Wodan said:
It's actually quite fun. Biggest problem is that resource placement is hidden like the game but random. By that I mean you are supposed to shuffle the counters face down and then spread them out over the world.
Obviously, due to vagaries of chance, you can get one continent with a bunch of happiness resources, while other players get little to none. This has a hugely unbalancing affect on the game.
You're not describing the original Civ or Advanced Civ games that came before Civilization I, maybe there was some other board game with the name that cam out later and you're talking about it. In the board game Civilization (and the expansion Advanced Civilization), there's no counters for resources, and there's no counters spread over the board, plus there's no such thing has happiness resources, and there's no continents.
The Civ game board covers the mediterranian, including North africa, Southern Europe, and the Middle East. Players start with population counters, the empire grows each turn by getting additional pop in areas where there's already some. Once your pop grows you can put 6 (IIRC) population in a space then use it to make a city, convert 'citizens' to boats to cross water, and can fight (when population from 2 empires is in the same space, they wipe each other out, if you put seven IIRC in a space with you can sack a city). At the end of the turn, every space has a population limit, more than that vanishes, and every city needs 2 population to support it or it starves (IIRC it converts to as many people as the space will hold to help support other cities).
You draw trade cards, there are 9 types getting stronger with each type. You draw one card from each stack up to the number of cities you have, in other words with 3 cities you get a card from each of the 1, 2, and 3 stacks. The higher stacks are worth more, but it's hard to maintain 9 cities all the time, so the 4s and 5s tend to be the most common. Each card is either a commodity or a disaster card. Each number of stack has a base value, and several different types of commodity (furs, salt, gems, etc.), and the commodity cards can be cashed in. The value of commodities goes up exponentially as you have more of each type, so you'll want to trade to make sets. However, most of the disaster cards are tradeable, so you'll have to risk someone palming a disaster off to you. After trading is done, disaster cards take effect, doing damage to various players. The points from cashed in cards are then used to buy technologies, which directly affect your final score and have other effects in game too.
They run from dawn of time to around 0AD I believe. You can play as any of the Mediterranean/Middle East civs of the period (and various people have made expansions to go far to the east):
