I realized what Civ VII feels like, but will it win Spiel des Jahres?

[DSYoungEsq]

I have had a nagging feeling of familiarity with the whole "Ages" mechanic since watching the reveal the other day. I have had trouble putting my finger on why, until it came to me during sleep last night.

Civ VII is a German Board Game.

Specifically, it's a game with three specific stages, each with a number of turns. Each stage has goals, and the results of each stage affect the set-up of the next stage. That is SOOOO like some of the more complex German Board Games.

I suppose it's not a shock that mechanics from those games are making it into Civ. After all, we got a card-based approach to social bonuses with Civ VI, and other 4X games have had boardgame-like mechanics (e.g.: STellaris with tech cards). But I do find it interesting that, at the exact same time that Paradox is re-inventing Europa Universalis to get away from its board game origins mechanically, Civ VII appears to be attempting to integrate board game mechanics.

 

[nzcamel]

They presented the social policies in a card format, but really they weren't cards by any significant metric. You could (and some mods did) change the look to another format and it worked just the same.
Any turn based game will get compared to boardgames, and the Civ boardgame was part of the inspiration for the computer game; but this idea that the social policy implementation in 6 was very boardgamey is pain silly.

 

[Uberfrog]

Ed Beach’s background was in board game design, so the influences have been overt since Civ 6.

 

[Krajzen]

I have much less board/card game vibe this time - like they said and like it looks, it's has more of a "dramatic narrative" focus

 

[JNR13]

Civ has had overt board game influences since Civ I. A tiled map and turn-based progression are at the very core of its gameplay identity and it doesn't get more boardgamey than that.

Having different stages is just a general gameplay mechanic that *can* be used in board games but doesn't have to and might not even be native to it. After all, importing my CK2 save into EU IV doesn't feel boardgamey at all.

If you want the feature to feel more videogamey, I guess you could just change the name of the eras to "levels".

 

[bbbt]

Civ VII is a German Board Game.

Eh, Civ has always been a board game, and as board games in general have gone from Avalon Hill to more "Eurogame", it's certainly followed suit.

I don't think that the influence has only been one way though.

But speaking of board games, I'm hoping Civ 7 takes influence from games like Pandemic or Spirit Island to give us some sort of co-op versus a specific crisis (climate change?) as a victory mode.

 

[Marla_Singer]

Civ has had overt board game influences since Civ I. A tiled map and turn-based progression are at the very core of its gameplay identity and it doesn't get more boardgamey than that.

It's a misconception that Sid Meier wanted to make a board game with Civ I, he always wanted to make a video game. The game design was actually more inspired from 1977's "Empire" video game than Avalon Hill's board game.

His first idea was to make the game real time, but when he realized it didn't work, he switched back to turn-based. Also tiles were technological limitations at the time. They really increased in importance over time, particularly with 1UPT in Civ5 and distrcts in Civ6.

 

[UWHabs]

It's always taken inspiration from board games. But I don't think that's a bad thing at all. Board games are great, and computer games give you things you can't do on a board game. Sometimes it feels like when people see a building give +2 instead of +10%, they feel the +2 isn't as rich because it's math they can do in their head or something.

I mean, I think if civ ever switched combat to literally show you a D20 roll on the screen for your combat outcome, you might have an argument there. But it's a tile-based, turn-based strategy game. It's always going to feel an awful lot like a board game.

 

[Marla_Singer]

It's always taken inspiration from board games. But I don't think that's a bad thing at all. Board games are great, and computer games give you things you can't do on a board game. Sometimes it feels like when people see a building give +2 instead of +10%, they feel the +2 isn't as rich because it's math they can do in their head or something.

I mean, I think if civ ever switched combat to literally show you a D20 roll on the screen for your combat outcome, you might have an argument there. But it's a tile-based, turn-based strategy game. It's always going to feel an awful lot like a board game.

In first civilization games, tile-based was considered as a technological compromise, nowadays, it's more considered as a feature. It's not the same nature. Pac-Man was pixelized because we couldn't do it in a different way back in the early 1980's. Minecraft is pixelized as an Art design choice. You can't compare both.

Also the reason why Civ is turn-based isn't to give a board game flavour to the game, but because it appeared as the best way to emancipate the player from time constraints. The idea is to give him all the needed time to elaborate his strategy, to control the pace of the game. Board games are turn-based for multiplayer reasons. Civilization remains primarily designed for single player, with AIs adjusted to maximize the satisfaction and challenges of the Human player.

We can't reduce Civilization to a board game, therefore concluding more board game features are necessarily a good thing. Civilization is primarily an empire-building video game, in which you start with nothing and build an elaborated and powerful system over time.

 

[8housesofelixir]

Civ becomes more "board game" does not equal to "bad".

It's funny how many older-generation civ players tend to dismiss board games as "simple" or "light", despite the fact some grand strategy wargames are heavy as hell (Ed Beach's Here I Stand comes to mind - people coming from a purely video game background might not realize how heavy this game is), and many recent innovations in the 4X genre are coming from a new generation of board games.

Soren Johnson, the lead designer of Civ 4, a game that is described by some as "the last computer civ game before 1UPT reduced everything into a board game", is also very interested in the board game designs of Cole Wehrle, who created Root which is the go-to 4X board game in recent years.

 

[Nikolai II]

Civ has always to a degree been a board game. And it is not necessarily a bad term either, as others have mentioned.

 

[Professor Phobo]

One thing that might contribute to what seems to be a generation gap in respect for board game design is there is a stark divide between modern designer board games and what many of us grew up with.

If you grew up with stuff like Risk or Life or, god forbid, Monopoly, you probably have a bad view of board games. But the diversity and sheer cleverness of modern board games is impressive. From a design perspective, it forces the designer to do a lot with very little - a board game has limited budget and room for components (bloated kickstarter darlings aside) and the rules have to be something a person can read, understand, and then teach to their friends but also be deep enough and rewarding enough to keep this huge physical object in their home and bring it out again and again.

If every game designer had to produce one good board game to graduate from game design academy it would separate a lot of wheat from a lot of chaff, IMO.

 

[Siptah]

One thing that might contribute to what seems to be a generation gap in respect for board game design is there is a stark divide between modern designer board games and what many of us grew up with.

If you grew up with stuff like Risk or Life or, god forbid, Monopoly, you probably have a bad view of board games. But the diversity and sheer cleverness of modern board games is impressive. From a design perspective, it forces the designer to do a lot with very little - a board game has limited budget and room for components (bloated kickstarter darlings aside) and the rules have to be something a person can read, understand, and then teach to their friends but also be deep enough and rewarding enough to keep this huge physical object in their home and bring it out again and again.

If every game designer had to produce one good board game to graduate from game design academy it would separate a lot of wheat from a lot of chaff, IMO.

The main difference for me is that board games tend to focus on 2-3 mechanics that are the main part of the game and the whole idea is to make them interact in a meaningful way that is hard to get to "optimum" when a little bit of luck is involved. E.g., combining deck building with worker placement, or push your luck with resource optimization. Everybody is fine with that in board games, but from video games of the scope of civ, we tend to expect more mechanics, dozens of them. As a result, we often get many boring mechanics, essentially filling buckets, or cool mechanics that don't interact with each other. On the other hand, some strategy games popular today actually have very simple mechanics: Age of Empires is essentially worker placement combined with a fancy (and meanwhile very complex) rock-paper-scissors variant. Anyway, what I meant to say is: expectations for civ are to have dozens of mechanics, all with a lot of bells and whistles, and how well they come together seems secondary to a lot of players. In contrast, a good board game can be as simple as Cascadia or Azul, where no one expects or really needs more additional stuff.

 

[Professor Phobo]

Yes having the computer available to do calculations is great and definitely opens up space for design...but it's also a trap. It allows you to put in mechanics and systems that are individually not that interesting or well designed but the player overhead is low enough no one is too bothered by them until 60 hours in and they realize they never want to place specific defensive spies ever again. If every mechanic you put into a game had to be elegant enough to win you the Spiel des Jahres first, and only then could you elaborate in a way that needs the computer...

 

[AntSou]

As @nzcamel said already, policy cards aren't a great example since the card is only an aesthetic choice and plays nothing like cards in board games.

I guess the Stellaris example is more appropriate. The approach is identical to shuffling a deck and drawing a few cards... but then, that's just random selection from a pool of options. It's not like board games invented the concept. And Twilight Imperium uses tech cards but they play like an open tech tree in Civ.

There's always so much overlap it's difficult to discern exactly what people mean when they say this game or that game is board gamey. Frankly, I think it's mostly down to feel. In Civ VI the board was more important than ever due to district placement and adjacencies. It also encouraged playing smaller maps, in my opinion at least, which gave it the homely feel of a board game. (I almost always played huge maps in Civ IV and V, but dealing with district placement on every of my cities was an absolute chore later in the game in Civ VI)

 

[Thormodr]

7 definitely reminds me of this old board game. I've played it before and currently have the iPad version.

Civ switching for every age.

History of the World

Civilizations rise and fall. Rewrite history in this epoch-sprawling game of strategy

boardgamegeek.com

History of the World (board game) - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

 

[Nylan]

I have had a nagging feeling of familiarity with the whole "Ages" mechanic since watching the reveal the other day. I have had trouble putting my finger on why, until it came to me during sleep last night.

Civ VII is a German Board Game.

Specifically, it's a game with three specific stages, each with a number of turns. Each stage has goals, and the results of each stage affect the set-up of the next stage. That is SOOOO like some of the more complex German Board Games.

I suppose it's not a shock that mechanics from those games are making it into Civ. After all, we got a card-based approach to social bonuses with Civ VI, and other 4X games have had boardgame-like mechanics (e.g.: STellaris with tech cards). But I do find it interesting that, at the exact same time that Paradox is re-inventing Europa Universalis to get away from its board game origins mechanically, Civ VII appears to be attempting to integrate board game mechanics.

If I could rephrase it, I would suggest that the feeling you have is that Civ7 appears more "eurogame" to you and less "ameritrash" (not to be derogatory - I love such games) than previous entries.

I don't know that I agree, but the distinction is described in those terms by board game enthusiasts and that might help you work through that sense you have if you read up on those "genres" and the arguments surrounding them.

 

[BackseatTyrant]

If I could rephrase it, I would suggest that the feeling you have is that Civ7 appears more "eurogame" to you and less "ameritrash" (not to be derogatory - I love such games) than previous entries.

I don't know that I agree, but the distinction is described in those terms by board game enthusiasts and that might help you work through that sense you have if you read up on those "genres" and the arguments surrounding them.

I'm guessing you had this video in mind:

 

[fantsu]

The more its board game, the better.
It could be more complex in my eyes, like old board war games when it comes to battles and strategy. Then again Civ has many other things going on too than in depth war.