Civolution impressions
We signed up for a 4 hour 😬 demo of Civolution during SPIEL23. It’s quite unusual, as most demos only run for 60-90 minutes, but we decided to go for it, as Saturdays are super crowded anyway.
So what is Civolution? In 4 hours we managed to play 2 epochs out of 4, so that should speak for its complexity. It's not the usual streamlined Feld experience.
☝️ The two main features of the game are clever dice action selection and nuanced tableau-building.
The learning curve is steep as there are 22 actions to choose from, and many other things to learn and remember (e.g. 18 different resources). However if you are past the rules teach, the general flow of the game isn't complicated: 🧐 On your turn you just pick two of your dice and use the corresponding action depending on their values.
If you don't have enough dice you can do a reset, meaning you reroll your dice pool and push a token forward, bringing the end of the Epoch closer.
People just play like this in turn order, using 2 dice to do an action or doing a reset turn, until the Epoch’s end is triggered (which has a bunch of different scorings and events).
A game is over after the 4th Epoch, and the one with the most VPs wins 🏆 - in usual Feld fashion you get points for a bunch of things.
There is a lot to do on a central map like bringing in new meeples, moving around, finding new resource sources and extracting these, flipping location tiles, hunting for food, or placing down buildings.
An important part is research: either drawing new cards, or playing them. Your tableau has multiple levels and nuances in how to play cards and pay for them.
This is also where the Evolution part of Civolution comes into play, as green cards are called Mutations. For example I had a card that developed wings for my people, allowing meeples to move anywhere on the map for a cost.
As we played a prototype it was a bit rough around the edges, but it made me interested in the final product next year. It’s main strength will be the engine building, as you get better in many aspects as the game evolves.
