The August 2024 FBXG

My bad. I'm really late on this. And worse, I've let FBXG slide! I plan to reboot FBXG in the new year.

Anyway, three guests tried an oldie but goodie, Avalon Hill's Civilization. This got a lot of play back in the 1980s. Which is the last time I played the game. A friend noted not too long ago that it had been re-released. And it seems to be the same game with a more compact map, as far as I can tell.

Bending to popular will, this is a non-wargame. While fighting is part of the game, it is a building and technology game.

We had beer from four players. Plus corn chips, dip, and cookies, plus whatever dinner people wanted to bring:

So we hauled out a game from ancient gaming history. We lost the western edge for only four players and rolled for order of picking your civilization.

The game isn't difficult to play and it came back to us pretty readily. One friend says he swears he's played the game much more recently than the '80s. Some things came back to me only after disaster struck. It really is important to have technology to alleviate disaster cards. In one turn I drew the flood and civil war cards. That hurt. A lot. I was only slowly recovering from the civil war when the game ended.

We wrapped up based on clock time with all players having had an equal number of turns. And the Egyptian player won the game. I must say, I like Egypt:

Ah, memories of playing until dawn under the game rules! Those games generally involved wars of annihilation against the leader to eliminate all their cities and so stop their progress on the archeological succession table path to victory. By the third player approaching victory, too many other empires were too exhausted to burn down all of the new leader's cities.

I recall one game where somebody had to drop out and luckily a friend coming home from the bar was convinced to join us. He was inebriated and had never played. But I was able to explain the game mechanism in terms of maximizing population reproduction.

It would be fun to play this with a full complement. Maybe a special gaming day on a Saturday would work for that.

Much fun. Thanks!