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At heart, Civ: A New Dawn is an action selection, civilization building game for 2-4 players that takes about 30 minutes per player to play. It definitely plays best with 3 or 4 players. Gameplay Overview: The focus bar mechanic is a real stand-out feature for me. This requires players to think long-term about their actions and plan several turns in advance. Each time you don’t play a card is an investment in its future strength, but how long can you hold on? Similarly, it’s great fun mapping out what cards you need at what point along the focus row, as grueling as it can sometimes be. Cons: The victory conditions in this expansion are slightly modified, resulting in military interaction with other players. You have the usual three goal cards as you would expect and two new fort goals. Unlike the three main goal cards, you can lose fort goal cards, and winning the game requires you to complete four out of the five goals. It is still a glorified race similar to the base game, which might be a problem for some of you. Ending On A High Note
It would have been nice if there’d been some eye-catching plastic wonders in there, but perhaps that’s a little ambitious! How to Play Civilization: A New Dawn Setup To aid you in raising a powerful empire, resources scattered around the board will in turn allow you to construct world wonders. These constructs will provide not only bonuses during the game,but will be essential to completing objectives to win too. On top of all this, barbarians are present to derail your plans of domination with there movement and actions determined via an event dial and direction token.Before 1 of your caravans explores, you may place a water token touching that caravan's space. [2 caravans] Straight out of the box, the components and artwork stays true to Sid Meier with that old school feel but with fresh revamps in places. With a mixture of plastic tokens as well as cardboard ones, it's a nice balance and looks pleasing once set-up. Be warned though, invest in some plastic grip seal bags to keep the tokens separate as only a few are provided in the box and it helps with faster setup times. I dislike expansions that throw the base game out the window. Not this time. Read our review of Civilization: A New Dawn – Terra Incognita.
Build 1 world wonder. Your production equals this slot's number, plus 1 for each of your districts on the map.
The Ideal Foundation
Build 1 world wonder. Your production equals this slot's number. Each resource spent to build this wonder increases production by an additional 1. Economy – move your caravan the number of spaces shown on your card. If you reach a city-state or rival city, you get trade tokens, which can be placed on your focus cards to boost their effects. You may not move your caravan into terrain that is in a higher focus slot than the card. Final Score: 4.5 Stars – An amazing game that can only get better with expansions. Unfortunately, these are also desperately needed to give life to long-term playability. Earth is running out of precious space to build new settlements and produce food to sustain the population – this is when the world’s finest brains turn to the sea bottom. In Underwater Cities, 1-4 players attempt to build the most sophisticated system of dwellings on the sea bottom, using politics, science and production to sustain the operation and give mankind a new chance. These districts bring an undeniable advantage, but they can’t be triggered at the drop of a hat. A redesigned event dial now features the district icon, allowing you and your opponents to trigger all of your districts whenever this icon is selected. These reformed event dial also indicates when players can use another new addition to the game in Terra Incognita: changing their form of government.
Overall, Civilization: A New Dawn is an enjoyable and complete 4X strategy game. It’s a solid empire-builder, requiring a lot of thought and foresight to play well. The focus bar mechanic, in particular, is a really interesting concept, which encourages a much more long-term and patient style of play. As mentioned before, the artwork and design is great, with time and effort being put into making this feel like a tribute to its gaming ancestor from the 90s. Having eight different races to guide through the ages adds variety each time you play and the unique focus card play system is refreshing. The tech dial upgrades give you the sense of improving your choices as you progress too. Once you've grasped the basics, you spend minimal time browsing the rule book looking for clarification on things, so again another plus. A player’s turn consists of choosing a card from their focus row and resolving its effect. Play then moves on to the next player. The five cards act as follows:
Leave Your Mark
Neutral policies will try to remain in your good graces as you pivot towards your unique game objectives, which could often involve the building of several wonders of your own. The expansion for the game, Terra Incognita, creates even more tension and makes a victory more hard-won and fought, adding a bit of oomph to the core gameplay. When resolving a focus card, if you have a diplomacy card from a city-state of that focus card's type, resolve it as though it is 1 slot farther to the right. This is a game of gentle but firm conflict as is usually the case with Stegmaier’s titles and a game that feels and plays like a civilization title from top to bottom. It’s one of our favorite titles to try and a worthy member of the best civilization board games. So anyways after thoughts, as my other choice is Agricola. I love worker placement games and I know it's the king.
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