Overview:
In Civolution each of you holds the rank of a local deity which is closely linked to its very own civilization and must lead it to success over the other civilizations. Your developmental possibilities are endless and reach from cultural and technical progress to evolutional adaptations. For example, what would you consider more beneficial to your tribes: inventing the wheel or growing wings? Demonstrate your ability to operate your civilization console and show us how well you can adjust to changeable environmental conditions and mild creational chaos.
Rules & Setup:
For me, Civolution is not a game you can simply sit down and start playing. The rules are quite involved and will take a bit of learning, and for me the best way to do this is to watch one of the excellent How to Play videos out there, whilst reading the rules at the same time.
Set up is somewhat taken care for each player as the player boards fold open, and as long as you open them the right way up, all your main board components are stored in their correct spaces, and you simply add a few tokens and dice once you are ready.
The main board is assembled each time so will again take a few minutes to sort out, and again tokens need placing onto spaces depending on the player count.
Theme:
The theme is that you are a student taking your final exam in Civilization Design from the cosmic faculty of the Technical Academy of Creation.
It is your job to build the perfect civilization.
Gameplay:
Your turns and their subsequent actions are determined by the availability of dice which you use in pairs to select actions on your player board, which in turn allow you to utilise the main board in your quest to build up your own civilization. On you player board there are 15 module tiles placed into slots which start at level 1 and can be upgraded to level 3 during the game. These modules are where you get your actions from, by placing pairs of dice, or a dice and a marker, or even 2 markers (which can be used as dice) and you take turns in player order to do this until you can no longer take actions due to running out of dice / markers and you then perform a reset, in which you will reroll all your dice and reallocate them to the dice pool based on the numbers they show. You can also alter the dice value by one by using an idea marker, including wrapping round on 1’s & 6’s.
There are a set number of resets each round depending on player count, and players can perform this as many times as allowed within that number, i.e. one plyer may perform 2, 3 or more whilst others may only do it once, it all depends on the actions you take with your modules and how many dice / markers you have available to take those actions. You can also gain extra dice during the game by utilising a specific module so your turns will sometimes run longer than other players because you have more dice available to perform more module based actions.
I’m not going to list all the actions and what they do here as there are a lot and it is easier if you check out the game either on the publishers own website, or the game listing on BGG where you can download the rules and see these more detailed for yourself.
Once you reach a point in the 4th era, i.e. when all scoring spaces of the era scoring area are empty the end game sequence is triggered and you carry out the final scoring to determine a winner.
In the final scoring, each civilization gains success points for each of the games 9 scoring categories as well as its console. To do this, advance the phase indicator track by moving along the arrows from hexagon space to hexagon space and at each, score the corresponding category.
Once you are finished with all the scoring, the civilization whose disc is in the lead on the scoring track and thus has the most success points wins. In the case of a tie, the tied civilization that has carried out more module upgrades wins. If this does not break the tie, the tied civilization that comes first in the seating order wins.
Artwork and Components:
The artwork is fine and well done, without being up to the standard of some new releases in my opinion. The rulebook is excellent, very thorough with plenty of pictures and examples to help you learn this involved game.
The main components like the meeples and tokens are again a little basic but do the job adequately well, and the dice are small standard D6 in white and pink.
Could some of the above have been better, probably. Would upgrading them made a difference to what is a very good game, probably not.
The Good:
As mentioned previously the publishers have done an excellent job on the rulebook and the subsequent how to play video in conjunction with people such as Paul Grogan (a must watch IMO if you want to play the game).
Civolution itself is excellent and has been extremely well thought out, and is definitely a game for more experienced game players.
The Other:
The components and dice are a bit basic, but as I said earlier this doesn’t detract from the gameplay, it just makes it feel a little ‘cheap’.
Final Thoughts:
As far as games go, Civolution is a good solid worker placement, action selection game, well thought out and ok to play.
Some have said it’s their game of the year, but I’m not among that group I’m afraid. It’s good, but I’ve enjoyed other games far more than Civolution this past year. I will try it with my gaming friends at some point, as only played solo so far, but if that doesn’t improve my thinking then it might just go in the pile of games that I would consider selling, or swapping.
