In last week’s column, I gushed effusively over civilization building games such as ORIGINS: HOW WE BECAME HUMAN which I consider to be a very worthy example of the genre. However much I enjoy that game, all this talk of tech trees, population expansion, and nurturing a civilization from the Stone Age made me painfully aware that it had been over a decade since the last time I played a game of Frances Tresham’s immortal, absolutely timeless classic CIVILIZATION, first published in 1980 by Hartland-Trefoil and Avalon Hill.

Recalling that ORIGINS has a lot of basic similarity to its ancestor, I went down to the Game Crypt and dusted off the weathered, worn box—itself resembling some artifact of a forgotten era and set to re-reading the rules. I found myself realizing that I deeply missed seeing this classic game on the table so I determined to introduce it to my current gaming group at the following session…none of whom had played the game before but their interest in multiplayer conflict games seemed like a good enough excuse for me to foist it on them.

The result was one of best gaming sessions I have had in years and a epiphany that CIVILIZATION is, along with DUNE and possibly SETTLERS OF CATAN, one of the hobby’s few completely perfect and almost elemental masterpieces, iconic designs whose influence and significance echoes throughout the hobby canon while remaining imminently playable, exciting, and revolutionary regardless of current trends or tastes.

I’m reminded of how it was once said that Stanley Kubrick didn’t make films for audiences but rather for the ages—a concept that is far too lost in every medium obsessed with producing consumable product to meet contemporary expectations. CIVILIZATION is undoubtedly a game for the ages and very nearly as close to a work of art as game design can possibly get, but more than that it stands as an interesting paradox. The Eurogame craze of 1996-2006 saw the hobby turn toward games that were fairly abstract, simplified and stripped down to essential mechanics, strictly procedural, and with reduced or severely mitigated elements of luck or randomness. Strangely, after playing CIVILIZATION for the first time since before I had ever played SETTLERS and any number of Eurogames following that revelation, I realized that all of those key elements were already present in Tresham’s design. The paradox is in that CIVILIZATION never seemed to meet Eurogamers’ demands despite the fact that it was really, in a very real sense, already the greatest Eurogame ever designed fifteen years before everyone got into the wooden cubes and scoring tracks racket. And as such, the game now languishes, rarely played and often even derided by many who know nothing of it other than its reputation.

However, playing CIVILIZATION nearly thirty years after its original publication reveals a game that is actually much simpler than it seems and despite reports of marathon ten or twelve hour sessions, the game is only a four to six hour commitment. The game only covers the period from the Late Stone Age to the Late Iron Age (about 8000 BC to 250 AD) and rather than gum up the works with a lot of detail, Tresham’s design boils the progress of humanity up to that point down to a simplified system for population growth and migration, a closed economy that is tied directly into the size of a civilization and which requires territorial support to maintain settlements and includes trade, and a small set of technological advances representing the key milestones of the period. The game, like all of Tresham’s designs, follows a rigid multi-phased turn structure that upon play demonstrates an intricate, almost uncanny sense of interconnectivity and codependence. With only fourteen pages of very clear rules without exceptions or situational variance, the game is remarkably clean, streamlined, and easy to teach.

Each player represents a historical civilization such as the Babylonians or the Assyrians although the designation means nothing more than a starting location and some shifted requirements on the game’s offboard Archaeological Succession Table, sort of a victory point track that divides the game up into archaeological eras. The goal is to earn enough civilization points (earned by purchasing advances) to qualify for the winning spot at the end of the late Iron Age- there is no victory condition associated with conquest, territorial control, domination, or anything of the sort and in fact there are no on-board resources other than territories containing potential city sites. The game is ultimately all about earning advances no matter how severely the Illyrians stomp the Iberians or how many times Babylon is crushed and rebuilt.

A turn consists of some fourteen phases and although that sounds like trouble, some of them are not conducted each turn if unnecessary and many of them can be handled simultaneously by all players. The basic functions each civilization conducts each turn will see its on-board population increase, perhaps engage in a little migration to expand territory or establish a city, a fight or two in areas where population limits are exceeded, build ships, and generally monitor the logistics to ensure that growth neither outstrips infrastructure nor falls too far behind the development curve. The turn culminates in the acquiring of trade goods, the fruits of city building and an overall barometer of the economic viability of a civilization, and a loosely structured, open trading round.

Each city a player has on the board earns a draw from one of the nine trade good piles. With only one city, the player can only draw from the first pile feature “1” value goods such as hide and ochre. Each successive city gets to draw from its respective pile. Each pile also features a unique calamity that generally causes a lot of woe and gnashing of teeth to the player who has to draw and therefore enact it- some of them are notoriously devastating, such as the much-hated Civil War but most allow the player to share the love of Famine or Flood amongst other players, generally resolved by removing population or reducing cities on the board. Sometimes the losses are quite devastating, but the ebb and flow of the game dictates that nothing really lasts forever and even the great cities of antiquity rise and fall over time. Just don’t get too attached to all those cities down the Nile delta.

It may not be immediately apparent, but as much of the game is in the trading phase as there is in on-board play- in order to acquire enough points to purchase the advances, players have to build sets and the system makes it simply impossible for a player to produce more than one of each item per turn. So a civilization with nine cities produces one of each good but since the values increase exponentially as sets are formed, it is critical to trade for these sets. What that creates is a sense of interdependency between players that the simple trade system spices up by allowing traders to bluff- a trade is a three-item set of which only the total value of the set and one of the items has to be revealed. So I may offer you Salt, Iron, and Gold but really trade you Salt, Iron, and Hide- a much less valuable trade. What’s more, some of the calamites have brown backs and can be snuck into trades, a really nasty element that gives the trading an element of suspicion and trickery. These hidden calamity cards, passed in trade, are also the best and most effective way to attack other players- but be prepared to be considered a pariah at the trade table. As with most elements in CIVILIZATION, finding the right balance of honesty and outright lying is the key to succeeding and getting high-value sets to purchase advances such as, say, Law or Democracy.