I doubt that I will be the only person reading this article who grew up in the age of video games, and I would wager that many who hold this magazine have spent countless hours in front of computer or TV screen, controller in hand, forging great civilisations from the ground up in games such as Pharaoh or Masters Of Orion. Whether on earth or in space, the idea of exploring previously unknown territory, building a functioning civilisation and guiding it towards technological achievements and wonders has a strong, near irresistible pull.
The master of them all, though, is surely Sid Meier’s Civilization, a game so groundbreaking in its time and so developed in its various later incarnations that it must have stolen millions of gaming hours from screen-bathed gamers the world over during the past twenty years or so. However, time creeps up on even the most dedicated of players, and they will forge relationships in that troublesome real world, start families, maybe even confront their own mortality, and realise that time spent together, possibly even over a table, is worth more than time spent on a screen. Many of us have experienced that move from screen to cardboard, but still hanker after the kinds of thrills and experiences that we once felt from the comfy end of the sofa.
Playing a cardboard version of those computer games brings its own problems, though, and many attempts to provide a full-on Civ experience have to tread a delicate balance between detail and gaming length. Include too much from the computer games and you place your board game firmly into the long and heavy category, rendering it difficult to get to the table for all but the most dedicated of players, and presumably adding to the complexity of the rules as you do so. Include too little and the game loses its challenge and authenticity, and instead earns the “Civ-light” moniker, damning it with faint praise.
There is also the whole issue of set up and tear down times, as well as nooks and crannies of ruledom that can threaten to lengthen (at best) or entirely derail (at worst) the gaming experience, and that is without mentioning the need for piles of chits, cards, counters and the like.
However, Sid Meier’s Civilization: A New Dawn aims to present gamers with a viable and approachable middle ground, and loudly proclaims its official approval from the front of the box. It is by no means the first Sid Meier’s Civilization game, though, as two such games – confusingly with identical titles – have appeared before, but this is the latest, shiniest and, in comparison with the others, leanest take on that game thus far, promising to clock in at only two hours with the maximum count of four players. Compare that with the four to six hour playtimes mentioned by its older siblings and it only takes the most rudimentary of mathematical calculations to realise that it stands a good chance of being played at least twice as much, and that has to be a good thing.
It comes courtesy of Fantasy Flight, and players should therefore expect a multitude of cards and tokens, rules and subrules, and in this they will not be disappointed, but they will also get the best stuff that FF manage to put into their games, namely theme, smooth play (after a while, naturally), and a polished and professional product. You also get those standard FF annoyances, such as the one-size-just-about-fits-all insert, the lack of player aids, and a set of rules that, while intuitive after a while, sets its players hunting for important information like explorers seeking new resources.
Having said that, for a game that attempts to encapsulate most of what makes a Civ game tick, A New Dawn is commendably parsimonious in its rules. One might expect the two-book approach of something like Star Wars: Rebellion, but instead A New Dawn comes with a single booklet, and the very core of the game, essentially what a player does in their turn, takes up only a single page. This is all refreshingly simple, and you might well wonder if that is all there is to it, but the simple choice a player gets to make on their turn is only the very tip of the iceberg. When their turn swings around a player chooses a card from underneath their focus bar, activates it, and then slides it to the leftmost of five slots, moving the remaining cards rightwards to fill the gaps. Yes, the details behind this take up the rest of the rules, but this is still a laudably economical approach to a game – simple choices, difficult decisions.
The aforementioned focus bar is the core of A New Dawn, its regularly beating heart. There are five slots underneath this bar in which sit a player’s cards, representing Science, Military, Economy, Culture and Industry, arranged at the start of the game according to the empire they represent, but the grit in the oyster, the detail that makes the pearl, is that a card gets stronger as it moves rightwards. In pure and simple terms, the longer you leave an action, the more powerful it becomes when you finally get around to using it.
Leave one aspect of your civilisation to develop for a few turns and suddenly your caravans will be able to traverse more difficult terrain, your army will be stronger, your technology will advance more quickly, but, critically, not all at the same time. At the start of the game this feels positively airy and light as your imagined populus gets on with things, but in the end game players will be trying to do very specific things in a very specific order and will often find themselves backed into a corner where they have to commit the worst of gaming sins – waste a turn.
A New Dawn dispenses with a few areas of the computer game in an attempt to keep gaming time to a reasonable length, so those who would like to see what lies beyond the fog at the beginning of the game will be disappointed, as the board is set up already populated with resources, natural wonders, capital cities and city states. It also comes with barbarians ready to rampage, so even though the initial exploration has been dealt with most of the elements that one would encounter in the computer game are present.
However, some areas of the computer game are well integrated, incorporated into the game in an effective and unfussy way. I am thinking particularly of the barbarians, the scourge of Civ players for many a year. These folks, represented by tokens, will move across the map essentially at random, with their direction decided by a die roll, and will destroy or interfere with whatever they might come into contact with. They can be attacked, in which case a player will gain a Trade Token, which can be used to strengthen a card, but will respawn on the map later in the game. At a push they can even be wiped out, which usually gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling inside, but means that I have probably spent a move doing so that could have been better used elsewhere.
Diplomacy is also an aspect of the family of Civ games that works well in A New Dawn. There are long term benefits of dealing either with your competitors or with the city states on the board, bonuses that can help in combat, for example, or in any other number of ways. Putting together a synergy of various diplomatic agreements is one of the most satisfying parts of A New Dawn. The wonders work in a similar fashion, granting a player long-term abilities, as well as providing a stepping stone to the fulfilling of goals.
The combat in A New Dawn has received a little criticism here and there for being overly complicated, but seasoned wargamers will have no problem at all dealing with what are, in effect, pretty simple modifiers that are based on who a player might be attacking and what terrain they happen to be occupying. As so often in a Fantasy Flight game, it would have helped no end to have had this kind of information supplied on individual player aids, but at least there is a summary on the back of the rule book, even if the approach that assumes players will simply pass this around is disappointingly dismissive.
The goal of the game is to achieve three victory conditions, and these vary from game to game depending on which of the five relevant cards are dealt onto the table. Each of these has two options players may choose to fulfil, cleverly designed to be mutually contradictory. The state of the board can alter radically as it progresses, so players need to be both flexible and swift in attaining the goals, and the end of a game of A New Dawn can come suddenly as players reach the point where they are able to achieve all three objectives in short order, and this can also sometimes be a trigger for full-scale aggression to break out over the board as the different civilisations fight over control of resources or wonders. The way that a fragile but peaceful coexistence can suddenly degenerate into all-out war is, frankly, frightening, and players had better beware of the civilisation that has Nuclear Power sitting in slot 5…
The theme sits lightly and effectively on A New Dawn’s bones, even if at times the game can feel like a wonderfully intricate and imaginative game of reimagined chess. These chits and those plastic figures are really just pieces with certain powers, even if they represent a caravan or a control token, but what this does is to render the game enjoyable both by those who adore abstracts (such as me) and those who avoid them (such as my partner). There is the faint perfume of Tigris about this, a level of thematic engagement under which clicks and whirrs a polished abstract soul, and it is wonderful to behold.
Like almost every Fantasy Flight game I have ever encountered, A New Dawn’s base box comes almost begging for expansions – more wonders, more civilisations, more abilities – and those will surely come, probably sooner rather than later. The game is complete in and of itself, and will happily support many plays, but it is abundantly clear that this is the starting point for a journey of exploration, and that sounds wonderfully and thematically appropriate.
While A New Dawn is at its best with the full complement of four players, it works with good effect even at lower player counts, and is still an engrossing and interesting experience with two. There is enough gaming noise going on around the players – barbarians, wonders, city states, diplomacy, resources – to create an experience which, while slightly shallower than with four, nevertheless represents a fulfilling experience. To get the most out of the game, though, players will need to attack it several times – we found our first experience a little underwhelming, but familiarity and further plays have revealed that A New Dawn just gets better and better pretty much every time it hits the table.
In summary, then, A New Dawn cannily sidesteps those things which it is unable to do, and instead picks its battles wisely, but the corollary to that is that its players need to manage their expectations going into it. For those who seek something akin to the computer game that plays in a couple of hours and can present an enthralling and engaging challenge whatever the player count, A New Dawn provides great value for gaming money however many other people you have around your table, but be aware that it is the distilled essence of that game rather than a direct translation of it. For diehards who want more there is always the behemoth that is the original board game, although you will certainly need both more time and a bigger table. As a stepping stone to that experience, however, or even as a destination in itself, A New Dawn works just fine and is perfectly civilised.
Originally published in Yaah! magazine
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