CFC is giving away a founder edition: Tell us your civ story

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The_J

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Dear fellow CivFanatics,

we are all eager for the next installment of Civ7, and obviously we all want to play it.
To make this playing easier for some of you, we decided to gift you a founder's edition! While this come from our own motivation, Firaxis has in the meantime come forward and gifted us some founder editions to distribute, so we are having a few contests!
For this one here, we want to know your best real-life civ story: Has civ motivated you to do anything, have you had a noticable experience at a civ-worthy place, do you have amazing pictures of a wonder and a story to tell? Something from a museum, from school, from a historially themed party? Then let us know!

Please write down your story (with or without picture) here in this thread or submit it privately to @contest_entries (these will be published after contest closure) until January 31, at which the competition will be closed. At February 3 we will announce the winner of the story competition and will distribute the key.

You can also enter the banner contest here or the modder raffle here.
 
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Playing Civilization from an early age inspired me to learn more about the history of the world, and to try and experience more of that history myself. Several years ago, I had the opportunity to travel to Mexico to tour the Mayan ruins at Tulum. The temple complex stands in a clearing near the shore, with a lighthouse that would have guided visiting traders to the settlement's harbor, on the edge of a jungle. Our guide shared several indigenous legends about the jungle, including the origin myth behind two species of trees, one of which has sap that causes severe burns and rashes, and another which has healing sap that soothes the burns. I remember thinking that, having lived in Florida for the past 20 years, I would be prepared for July in the tropics. I was not prepared. The sun felt like a physical weight on my shoulders, and I found myself trying to imagine surviving in this climate without sunblock. I don't know if I could. The ruins themselves were not imposing physically, but psychologically I felt they demanded a kind of hushed reverence; you could tell that this had been a sacred place. The faces of unfamiliar deities stared down at me from reliefs that were carved into stone with both precision and passion. The features remained expressive despite centuries of exposure to the elements, and there were still faint traces of what must have once been brightly colored pigments. The ruins were abandoned, but not empty: birds perched on crumbling walls, and iguanas were everywhere, sunbathing on ledges and peering through windows. The people who lived here must have been proud of their temples, their gods, their walls and their lighthouse, and I wonder what they would think to see it all housing a menagerie of birds and lizards while people in strange clothes wander through and stare and point at everything. Maybe their civilization didn't "stand the test of time," but their buildings did, and their legacy did, and their descendants are proud of that. Tulum shows that the true test of a civilization is whether they leave a legacy the future can be proud of.
 

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I have a question about the story. Does it exclusively have to be what was listed or can it be anything Civ related?
 
I played a lot of Civilization IV back in Seminary. A lot. To the point that it certainly interfered with my studies and almost definitely influenced the direction my life took professionally. Given the choice between yet another class period spent parsing out the Minor Prophets in their original Hebrew or playing hooky to build an empire to stand the test of time, the later usually won out. Realizing where my interests really were convinced me against a career in the cloth.
In the years since I've moonlighted as a writer for various different sites and edutainment channels on YouTube, such as Wisecrack and Today I found Out. A brief stint as the Video Games Expert for Medievalist.net turned out to not be the best fit for me professionally, but the first thing I did in my short time there was an analysis of Civilization and the historical 4X Strategy genre. I found a much better fit when writing for In Deep Geek as a Tolkien lore-master. Tolkien's love of history, as evidenced all throughout his posthumously published writings, such as The Battle of Maldon and Finn & Hengest, has given me a much deeper insight into periods of history with which I was less familiar, such as Sub-Roman Britain and the Anglo-Saxon invasion, and has set my imagination ablaze with new Leaders and civilizations to be added to Civ in the future.
 
When i was a youngling,
i saw my friend playing this weird game of cubes with numbers on them...(civ1)
at that time we could not afford cpu. so i used to come over my friend's house more than a few, each time getting more and more captivated by civ1. amazed on how computer game can be so fascinating.
time passed and civ2 was about to be released, which prompted me to ask my parents to buy a computer and which they later did.
little did i know how much civ is going to be my very definition of gaming.
through civ2, civ3 and then civ4, which , rocked my world, civ5 and 6, i was hooked to my core.

my civilization inspiration story is about my career,
i owe civ not only me personal gaming joy, but a substantial part of leading me to have a career in software development
modding gave me the first glance at writing code and programming, with python and c++.
the amount of hours and skills i developed from modding inspired me to take action and shift my career at a rather late stage and make my way towards being a programmer.
i started to take courses and learn towards that goal, practicing what i learned.
civ4 sparked my fire at programming and I wonder if i would have gotten thus far if it hadn't been for civ4.
luckily, today, i work with python and develop in my line of work and im gracious for it.

civ was a love story, i played and modded it until this very day.
through out the years, i always felt for civ to be my anchor on my life's stations as a grew up, i used to say to my self at times when i felt bleak and sometimes when not everything was all sunshine in my life,
that ill always have civ, as a friend that does leave and there to support.
always i could immerse my self in the story telling and creating with civ. i have come to realize that civ will never be just a game for me.
whenever i played a none civ game, i ended up thinking, could played another empire, could have modded that and this instead.
with every civ game that got released it was a celebration for me, another mile stone in life.
now i wonder, will i be around to see and play civ 10?
 
I'm building something I believe in
My story regarding Civilization is one of ups and downs, rediscoveries and rebuilding. New foundations of new relationships (both with myself and others) upon older versions of my life.

It starts with me playing Civilization IV in my friend's basement. We shared many evenings there, laughing, not getting what we were doing (we were young, and there was a language barrier).

Fast forward many years... I moved to a different country, began to face many major psychological challenges and a long term depression due to trauma I had suffered in my childhood and teens, when that same friend I played IV with gifted me a copy of Civilization V including DLC, so we could play together again. His friendship and the moments we shared in Civilization V (and later Beyond Earth, nearing 900 hours combined) were bright instances keeping me going through a dark time.

Unfortunately, that time didn't get brighter until many years later. Due to the psychological hurdles I faced, I had to quit my job to focus on my wellbeing. I couldn't afford my place any longer and returned back to my home country. I was stingy with my groceries, and managed to save up to buy a copy of Civilization VI at launch. Since then, I spent 2800+ hours in Civilization VI, providing me respite from trauma therapy. Quite a bit of those hours were also spent playing hotseat with a different friend, who now lived close enough to me to spend many evenings together trying out different Civ strategies, mods, and scenarios. My days started getting brighter and brighter, and I started studying again to get a job with more social energy, worked to better myself and strengthen myself as a person, and over those eight grueling years managed to become a happier and more passionate version of myself, with a great job, all the while coming back to enjoy one more turn of Civilization VI.

Today, I've been in a steady and happy relationship for nearly two years, and my significant other (who has always been interested in my hobbies), has been infected with the Civilization bug and is alongside me eagerly awaiting the release of Civilization VII. I can't wait to share another iteration of Civilization with the most important person in my life, who is at once my friend, my partner, my lover, and my gaming buddy.

For the past years I have been building and building, and am looking forward to keep building something I believe in.
 
I have a question about the story. Does it exclusively have to be what was listed or can it be anything Civ related?
Sure...ideally a real-life story
 
Whilst the first Civ game I played was Civ6, my exposure to the series did not begin there as I often watched playthroughs of Civ5 when I was little, and it was that which sparked my overall interest in history and encouraged me to overtime broaden my horizons and learn about the world around us. Which has sparked a sense of curiosity in me to learn about the world but most importantly, history and not just of the world or my people but also my family.

Now, from playing Civ 6 a lot during the lockdown, the message of standing the test of time began to strongly resonate with me for that my own family’s history had struggled to stand the test of time and overall survive (to be exact, whilst some elements of it are known there are also many missing puzzle pieces that left it incomplete such as missing names and information). Naturally, as a Yoruba born outside of Nigeria, rediscovering my own family’s history is far from an easy task due to it being largely recorded in the form of oral history with it not being passed down at sufficient enough speed nor effectiveness (to both of my parents) as unfortunately some of my older relatives who did know have since passed away which in my case meant that I would only know a quarter about one of my maternal ancestors. This isn’t however new with any part of Yoruba, let alone much of West African history as a whole due to many stories being lost and the destruction brought by various European colonial powers such as the annihilation of Benin City by the British.

However, playing Civ6 had filled me with inspiration to try my hardest with what is available at my disposal to recover missing pieces of what is known about my family history, in similar fashion to how ancient civilisations that failed to stand the test of time such as Scythia, Sumeria, Gaul and Babylon are reimagined so strongly in the game as if they’ve been revived.

And so I began my search, where overtime multiple of those missing puzzle pieces have been found, in the process reconstructing parts of my mother’s lineage thus dragging our known info about it to the 1800s but in the process I found that one of my ancestors who I even managed to rediscover the name of, had physically left his mark in the city in the form of the first mosque in Ile-Ife which to this day still stands.

With it also being established that on my father’s side that many of us were cocoa farms, I am left with a newfound inspiration to someday compile all of my family history into a physical or digital form that will survive for far longer. It is thanks to Civ that I can build something that I believe in and gain the courage to attempt to compile and preserve my family history so that it may stand the test of time and so that no matter what year it may be, the accomplishments of my forefathers will live on forever and so too shall they be remembered!
 
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When I was a kid, I remember playing civilization 1 on the SNES. My mom would rent me the video game at the local video rental store back in the day a lot of times. I would spend time on the SNES all day when I had it. I remember playing from Ancient to Future and then back so much that I would get bored of it temporarily. Eventually as time passed by, Civilization 2 came out on PC and PS and eventually I was able to see it come out on the computers at my local library in the LAPL system. I used to take the computers there and would find out that the computers had educational software such as Sid Meier's Civilization 2 so I went ahead and was so excited to try it out that I would ask the person who was in charge of the computers to allow me to spend more time on the computer since I was only able to play it for 30 minutes. The guy at the computer lab was nice and he let me use it for about 2 and a half hours. I was so entertained. I didn't make a priority to get the game though.
I grew up a little and finally graduated high school and that's when I started to play civilization again. I had a friend from church who burned a copy of civilization 2 from the internet and I was so happy that I wanted to get civilization 3. So, I go to Target and look for it and find it, but I was caught trying to steal it, lol. I had to pay off about $350 for theft and they let me go. I eventually went back again like 2 years later to get civilization 3 again but civilization 4 was starting to come out new in the store rack. I bought civilization 4 instead and took it home and installed it in the home PC. It was so fun. I would log online to play it in multiplayer like I do now but civilization 6. I would keep doing that I was going to college and then civilization 5 came out and the same process happened except that I bought a new laptop with civilization 5 GnK. Eventually I bought BNW for it later. I then graduated college and went to university. I eventually got Civilization 6 and use it to play online with players at the university and at multiplayer.
 
Around 2010-2011, I was a junior in High School in Phnom Penh, and this was around the same time Cambodia was starting to open up to the world, after the turmoil from the 90s and 2000s. It was certainly different, touchscreen phones were being sold in markets, cellular towers popped up around the country, and more modern cars started filling the roads. During this time, my cousin brought home a computer, it was a black Dell desktop, with a keyboard that had glowing letters. Everytime we went to his house, I’d watch him play video games on that computer, it didn't matter what games he played, they were all fun.

One day, I watched as he got a new game, Civilization V. It took hours for it to download, but it was definitely worth it. I distinctly remember his first game: We were overwhelmed by the roster of civilizations and their historical leaders. He chose Japan, and spent the first 20-30 turns trying to rescue his workers from barbarians. His first neighbor was Ramkhamhaeng of Siam, and we were stunned by the graphics of the diplomacy screen, and admired the screen as Ramkhamhaeng stood idly and the music played. He was a figure we learned from history classes, but he looked so real to us. We immediately declared war on him and spent the next 20 turns fighting his forces before ending the game, but we knew that this would be a game we’d come back to, for many, many times. Civ 5 was truly the game that opened me to the vast world beyond my own, I learned about so many new cultures and figures, and we’d open the game just to read the civilopedia sometimes. This game, despite only watching my cousin playing it, has influenced my life enough that It was included in my college essays when applying to schools in the US.

A year later, I would eventually move to the US to pursue my Undergrad, with a laptop that was provided alongside my scholarship. The first game I ever owned was Civ 5 and its expansions, and I probably spent more time playing than studying. The game inspired me to take a minor in history, it was not an easy feat considering that I also had two majors, but Civ 5 was able to help me through it all, both as a distraction and as a way to further my passion for history. One of my majors was Literature, and Civ 5 has definitely helped in shaping ideas for my senior thesis, which was about exploring imperialism in fantasy fiction. I got myself Civ 6 as a late graduation gift, and combined together with civ 5, I had a total of 3000+ hours of playing time.

I think the biggest impact that Civ 5 (and a bit of Civ 6) had in shaping me as a person was how much the game gave me a newfound appreciation of life in back Cambodia, and the philosophy that every voice and history, no matter how small, should be remembered. After my undergrad, I used up most of my internship salary to create a small publishing company that aims to preserve my family’s legacy of Khmer poetry. The last few years were definitely a lot of work, trying to compile and translate Khmer manuscripts from multiple generations, more so for the ones written pre-Cambodian genocide as they were mostly lost or damaged. These poems were about various things, from life in rural villages, to tales of the warrior-king in Bayon, to stories of French colonial decadence in Phnom Bokor, to the trauma of the genocide. I hope one day, these poems will be made readily available for everyone to read, and I really hope that these works will stand the test of time.

I still play civ with my cousin from Cambodia, and we’d share the joy of civ with other cousins who now reside in other parts of the world. It’s definitely the most impactful video game of my life, it made me the person I am today, I definitely owe some of my gratitude to the people who make the magic of these games come true. It’s certainly a series that will stick with me for the rest of my life.
 
I nominate BlackBetsy´s short, but very impressive civ story, that can be found here:

Wife Said No Civ 3 On Caribbean Vacation - that does not preclude me from hand-building the Pyramids.

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Took me about 40 turns; 24 on the bigger one, 16 on the smaller one. I built a much bigger one the day before, and it took nearly 3 hours!

Of course, if this would be the winner, the game goes to BlackBetsy. :)
 
Here is one of my Civ stories.
It concerns Civ VII, though I have (obviously) never played it.
It involves Ibn Battuta.
Telling the story requires that I confess I had never heard of him before.
When he was announced as a leader for Civ VII, I began to learn about him from the thread dedicated to him.
(So this is a CivFanatics story as well.)
I learned that his achievements were along the lines of Marco Polo's, but much more culturally impactful.
When I learned of his importance, I first felt embarrassed for not having previously known him.
I next chalked my ignorance up to an education that had an almost exclusively Western focus.
I next felt grateful for all that the Civ developers and knowledgeable CivFanatics taught me about his importance.

That is one of my Civ stories.
All of my other Civ stories are exactly like it.

I come across some leader, or civ, or unique that I don’t know, or that is only a name to me.
Then the Civilopedia entry starts to flesh out the importance of that historical figure.
They come on to my radar and I suddenly start finding references to them everywhere.
The lead historian for Civ VII hopes that the game will be a “gateway drug to history textbooks.”
Done and done.

I’ll just let you guess who I will first play as if I am fortunate enough to win a copy of the founders edition.
 
Well unlikely to win any prices. its my story nonetheless.

I started playing Civilization I on my Amiga probably as soon as I could get hold of a probably very legal copy back in the early 90s and was immediately hooked for Days. Playing as the Germans I believe I got trashed in the end, but it was sooo much fun. So I just stated again and tried to find the optimal order of Technologies, Explored more and more continents and just played one more turn. I think it took me about 3 games before I beat the game on prince and then another month to work myself up to Emperor (The highest difficulty level at that time). By that time Civilization was the first game I had ever "completed" and I was mighty proud of this. which not too much else to do I shelved it until a few years later Civ II came out. But whenever I was asked about my favoruit computer game the answer was easy. Civilization by a landslide.

I know I played that one a lot too, but my fondest memory of that time are from Alpha Centauri which I felt but much more fresh ideas into the franchise. Anyway by the late my computer gaming times came mostly to an end as i Switched to board games as my main hobby.

Which is exactly How I came back to Civilization a few years later. On closing Sunday on a large Gaming fair in Germany I Wandered the back pavilions looking for a sweet deal when I spotted a Budget Edition of CIV 3 Complete on one of the booths and decide to give it a try. I found myself a bit of empty floor next to a power outlet, fired up my laptop and installed it. I started the game, stopped for a short time to catch my train and doidn't stop until I got crushed by some nuking AI in the late game. I still rememeber myself sitting on the cold floor brewing up infection I had caught on the fair and not being able to let got.

CIV3 is still by far my favourite entry in the series and I played it for over 3 years. During this time I also found CFC starting competing in game of the month, and hall of Fame games. Here I also found the greatest Idea of this forum - team games of the month. For new timers, this where actually year long games, were teams of 4 or 5 people playing consuctive stints of 10 turns while discussing a common strategy and competing with other teams for the best finish time on the same starting save. I learned soo much about the game from that it is was also soo much fun.

When my daughter was born she used to wake up bet 4 and 5 am. So in order to give my wife a bit more sleep i got up, fed her andf then put he on the kitchen floor between all her plaything, fired up the comp and play a few more turns of the latest game of the month wwhile my daughter learned to clear out all the thing from the lower kitchen cabinets.

But by then CIV IV had come out and the community switched over. but the gamne never really gelled with me. I played a few games and also won the obligatory science victory but I never liked the new systems as much.

I had a similar experience with CIV5 and 6 but I enjoyed CIV 6 a t least enough to play about 20 games. I also managed to win a few games but like firaxis correctly found out. Ending games wasn't that much fun so I often quit by the middle ages.

Now here I am looking forward for CIV 7 to switch some of those things, and bring back some glory to the franchise.
 
while my daughter learned to clear out all the thing from the lower kitchen cabinets.
That's a charming detail.
 
Thanks to early versions of Civilization (like Civ 1 and Civ 2), I started creating games as a child—specifically turn-based strategy games.
Over time, this passion grew, and I eventually became an indie developer making strategy games for a living.
 
So, a long time ago in the early 00s I was still a kid. And like most kids fortunate enough to have a father in their lives, we had a bonding activity. Unfortunately, neither my father or I were any good at sports, so we got something else.

After he got done teaching me how to use MS Excel, he showed me how to play Civilization III. Apparently he had played a little bit of Civ 1 when it first came out (a bootleg disc from his telling of it, since they couldn't get the real thing in his home country), he was surprised to find Civ 3 on sale at my school's book fair. So, we purchased it, and that's how it all got started.

I remember very fondly that we almost always played Babylon. My dad and I weren't really aware of expansion packs at the time, and he reasoned that Babylon was sorta kinda close enough to our country of origin (Turkey) that it was good enough. At the time it was sorta like me watching him and giving him goals while he was the one actually accomplishing stuff. We played off and on for many years until Civ 4 came out (at yet (not) another book fair) and I purchased it.

Again, we had no DLCs, but this time the Mongols were in the base game without it and we had the benefit of two leaders! Kublai, and Genghis. I always preferred Genghis while my dad preferred Kublai. It was probably this that lead me to my warlord tendencies. Around this time, my sister had grown big enough to be aware that we were playing civ but she was still too small to actually get into it. Civ 4 we played a lot less of than civ 3.

And in 2010, Civ 5 came out! I was the one watching the updates for this one quite a bit. Thanks to my dad's early influence I had developed into quite the young gamer, and for the first time the Ottomans were a base civ! I remember I only played a little bit thanks to early civ 5 clunkiness, but once Brave New World came out I was finally aware that Expansion Packs were a thing and bought it. That just about changed everything. A year or so afterwards, my friends were all talking about this thing called Reddit and I joined up, soon after finding the civ subreddit. That's where I got my exposure to mods for the first time, and finally got to the release of Civ 6, where my enthusiasm for the franchise really hit it's peak. By this point I was finally in college, and I actually ended up getting my whole dorm involved. I remember playing a big final game of civ 5 as Yu the Great (Xia) to close out my experience with civ 5, finally winning the game during a late night. We were running an experiment for an extracurricular project, and in the parts where I was waiting around for a result I was playing turns. Once civ 6 came back, I found that was a good decision: I just couldn't go back to civ 5. It felt pale and dull and lifeless by comparison, and the four city meta felt too restrictive.

Civ 6 is where I finally got really fussy about history. I fell into the modder community thanks to a reddit thread linking to the Civ Modding Helpline discord at some point, and I started up a design for something called Thule lead by some guy named Dave at the suggestion of one Senshidenshi. I didn't yet develop the coding skills to make it (though I was rapidly learning) so I started mostly by making text for other modders. There were suspicions (fears) that I would be brought into the orbit of TPangolin and become a part of CLs. Ultimately, that didn't happen and I'm all the better for it. I was eventually dubbed a lad, and my skills increased: I learned art from Leugi and DarthKyofu, code from anyone I could steal code from (mostly JFD and Sukritact), design from Chrisy15. But weirdly, I seemed to be the modder that enjoyed playing civ 6 the most - usually I ended up just sort of playing during test games without a care in the world. Alas, that's probably why so many of my mods have non-functional components and part of why my grades suffered so much. This is also where I got really into Mesoamerican, Ancient Near East, and Mercantile/Naval history. Surprisingly I actually ran into a lot of people who played civ 6 during my aerospace classes, and someone actually recognized me by my mods. That was a weird one. A lot of the modders recognize me as an unrepentant warmonger, but I don't think that's exactly true. Yeah, I can be pretty conquery, but usually by the midgame I blossom into an enlightened despotic trader king, whose benevolent rule protects the city states in my orbit: all those that are on my continent. No, there were never any other civilizations on my continent, why do you ask? Nothing suspicious about it. London has always been a Japanese city. And these city-states have always been mine.

My love of civ has been with me for most of my life, and just this past Thanksgiving while my family was cooking we all played a hot seat game of civ 6 against each other. It ended in my sister ragequitting after my Vietnamese pikemen decimated her Scythian horde. It was probably an extreme reaction in retrospect, but she did attack and conquer one of my vassal city-states. She tried to justify it by me having brutally conquered Brazil early on, but it was like the ancient era, man. She also got pretty peeved at her boyfriend because he didn't attack me (I permitted him to conquer one of my other vassal citystates in exchange). While we were all murdering each other my dad ended up winning as Maori, which I still contend is a badly designed and badly balanced civ. Nothing lasts forever, and between my career and my relationship I don't have a lot of time to mod civ anymore (or tend to my older mods, sadly). And besides, my standard of quality for my mods has ballooned so high that it's become hard to make them. Civ 7 definitely looks to be a weird one, and I'm skeptical if it's ever going to replace civ 6 for me like civ 6 did for civ 5. But clearly based on this long account of close to 25 years of gaming, this franchise and I have stood the test of time.
 
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For nearly three decades, Civilization has been more than just a game for me; it has been an inspiration in my personal and professional life, shaping my passions, my career, and the bond I share with my family. What began as a simple love for strategy and history evolved into a lifelong journey of learning, teaching, and sharing joy with others.

When I first encountered Civilization, I loved the way it brought history to life. The game encouraged me to think critically about decision-making, strategy, and the complexities of human development. All of these stuck with me when I became a teacher. I wanted to inspire others the way the game had inspired me—to look at history not as a collection of dry facts, but as a vibrant tapestry of human ingenuity, conflict, and triumph.

As a teacher, I found ways to incorporate Civilization into my classroom. It became a tool to engage students in learning history through gaming. Whether it was recreating the rise and fall of empires or debating the merits of different forms of governance, Civilization made history relatable and exciting. Students who were once disinterested in the subject became eager participants, fueled by their curiosity and the game’s immersive storytelling. Watching them light up with newfound knowledge reminded me why I became a teacher in the first place.

My journey with Civilization extended beyond the classroom and into my home. My two sons grew up watching me play the game, their young minds fascinated by the colorful maps, the evolving cities, and the historical figures brought to life on the screen. When they were old enough, I taught them how to play. What followed were countless hours of shared discovery, where our living room and dinner table transformed into a hub of strategic debates and historical discussions. The game became a springboard for conversations about everything from ancient civilizations to modern politics, enriching their understanding of the world and complementing their school studies.

As they grew older, Civilization continued to be a cornerstone of our relationship. Both of my sons, now in college, often reflect on how the lessons they learned from the game helped them in their advanced placement classes and other school projects. Today, they play multiplayer games of Civilization with their friends, carrying forward a tradition of learning and camaraderie that began in our home.

One of our favorite family traditions when my kids were younger and even now, when they are home from college, is watching Jeopardy together. Every time one of us answers a question correctly because of something we learned from Civilization, we yell, “That’s from Civ!” It’s a small but meaningful celebration of the knowledge we’ve gained and the shared experiences that have brought us closer.

Civilization has been more than just a game—it has been a bridge between generations, a teaching tool, and a source of inspiration. It has taught me that learning can be fun and that passion, when shared, can create lasting bonds. Whether I’m guiding my students or strategizing with my sons, I’m reminded of the power of games to educate, inspire, and bring people together. This is the legacy of Civilization in my life—a legacy of learning, teaching, and love that I will cherish forever.
 
For year 12 in 1992 (the final year of school) I needed a computer to do assignments on. The PC I bought came with Civilization 1. I've been playing Civ since 1992, every edition. I was part of Frankenstein from the end of Civ3, and for all of Civ4 and Civ5. I was even able to make official content for Civ4, in the way of Desert War and Road to War.

My official career was in IT, first doing server support, then greenfield server room design and implementation, then software development.

I love the Civ series so much, I became a game developer and now work for Soren at Mohawk. :)

That's my civ story.
 
I've been a huge Civilization fan ever since Civ 1. From the pixelated world maps of the early days to the stunningly detailed empires of today, the series has been a constant in my life, shaping my love for history and strategy. Each new installment brought fresh mechanics and civilizations to explore, fueling my passion even more.

One of my most memorable moments in the series was the inclusion of Vietnam in Civ VI’s New Frontier Pass. As someone with a Vietnamese background, seeing my heritage represented in my favorite strategy game was an incredible experience. I was beyond excited to lead Bà Triệu and build an empire that could stand the test of time! It was a moment of pride, especially since Vietnam is often overlooked in global media and games.

But my passion for Civilization didn’t just stay in the game—it shaped my academic journey as well. The game sparked my interest in Vietnamese history and culture to such an extent that I decided to study Vietnamese Studies at university. That passion led me all the way to completing my PhD, where I focused on Vietnamese literature and historical narratives. In a way, Civilization was the first step in a journey that became my life’s work.

Beyond academia, Civilization has inspired me to travel and explore historical sites in real life. During a trip to Vietnam, I visited ancient temples and citadels, imagining how they might have looked if they were World Wonders in the game. I even stood at the historic site of the Battle of Bạch Đằng, picturing how a Civ scenario for it might play out.

Civilization is more than just a game for me—it’s an interactive history lesson, a source of inspiration, and a bridge to my own heritage. And with Civ VII on the horizon, I can't wait to see which new cultures and stories will come to life!
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Me at the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology during my research stay in Vietnam.

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