How proceedeth the boardgame?

[Ethelred]

I never played it but that was a PC version of the Board Game. I don't know how close it came to the real thing.

Link to review.

http://www.gamesdomain.com/gdreview/zones/reviews/pc/dec/advciv.html

[khyron]

I've got the PC version of AC. It's...slow. But so was the boardgame. When I was young and didn't have a life.... ....I used to play it sometimes, when my friends and I couldn't get together to do the boardgame.

[Ethelred]

The boardgame usually was an all day game. Start early and end in the evening with seven players. It helps if you use a timer to limit the discusions.

[khyron]

All day? Timer? What foreign and alien concepts are these? You're right of course, and in hindsight, it would have saved us a lot of time over noting unit locations at the end of an 8-hour stretch so we could resume the following weekend...and sometimes the weekend after that...if we had done it your way. But we were such gluttons for punishment back in the day....

In that vein, I'm interested in seeing what this new game has to offer in the way of shortened versions. I'm sure that I could get wifey to sit and play this boardgame for a long time--heck, she loves a good long game of Risk--but she works, and I work, and time is a precious commodity.

[Ethelred]

Originally posted by khyron
All day? Timer?

Our gaming group started with Diplomacy. Half of us lived in Long Beach and the other half in Pasadena which are about an hour apart depending on traffic. So we usually spent the whole day in one city or the other. The rules for Diplomacy include a timer on the discussion phase so we were used to using a timer. We didn't always use one for Civilization though. Only if it got out of hand.

[khyron]

We were of the opposite extreme with Civilization. The limit on the number of trades per turn was tossed out, we did private negotiations, both in-game and during breaks...any way we could think of to make that game more spicy. Of course, unlike your case, Ethelred, we all lived about 10 minutes apart, and that was when a good Floridian storm was blowing through during summer. So we had time to waste in spades.

Tossing the trading limit kinda made things amusing, because after the third round of trading, you could always figure out who had which calamities, and how badly they were going to get whammed with them...many was the time that desperation to make "really sweet deals" was met with mockery at the misfortune that was about to befall the victim. (By the way. Ever up the number of barbarians that would sweep through to...25? Needless to say, we were in an odd mood that day. )

[Ethelred]

I don't remember barbarians except maybe as a disaster card.

We didn't have rounds of trading. Everyone was at the table and we just traded with each other till we were done or if needed, time was up. I learned to count cards on the big disasters and it was REALLY hard to trade a disaster to someone. Card count, one card specified and a point total makes it pretty to slip one by. A person either has to need a card bad or been a bit distracted to get caught IF you play by the rules.

I had to learn to count the cards and to control my city count to avoid the drawn disasters. Playing a trading game with my brother tends to be futile if don't use every technique you can think off. About the only games I have a tactical edge on him have been Monopoly and Clue and my edge in Monopoly was that my brother kept forgetting that my Mother was a sucker for railroads.

[khyron]

Exactly, the Barbarian Hordes disaster card. The base number of barbarians was 15, they started in the victim's start area and basically went after the juiciest targets they could find until there were no more attackers available.

We would experiment with a lot of rule customizations, though none of them were too unusual. (There was a section in the back of the Adv. Civ manual that had some really radical changes to the mechanics. We didn't use these.) One way we avoided the counting of commodity cards was to shuffle the stacks at the end of every trade session, no matter what was traded. That way you just never knew. Piracy could pop up in two consecutive turns, Civil War could do the same. Alternatively, you could end up with ages of total tranquility.

On topic, that's one advantage of the boardgame format for this new Civilization. As Rusty Gamer said, if you think a rule can be done a little better, great, more power to ya. That's why God invented "house rules."