Mega Empires Game Review

Every time I hear the term “civ game”, I laugh. You’d be surprised how many times in this day and age—where three-hour Euros are being distilled into 45-minute, rapid-fire strategy games—designers, publishers, and we the media try to frame a tabletop product with themes of technology development, historical context, culture integration and territory control as a “civ game.”

“Civ game” is the shorthand for a civilization game, the brand of day-long gaming experience that began for most people in one of two environments: either the Civilization video games first designed by Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley released in 1991, or the board game Civilization, designed by Francis Tresham and published in 1980.

My first civ game was the video game, and while I enjoyed Civilization, it was a lot, even for a kid who had all kinds of time on his hands. I think I only played Civilization because, at that point, I was already a Sid Meier video game junkie: I sank a billion hours (give or take) into Meier’s PC game F-19 Stealth Fighter. Sid Meier’s Pirates! was another title I hit hard in the late 1980s.

The Civilization video games and the Civilization board game have a lot of similarities. Civ games are all about building an empire—developing a community from something small to something massive. While…

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