Civilization: the magazine of the new dawn

If, like me, you spent hours of your life developing the Holy Roman Empire’s nuclear weapons program Sid Meier’s Civilization V , the news about the board game version was undoubtedly exciting news.

Last but not least, a way to take a break from the screen, but don't waste valuable Civ time on things like going out or catching up with friends and family!

But is that good? Let's find out. Read the full overview of the board games Civilization: A New Dawn below.

Civilization: a new dawn

RULE THE WORLD AND BUILD AN EMPIRE: This board game based on ...
STRATEGIC GAME: As leaders of competing countries, players must ...
LEAVE YOUR STAMP: With the advancement of their culture, science, economy, ...

Read the full overview of the board games Civilization: A New Dawn below.

A brief overview of civilization: a new dawn

Civilization: New Dawn has taken over the classic video game and produced it in a comprehensive 4X desktop version. Choose from eight different civilizations and then explore , fight, trade and innovate your way to dominate the region.

Each game is set differently, with the map set randomly and the winning conditions selected from the shuffled deck. Players then need to determine with patience and foresight how best to advance in science, military, culture, economy and industry to be at the top.

Just watch out for those annoying barbarians.

Unpacking civilization: a new dawn

According to an old saying, Rome was not built in one day. However, you will have everything you need in this box to build it (and potentially destroy it) in a matter of hours. Here you get:

16 map tiles
1 dial for events
8 guide sheets
80 focus maps
4 technical dials
61 cards
240 tokens
8 miniatures of the city / capital
36 mini trailers
2 cubes

Video game lovers immediately find themselves at home. When you take the map tiles, you’ll see that they’re all made with the classic hexagonal “Civ” map structure, while the artwork fully mimics video games. When everything is ready, you really feel like your digital empire has been transferred to the table. Colors, graphics and design match the game nicely.

Most of the components are made of cardboard, such as map tiles, which makes it seem to me that this could cope with years of rigorous play, but overall it works well. Still, watch out for long, thin focal rods that are likely to fail first.

Some of the plastic Miniatures included represent the different places that will appear throughout the game, which is a pleasant touch and brings a 3D element to the board. I guess we could make them mutual individuals, but given that they don’t really bother with that in the digital version, it wasn’t expected. You will also find some caravans.

It would be nice if there were some attractive plastic wonders there, but maybe that’s a little ambitious!

How to play Civilization: New Dawn

Setup

For starters, each player chooses which civilization he wants to play and takes the appropriate pieces. Then take the sharpening line and sharpening cards and place the sharpening cards in the order dictated by the leader of your civilization to create your sharpening line. One of these will be a foreign trade card, place your trailer card on it .

Now is the time to make a map. This is done at random by following specific rules in the policy . Then, for each icon on the board - such as resources, barbarians, and city-states - place a matching token on it.

Then set the decks for each type of Question and choose three random winning cards and place them face up against the board.

The goal of the game

The object of the game is to reach one of the agendas on each of the three winning cards that were randomly selected at the beginning of the game.

Each winning card has two programs. When you reach it, put a win token on that agenda. It doesn’t matter if you no longer meet the criteria for this agenda later in the game. Once your token is on the card, it can no longer be removed.

The first person to have a token on all three cards wins.

Focus line

The key concept of civilization: the new dawn is the central line. It consists of five types of action maps that represent key areas of interest to your nation: science, military, culture, economy and industry.

The line runs from left to right. The more the card is in the right slot, the stronger it is. Each turn can be played on a card from any slot, but when you do, it moves back to the first slot and everyone else moves up to replace it.

Therefore, the longer you leave the card, the stronger it can become. You will also be able to upgrade each card throughout the game.

Also note that each slot in the focus line has a type of terrain. Harder / more valuable terrain continues to be a type of focus and will affect the actions you can take.

When turning

The player's move consists of selecting a card from their focus line and resolving its effect. Playback then passes to the next player. The five cards work like this:

Culture - Place control tokens on the hex next to your existing territory and claim its resources. The higher the focus bar, the more chips you can place. Also, you can only place chips on the terrain that matches the slot where the card was.
Science - Move your technical dial to match the focus bar where the card is. Once your technical dial reaches the 'technology level' mark, you can upgrade any of your focus cards to that level.
Economy - Move your trailer to the number of spaces shown on your card. If you get to a city-state or a competing city, you get trading tokens that you can place on your focus cards to maximize their effects. Do not move the caravan to terrain with a sharper focus than the card.
Industry - this allows you to build a new city or marvel. If you are building a site, you can only build it on the type of terrain that matches the focus slot in which the card is located. It must also be in the territory you control, or where you have a trailer. If (if you want to adore the world and give yourself powerful abilities) you create a miracle, the slot contributes to its cost.
Military - either strengthen your defenses or carry out an attack. The focus slot affects how many territories you can strengthen or how strong your attack is.

Attack resolution refers to who has the highest combat value between attacker and defender. This is determined by rolling the dice on both sides and then adding any bonus for the attacker / defender. There is also the option to spend merchant tokens for extra points.

Event number

When the game starts, the starting player will move forward to represent the time before moving the event number. In this case, a global event (i.e., an effect not caused by the player) may occur. This basically controls the movement and operation of the barbarians on the map and whether or not you receive taxes from the city-states that you control in the form of trade tokens.

Moving through the game

As progress changes, players expand their territory, fight barbarians, grow resources, and develop their civilization, all in an effort to reach the three programs listed on the three winning cards.

Your first game of civilization: a new dawn

Civilization: New Dawn isn't too complicated a game, but it could take a few turns before everything falls into place. This is partly because I think the policy makes things a little more complicated than they really are. However, it conveniently offers a tile layout that you can use for the first game while walking through the first few turns.

One rule that you obviously miss on a regular basis is that when you increase your focus cards on the card, you only have three trading chips allowed at a time. If you miss this, you’ll probably end up piling them up high on your military charts, which can severely distort playing into a combat aspect. This is hidden at the end of the trading chips section in the policy, so you can easily miss it when the game is running.

Also note that in the event that you fail to attempt an attack, you can try to attack that target again at the same turn. Maybe you’ll get a better ending this time!

Advantages disadvantages

Advantages:

A solid game for building empires
Some good mechanics
Randomly sets the setting to increase repeatability

Civilization: New Dawn fits nicely into the 4X and engine building category. There are quite a few things running in the background, and any fan of strategy games will enjoy it when he grinds his teeth. In particular, I thought that the balance between science, military, culture, economy and industrial civilizational traits is really strong, as often with these types of games it quickly becomes clear that some areas of focus are more effective than others.

Randomly determining the conditions of victory contributes greatly to this balance, which is why all the attributes are important at the same time. This also contributes nicely to the repeatability of the game, which is also encouraged by the fact that you have eight civilizations to choose from and you can set the map tiles differently each time, creating unique strategic challenges that need to be overcome.

The focus bar mechanic is a really outstanding feature for me. This requires players to think long-term about their actions and plan multiple turns in advance. Every time you don’t play a card, it’s an investment in its future power, but how long can you last? It’s also a lot of fun to map out which maps you need at which point along a sharp line, no matter how tedious.

Weaknesses:

Does not match video game
Maybe too simplistic
The military aspect is disappointing

All of this, however, revealed me when I came into the game as a big fan of the original Civilization video game. Especially the military aspect. You have no military units to move around, nor do you have combat tactics to command. Instead, the fight takes place by expanding your territory and is solved by simply rolling one matrix. This makes it an incredibly transactional affair that completely sucks out any sense of military conquest .

Of course, I understand that the higher you go up the chain of command, the more detached you are from what is happening on the ground. But that goes too far. Military combat becomes only a numerical exchange. Forget everything you know about military siege. This exchange is more like taking on the role of a corporate behemoth maneuvering to evict an old man to build a shopping mall.

Unfortunately, the same can be said for the other available measures, all of which have been removed to fit the desktop version. They are all there and working perfectly well. But compared to the original, they lost what impressed them. In the end, each course was too simplistic to make it feel like a comprehensive strategy game. You get one campaign and that’s it. Now wait for the next one.

TL; DR

Civilization: New Dawn is a decorated, desktop version of a video game that many of us already know and love. Like his digital counterpart, the goal is to expand his empire, discover new lands, build world wonders, and conquer adversaries. As a direct 4X game it does its job well.

Unfortunately, there were a lot of tiny details and intricacies in the conversion to analog that made the original so inspiring, on the side. So while this is a good experience in itself, hard Civ fans may not exactly get what they’re looking for.

Conclusion: a verdict?

Overall, Civilization: New Dawn is a fun and comprehensive 4X strategy game. He is a solid builder of empires that requires a lot of thinking and anticipation to play well. Focus Mechanic in particular is a really interesting concept that encourages a much more time-consuming and patient style of play.

However, as part of the entire Civilization A New Dawn franchise, it doesn’t cut me off yet. The team rightly tried not to pack too many moving parts of the original to avoid detailed overweight. But that unfortunately hurts some of the features that make the original series of video games so exciting. It suffers mainly from military conquest.

I would compare it to Weezer’s cover of the classic song Toto ‘Africa’. If you are exposed to this song for the first time, you will probably have a nice time. But for those who already know the original, it simply won’t be the same.

Civilization: a new dawn