Fantasy Flight Games | Sid Meier's Civilization: A New Dawn | Board Game | Ages 14+ | 2 to 4 Players | 120 Minutes

Product Information

It all starts with the new growth focus card. Every player starts with Irrigation as a new option on their newly extended focus bar. With During your turn, desert and mountain spaces that are adjacent to water or the edge of the map are treated as having a terrain difficulty of 3. Fantasy Flight Games is certainly no stranger to this and often they’re a company that takes smaller risks. However, with their new release of Sid Meier’s Civilization: A New Dawn (Civ: A New Dawn), they’re bringing more Euro-centric game design to a tried and true brand. This title is a civilization game where players will build cities and develop technology, but on a speed and scale rarely encountered in civilization games. 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:

This game feels like its more of a introduction to the series to help entice new players in with a more slimmed down and fluid playing experience, but at the same time could alienate true fans of the core game style. As turns progress, players expand their territory, battle barbarians, grow resources and develop their civilization, all in an effort to achieve three of the agendas set out on the three victory cards. Your First Game of Civilization: A New Dawn At this time, A New Dawn sits nicely in the middle, but with the right investment in future developments, it could really flourish.

Build 1 world wonder. Your production equals this slot's number. Each resource spent to build this wonder increases production by an additional 1. Before 1 of your caravans explores, you may place a water token touching that caravan's space. [2 caravans] When resolving your culture focus card, place additional control tokens based on your latest-era world wonder:

After you place a control token on a mountain space, you may place a control token on a space adjacent to that space (which can trigger the effect again). 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. Move each of your caravans up to 4 spaces. They can move into spaces matching this slot's terrain or lower, as well as water, Water spaces adjacent to your districts are treated as friendly spaces of all terrain types when resolving your districts' abilities.

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This article is about the 2017 board game based on Sid Meier's Civilization. For other board games named Civilization, see Civilization (disambiguation) §Games. Civilization: A New Dawn Civilization: A New Dawn box cover To shift the balance in their favor, the red player spends two trade tokens from their military card. This gives them a final combat value of ten, securing their victory over the blue player’s space. They may now replace the highlighted control token with an unreinforced control token of their own, spreading their influence into the blue player’s territory and putting them in a stronger strategic position to lay siege to the blue player’s city, if the red player can maintain their hold on their newly claimed territory. Impose Your Rule A key concept of Civilization: A New Dawn is the focus row. This is made up of five types of action cards, representing the key areas of interest to your nation: science, military, culture, economy and industry.

With a wide array of choices, leaders must choose what type of civilization they will build. There are five types of focus cards that players can use to advance their civilizations, indicated by an icon in the upper-left corner. Each player’s focus row contains one card of each type, starting with level “I” and advancing as their pursuits come to fruition. During the game, players can acquire advanced versions of their starting focus cards, which have greater impact on the game. At the start of your first turn, choose another player. Take 1 diplomacy card of your choice from that player. You can have any number of diplomacy cards from the chosen player. 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. Each victory card has two agendas. Once you’ve achieved one, place a victory token on that agenda. It doesn’t matter if later in the game you no longer meet the criteria for that agenda. Once your token is on the card, it cannot be removed. As for the districts, think of them as specialized control markers. There are five different types, each having their own set of conditions and characteristics. Slapping a Campus next to some gorgeous mountains and natural wonders will produce scientific trade tokens. If you are a control freak, a Theater Square helps you place some control markers two spaces away with little concern about terrain difficulty.Whether you’ve built countless civilizations from the ground up, or this is your first time guiding your people through the ages, the Terra Incognita expansion is something that you won’t want to miss. With new leaders and map tiles alongside the addition of districts, governments, exploration, and so much more, this is an expansion that’s unlike any other. Your caravans and armies can move into water. When you move a caravan, treat water spaces on the edge of the map as though they are adjacent to each other It contains a powerful and vastly superior new AI, charismatic new leaders and a new revolt and revolutions system. The huge amounts of new content also includes an advanced and reworked diplomacy system, a myriad of new automation options, an adaptive difficulty, and many other enhancements. There are some plastic miniatures included representing the various cities that will crop up throughout the game, which is a nice touch, bringing a 3D element to the board. I suppose they could have made them individual from one another but considering they don’t really bother to do so in the digital version it was not to be expected. You’ll also find some plastic caravans. It occurred to me that the focus row in Civilization: A New Dawn is perfect for operating a programmed opponent, and thus, the idea for the Automated Player was born!