Designed by: Rémi Amy
CIV is both a card game and a play on words: Civ is a traditional abbreviating of ‘civilisation’ for gamers, and what CIV attempts to do is reduce one of those (usually epic) civilisation-building games down to a deck of cards, with zero text on them. The cards are made up six suits, each of which represents an aspect of civilisation.
Your goal is to be the first to gather seven cards of the same suit, and the play of CIV is pretty straight-forward – on your turn, you play a card from your hand to a tableau in front of you, and activate the powers related to any cards on your tableau: if you have three or more of a card, you can activate a passive power for free, or you can discard any card from your tableau (even if you only have one of them) to activate a discard power.
So what are the powers? Well, they all involve the manipulation of cards – swapping, discarding, increased hand size, extra playing of cards on the same turn, forcing other players to need larger sets to win, and so on. One particular power (from the Culture suit) is highly-sought, as it allows whoever has the most culture to copy the power of another player on their turn.
The game continues either until someone hits the target of seven (or more!) cards in the same suit, triggering an instant win, or the deck runs out and a winner is determined from who holds the most majorities in each set.
The options on the cards didn't feel like they resulted in a plethora of opportunities for creative play, on my limited experience.
For a game of set-collection, there's a fair few elements of Take That present: stealing cards, making objectives harder, and so on.
On a first play, probably rather high as you keep referencing what all the powers are. Dropping considerably though as it becomes more about how best to use them.
See Fidget Factor above: your options aren't overwhelming - sometimes it'd be nice to have a few more - but how to implement them is the challenge with CIV.
Cards ensure randomness to some degree, but you can also try different strategies of ambition/aggression or tactical play.
2-4
Players
10+
Years
15-30
Mins
Sam says
After a couple of plays I'm afraid we were still slightly underwhelmed by CIV, which is a shame because I love some things about it: cards with no text - and the passive power/discard power handing you a nice thorny decision to face on every turn. It becomes obvious what you're collecting, and you become a target if you're anywhere near victory. I don't mind the combative nature of that dynamic, but despite the lack of text, it feels rather fiddly and mechanical. For me, though it has the coded-in frustration many other games do so well, it feels too attritional and as a result lacks the spicy, combative humour that usually accompanies the frustration: often more resigned sighs than hearty cackles.