From: manray97@hotmail.com (Cleburn) Newsgroups: rec.games.board Subject: A positive review of Sid Meier's Civilization I've read some lengthy negative reviews of SMC and I find myself having to respond simply with a positive review. I've played the game 3 times so far, once with the basic rules and twice with the full rules. The basic game is clearly for kids and wasn't played to conclusion because it was too simple for our tastes. The two advanced games, however, were great. The group that played the advanced games mainly consisted of hard core historical gamers who like occational diversions like Settlers and so forth. Before our second advanced game we created some spreadsheets and printed them out to show which technologies had been bought and who to pay royalties to for building the various units in the game. Despite that there were no other changes. No house rules were used. We got through the ancient period in 2 hours. Maybe a little less. I cannot imagine how you could remain in the ancient period for any longer than that. We could have probably advanced much faster if we felt a pressing need for it. The suggestions for the combat system (using the charts as a shield) were ignored and instead we took our armies in our hand under the table and produced them one at a time. Since there isn't a lot of combat each turn this wasn't a big deal and had a nice fog of war effect for those with bad short term memories. Since most of us are approaching our 40's this is becoming an issue! The tech tree and the royalty system are great. They differ from the computer game but yet there is that flavor of civilization the computer game writ in boardgame format. The game emphasised building great nations over causing great bloodshed and I think there are many lessons to be learned from that. The Civilization Computer game takes about 20 hours or more to complete (well, Civ II did, not sure about Civ III). This game would take around 6 hours total with our group. We never played it that long but we could have if other time constraints were not pressing. I do suggest having some paper handy to track the largest city size the can be built and who to pay when you build a unit and also what technologies have been bought. It isn't necessary but it made our games go much faster. I hope someone finds this review helpful. I am not a professional boadgame critic so just take it as the praise of a regular joe who enjoys the game.