If you’ve ever spent time on any of the board game websites that actively discuss such issues as whether a box lid fits too tightly or if an expansion’s cards might be a shade or two lighter on the Pantone chart than those in the base game, you’ve likely realized how extraordinarily lame the board gaming hobby can be in the wrong hands and also that there are certain “Holy Grails” of game design, most of which involve taking the concepts and mechanics of older, longer, and more complex games and stripping them down to ninety minutes and three pages of rules.

Chief among these design grails has been the quest for the “Civ-lite” game, an idealized condensation of the significant thematic elements of trade, exploration, conflict, and culture building embodied to near-perfection by Frances Tresham’s classic CIVILIZATION, which I effusively reviewed here a few months ago. Of course, boiling down thousands of years of history and development into a 90-minute game seems like a fool’s errand tantamount to squeezing the dynamics of a role-playing game into a BEJEWELED clone (PUZZLE QUEST notwithstanding).

Many games have come and gone that have purported to be the vaunted “Civ-lite”: the very great MARE NOSTRUM, which winds up being not very “lite” after all and stands on its own as a game of Mediterranean conquest and commerce; the super-hyped and utterly repulsive TEMPUS that employed every Eurogame design trick in the book to make for a perfectly balanced and perfectly boring exercise in abstraction; 7 AGES, with its 14 hour play time was anything but “lite” despite having an amazing sense of scope; and THROUGH THE AGES turned out to be a Euro-style card drafting game with little player interaction and no geography. I’ll not mention SID MEIER’S CIVILIZATION board game any further than necessary out of respect for Mr. Meier.

So the “Civ-lite” game has proven to be elusive quarry for even the most ambitious game designer, and many (including myself) have argued that it is an impossible goal in the first place—civilization is a vast, complex, and rich subject that simply can’t be reduced to a précis that invariably excludes key elements and factors that make a civilization-building game what it is and what it should be. Yet many persist, insistent that somewhere out in the ether is a game that manages to reign in the concepts of commerce, technological development, conflict, geographic elements, cultural progression, and a sense of nurturing a civilization to its highest glory within a framework that offers both accessible rules and playtime.

Into this hypothetical search for the Civ-lite game enters an Australian grad student who doesn’t even realize that he will lead me into a shocking revelation. He’s writing a thesis about social gaming and he emails me to see if I would be willing to be interviewed as part of his research. In particular, he’s interested in how European designs have changed social gaming so the first thing he asks me is to describe how I became interested in Eurogames in the first place, a story that takes us all the way back to 1996- long before the genre would denigrate into a seemingly endless series of multiplayer solitaire games where players spend 90-120 minutes staring at individual player boards and trying to figure out how to squeeze out an extra victory point. Long before Eurogames would be made available on Xbox Live, and long before I ever thought I’d be writing a board gaming column for a video gaming website. His question jogged my memory and reminded me of something that the last 12 years of hobby gaming history have somehow obscured.

At that point in the mid 1990s, my friends and I were in the deepest, darkest throes of addiction to MAGIC: THE GATHERING but we would often break out a board game to change things up; usually one of the games we played in the 1980s like AXIS AND ALLIES, TALISMAN, or CIVILIZATION. There’s no doubt that these games are long and involve a degree of commitment to get the most out of and since we were all equally interested in going to concerts, seeing movies, dating girls, and pursuing other interests those games were kind of waylaid in favor of other pursuits. Even though we could do all those things and still play a couple of hands of MAGIC every time we got together, we did miss boardgaming on a regular basis. One day I was in a comics and games shop and I was looking for some new games for us to try and I was specifically looking for games that would recapture some of the elements of the games we loved but that played shorter and easier. Avalon Hill was still in business at this point but most American board games at this time were actually pretty terrible. I left the shop with some terrible card game called HONOR OF THE SAMURAI, which I believe was played approximately twice, and another game that I had never even heard of.

This game looked boring as hell, but frankly, so did CIVILIZATION at first. But it also looked like it had a lot of the elements that we liked about CIV- trading, exploring, fighting, and developing, but it promised a 90-120 minute playtime. I read the rules and was surprised that it looked so easy—and fun. So I pitched it to my friends as being a game “kind of like CIVILIZATION but shorter” and everyone was interested on that count alone. We played the game and it indeed took under two hours. We played it again immediately. It was instant love, and soon we were meeting every Sunday night to play it rather than MAGIC. Our wallets breathed a collective, leathery sigh of relief.

CIV-LITE, as I’ll call it for now, was definitely a lot simpler, more abstract, and more approachable than CIVILIZATION. It didn’t really have the vast scope or concrete sense of history, but it made up for that lack by featuring some of the best trading we’d ever seen. The building model created some interesting strategic decisions and the development of your civilization had a real sense of progress and momentum. Direct conflict and confrontation was limited but it was still present, even if only in cardplay and in the competition for resources and geography. There was drama, some randomness, and even a “calamity” to hose the unprepared player. In short, the game captured most of the things we loved about CIVILIZATION even though it was a very different game and a very different approach to game design.

I did a little research on the internet, mostly via newsgroups at the time, and found out that CIV-LITE was actually pretty well known and that what I had bought was an English-language version of a German game. Then I started to hear about these other German games and so I started ordering imported copies of some of those but none of them lived up to CIV-LITE. Sure, there were some good games but none really made good on the promise that it seemed to make that these European designs were going to take the themes, mechanics, and styles of play of those 1980s games and transmute them into shorter, more accessible games that still had all of the flavor and drama we loved.

A couple of years on we were still playing CIV-LITE pretty regularly. I discovered that there were expansions for CIV-LITE but they didn’t match my English copy of the game so I gave it away and ordered all the expansions along with a German-language copy of the base game. The rules extensions and additional components opened the game up immensely, adding sea travel, city development along different technological and cultural tracks, more direct conflict, and more delightfully nasty interaction. They still didn’t completely address the lack of scale or historical contextualization that CIVILIZATION had but the elements of progression and cultural development over time increased without substantially changing the base game. The add-ons made the game a little longer, but we were still playing it in half the time that a game of classic CIV would have taken. With the expansions, the game went from “great” to what I would now consider to be among the very best games ever made- standing shoulder-to-shoulder with CIVILIZATION itself.