offers a variety of options for a savvy player to take advantage of. If you choose to specialize in culture, I can promise that you won’t regret it. Pinkies out, ladies!</p> <p></p> <div class="blog-end"></div> <a href="/edge_foros_temas.asp?efid=90"> <div class="forum-btn"> <i class="fa fa-comments"></i> <div class="forum-btn-txt">Discuss this article <br class="hidden-tablet"/>in our forums!</div> </div> </a> <div class="legal-text"> <p>The copyrightable portions of <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</i> is © 1991–2013 Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. and its subsidiaries. <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization, Civ, Civilization</i>, Firaxis Games, the Firaxis Games logo, 2K, the 2K Games logo, and Take-Two Interactive Software are all trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. in the United States and/or foreign countries. Fantasy Flight Supply is a trademark of Fantasy Flight Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved to their respective owners.</p> </div> </div> </div>https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2010/10/14/pinkies-out/https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2010/9/14/on-the-shoulders-of-giants/ <div class="blog-detail"> <div class="blog-header"> <img class='blog-visual device-break' src='https://images-cdn.fantasyflightgames.com/filer_public/f1/02/f1026f73-5dd6-450a-a791-ccfd7c315143/ci01_preview.jpg' /> <div class="blog-head"> <div class="blog-meta"> <span class="meta-date float-left"> Published 14 September 2010 </span> <span class="visible-desktop" style="padding: 5px;">|</span> <span class="meta-productline"><a href="/en/products/civilization/">Sid Meier&#39;s Civilization</a></span> </div> <div class="blog-titlelead-container"> <div class="blog-titlelead"> <h1>On the Shoulders of Giants</h1> <div class="blog-lead"> <p>A Designer's Diary for Sid Meier's Civilization: the Board Game by Kevin Wilson</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class="blog-content"> <p><i><img align="right" vspace="10" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/box-right-civilization.png" hspace="10" alt="">The following is another installment in a series of designer diaries for </i><a href="/edge_minisite.asp?eidm=128&amp;enmi=Civilization">Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game</a><i> by Kevin Wilson. Be sure to check out the previous designer diary <a href="/edge_news.asp?eidn=1569">here</a>. Take it away, Kevin!</i></p> <p>As anyone who’s played any of the <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization</i> computer games knows, technology is right at the heart of the <i>Civilization</i> experience. From the moment you first discover the alphabet, new vistas of choice start opening up before your eyes. Should you discover horseback riding and learn how to train horsemen to increase your ability to explore the land, or should you master navigation in order to start sailing the seas? Decisions like this form the skeleton of the game and I knew that I had to somehow capture that feel for the board game, but at the same time keep things simple.</p> <p>I knew that I wanted technologies to either grant new abilities or improve existing abilities when a player learns them. I also wanted each player to have to research their technologies individually. Although I’ve seen games in which technologies are learned by all the players when one player researches them, I’ve always felt that missed out on a critical element of the experience – choosing your own path and customizing your civilization to meet your play style. So, I decided, every player would have access to the same potential technologies, but would have to unlock them individually.</p> <p>After crunching numbers and distilling down the notes I had taken previously from the various <i>Civilization</i> computer games, I arrived at the conclusion that there were a ton of potential technologies – far more than I could reasonably include in a board game, particularly if I stuck to my guns of an individual tech tree for each player. Also, the way that the computer determined which technologies were available to be learned – a system of prerequisites tracked internally by the computer – just wasn’t going to work the way I wanted it to in cardboard.</p> <p>After a series of trial and error, I came upon the idea of a tech pyramid as opposed to a tech tree. If I assigned a level to each technology and forced the players to ‘support’ each card in the pyramid as it was added, I could avoid a more complicated prerequisite system while still retaining a great feeling that players were building up to the better technologies. As a bonus, the mechanic is super visual and easy to explain:</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img align="middle" vspace="10" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/CiV_Rulebook_ENG-11.png" hspace="10" alt=""></p> <p>Simply put, every level II or higher tech must be supported by two techs of the next level down. Thus, over the course of the game each player builds their own personal pyramid of technologies. This also allows players to explore the various technologies without getting trapped down too many “dead ends.” If you realize too late that you needed a different tech after all, you simply extend your pyramid out enough to support it, rather than starting over again at the beginning of a long chain of prerequisites. This brings us to the technology victory condition. There is only one copy of the level V technology space flight, because the first player who builds it, wins the game. This requires a total of 15 technologies, including space flight itself.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img align="middle" vspace="10" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/civ-diagram-tech-pyramid2.png" hspace="10" alt=""></p> <p>I’m not going to explain how you pay for new techs yet (it involves building up your cities) other than to say that if you’re clever, you can learn a tech every turn, meaning that it takes approximately 15 turns to win the game with a tech victory. But why level V? Why only fifteen techs to win? Why not twenty-one? Twenty-eight? I went with that number for a variety of reasons, namely to keep the game at a reasonable play length. Rigorous playtesting then backed that number up, showing me that my gut feeling was pretty good. It’s always nice when things work out on the first guess.</p> <p>But what do techs actually do for you? They make your civilization <a href="/media/ffg_content/civilization/civ-horseriding-tech.png">faster</a>...<a href="/media/ffg_content/civilization/civ-mathematics-tech.png">stronger</a>...<a href="/media/ffg_content/civilization/civ-banking-technology.png">better</a>:</p> <p>Techs can affect your civilization in a wide variety of ways. But, I’m about out of time for this article, so let me just leave you with an excerpt from the rulebook explaining some of the different things tech cards can do for you. Until next time, happy speculating!</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="/media/ffg_content/civilization/civ-techreference.png"><img align="middle" vspace="10" src="/media/ffg_content/civilization/civ-techreference.png" hspace="10" alt=""></a>  </p> <p></p> <div class="blog-end"></div> <a href="/edge_foros_temas.asp?efid=90"> <div class="forum-btn"> <i class="fa fa-comments"></i> <div class="forum-btn-txt">Discuss this article <br class="hidden-tablet"/>in our forums!</div> </div> </a> <div class="legal-text"> <p>The copyrightable portions of <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game</i> is © 1991–2013 Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. and its subsidiaries. <i>Sid Meier’s Civilization, Civ, Civilization</i>, Firaxis Games, the Firaxis Games logo, 2K, the 2K Games logo, and Take-Two Interactive Software are all trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. in the United States and/or foreign countries. Fantasy Flight Supply is a trademark of Fantasy Flight Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved to their respective owners.</p> </div> </div> </div>https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2010/9/14/on-the-shoulders-of-giants/