Playing Civilization A New Dawn (Credit: Fantasy Flight Games) A New Dawn – Is it Civilized or Grass Selecting your form of government is a crucial new addition with this expansion, and it has the potential to make your focus cards much more powerful. Depending on the government that you choose, you can resolve a specific type of focus card as if it were further to the right than it currently sits on your focus bar. To give a few examples, Democracy rewards you for devoting yourself to the sciences, while an Autocracy is ideal for military endeavors, and Communism lets you pour your energy into industry. You must choose carefully, however, because you cannot change your government at will—only when the event dial shows the designated icon. Move each of your armies up to 5 spaces. They can move into spaces matching this slot's terrain or lower, as well as water. During your turn, reduce the combat bonus provided by each reinforced control token by 1. [2 armies] Now, at the beginning of the game, you’ll establish a core area of map tiles, with each player’s capital tile placed along an edge of the core. The resources of these central tiles will certainly be hotly contested between the players, and this may drive you to explore new regions in search of an advantage against your opponents. Whenever you’re going to move a caravan or an army, if that figure is on the edge of the map and on a tile with a capital city, you can spend one space of movement to explore instead—pulling a new map tile, attaching it to your edge, and making your world that much larger. Straight out of the box, the components and artwork stays true to Sid Meier with that old school feel but with fresh revamps in places. With a mixture of plastic tokens as well as cardboard ones, it's a nice balance and looks pleasing once set-up. Be warned though, invest in some plastic grip seal bags to keep the tokens separate as only a few are provided in the box and it helps with faster setup times.

And what’s more, the AP isn’t just for solo play. It can also be used in games with up to three human players to provide an additional opponent against which you must compete. Will you coexist peacefully with the AP, manipulating it to your advantage and turning it against your human opponents, or will you team up with the other humans to carve up the AP’s territory for yourselves? The decision is yours. Civilization: A New Dawn has taken a classic video game and crafted it into a comprehensive 4X tabletop version. Choose from eight different civilizations and then explore, battle, trade and innovate your way to dominate the region. Most disappointing is the way tech has been handled. There isn’t a full tech tree like in the video game, which you can slowly work your way down; instead there’s just a dial that ratchets up every time you choose to increase it, and every time you hit a certain threshold you’re allowed to upgrade one of your action cards.

Industry – this lets you build a new city or wonder. If building a city, you may only build it on the terrain type that corresponds with the focus slot the card is in. It must also be on the territory you control or where you have a caravan. If (to both wow the world and grant yourself powerful abilities) you are building a wonder, the slot contributes towards its cost. For me, there are a few gripes which become apparent once you have a few games under your belt. Resource tokens are used within the game to buy some bits, but it feels considerably restricted in this area and so it can feel slightly redundant at times as there only really spent on wonders. I’d liked to have seen more emphasis on trade as well, and being able to upgrade focus areas on a slightly more detailed level, rather then just changing a card for a slightly better one. Final Score: 4.5 Stars – An amazing game that can only get better with expansions. Unfortunately, these are also desperately needed to give life to long-term playability.

A new age dawns on a world that is yours for the taking. As you advance your empire through the ages, it is up to you to decide how to lead your people to glory. Will you achieve dominance by spreading your culture across the globe or improving industry to build the world’s greatest wonders? Will you become the world’s wealthiest nation, or its most technologically advanced? Or, will you become a true conqueror, using your military to bend other nations to your will and add more territory to your empire?Once per turn, when your caravan moves to a rival city that is 8 or more spaces from your capital, you may build a city on a legal space within 2 spaces of that city. [2 caravans] After you move a caravan to the capital of the player with the "Ibrahim" card, gain 1 resource of your choice from the supply. [2 caravans] The rulebook, in typical FFG style, is going to make this a hurdle to understand. You will need to unlearn the core basics and internalize the new reforms. Do expect your first one or two games to involve rifling through the rulebook. Oddly enough, I would use the expansion when teaching brand new players. Since the map starts small, you can talk about the map features such as natural wonders or city-states as they expose themselves throughout the game. No longer are new players subjected to a huge intimidating map, and you don’t need to barf out sentences to explain every detail in one go like some insomnia curing classroom lecture.