Civilization: A New Dawn

Board Game Geek Reviews

1. 7 out of 10

   adebisi

   I find New Dawn and the previous Sid Meier’s Civilization game from FFG completely different games so there is no point in going into too lengthy comparisons here. New Dawn plays much faster with simplified mechanics, less downtime und fewer rule breaking situations. Nice. However, as a result of streamlining and cutting down the length, it has less depth and especially the tech tree has experienced considerable simplifications. Speaking of the techtree, this is the most brilliant part of the game IMHO. Technological advances are tied to upgrading your actions. Moreover, action selection is based on an ingenious system which allows you to wait longer before taking an action in order to make it stronger. Once an action is taken, it is cycled down to the bottom and it becomes weaker. This creates interesting decision making problems when you desperately need to do something immediately, but that might be against your longer term plan. You also cannot completely omit any aspect of your civilization since otherwise the action related to that aspect (e.g. military, technology, economy…) would indefinitely occupy a space on the action track and prevent the other actions from cycling up to stronger positions. This action selection system is also the opportunity for optimisers to gain advantage over their opponents if you manage to phase your actions perfectly. In order to win, you have to meet 3-out-of-5 victory conditions (such as, control certain number hexes or control wonders). Most of the time, it is quite intuitive, what you should do in order to get closer to your goals. However, there are situations when it takes experience to spot the opportunities as sometimes it may be a bit counterintuitive to see which hexes are within your reach. Since the victory conditions are discrete, the game end can sometimes be triggered somewhat abruptly when one player makes sudden leap to fulfill all conditions. King making situations can occur, though, when other players still get a chance to deny that player the win and let someone else win instead. This is a minor thing, though. The bottomline is that, this game offers a 4X experience in a timeframe manageable for busier people. It may not be as epic as longer civ games but it still offers a more than e.g. dice based civ games thus filling the gap between the two.

2. 8 out of 10

   alcofa

   Very good new version of the classic series. Plays much more faster than previous version and more abstract too. Like it!

3. 5 out of 10

   Ammorphalisk

   Focus row mechanic is nice, but doesn't seems balanced, lacks variablity and still there is a lot of randomness (barbarians and dice for attacks) and possibility of screwing with attacks. Also there are always the same wonders, upgrades and neutral cities (which seems weird also). The starting locations also are a bit of unbalanced.