Clash of Cultures Monumental Edition

• Designer: Christian Marcussen
• Publisher: Wizkids
• Players: 2-4
• Age: 14+
• Time: 3-4 hours
• Played twice. Review copy provided by Wizkids

Says the publisher: “ Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition brings back the classic game of exploration, expansion, and development with the Clash of Cultures base game and the Civilizations and Aztecs expansions in one box! Grow your civilization, advance your culture and tech, and leave your mark by building wonders, with this edition of the game including fully-sculpted miniatures of the Seven Wonders.  In Clash of Cultures, each player leads a civilization from a single settlement to a mighty empire. Players must explore their surroundings, build large cities, research advances and conquer those who stand in the way. The game features a modular board for players to explore, 48 distinct advances, seven mighty wonders, and loads of miniatures and cards. The winner will create a culture that will be remembered and admired for millennia.”

A game consists of six Rounds, each of which is composed of three Turns.  During a turn, the first player performs three actions, followed by three actions from the player on her left, and so on.  After the third turn, there is a Status Phase and then the next Round begins.

So the game revolves around actions and there are six kinds of them.  Here’s a brief description:

1. Advance

The advances are, in many ways, the heart of the game.  Each player has their own player board which lists the possible scientific, cultural, and governmental advances they can discover over the course of the game. The top advance in each category is a prerequisite for the other advances in that category and there are a few other prerequisites listed, but other than that, the players are free to discover whatever advance they choose.

The categories cover a wide range:  they include topics like Agriculture, Education, Warfare, Spirituality, Economics, and Culture.  There are also three Government categories (Democracy, Autocracy, and Theocracy) and each player can only have advances in one of these at a time (they are allowed to switch categories and move the advance tokens to the new form of government).  The wealth of choices here should give the players great scope in molding the kind of strategy they want to play.

Buying an advance is simple–all it costs is two food resources (Idea resources can be substituted for food).  Certain advances allow the players to take other specific actions or utilize certain kinds of pieces.  There’s lots of variety in the effects and figuring out how to best use and combine the advances should be a big part of the game’s learning curve.

2. Found City

A Settler piece on a vacant non-Barren land hex can found a city there.  This is signified by placing a Settlement piece on the hex.  Cities are the basic units that allow you to fuel your engine in this game, as we will soon see.

Here’s an old friend setting up the game

3. Activate City

Each city can be activated once a turn to perform one of three actions:  Increase City Size, Collect Resources, and Build Units.  A city can be activated more than once, but it negatively affects its mood (more on that later).  The key point here is that multiple cities allow you to perform multiple city actions without worrying about your citizens having a ‘tude.

Increase City Size

At the cost of some resources, you can increase the size of your city by one.  This is represented by placing a city-piece into the city.  These come in four varieties–Temples, Fortresses, Academies, and Ports–and each has its own special ability.  The key rule here is that cities can’t grow to a size larger than the total number of cities you possess.  So at the start, you need to found a second city before you can expand your first one (since the initial Settlement gives it a size of 1).

Collect Resources

You can collect resources from the hex your city is on and every adjacent hex.  The number of hexes you collect from is equal to the size of the city.

Build Units

You can build a number of units equal to the size of the city.  Units include Settlers, Armies, and Ships and each costs two specific resources to build.  I’ve already talked about Settlers–how are armies and ships used?  Keep reading.

4. Move Units

You can move up to three groups of units, where a group is a set of units that have the same origin and destination hexes.  Land units move one hex, while ships can move to any sea hex they’re connected to over water.  Ships can be used to transport land units.

When you move a unit into an undiscovered region, it is revealed and you can position it via specific rules.  Barbarian units and/or settlements may be revealed, which represent both a challenge and an opportunity for your civilization.

Moving into a hex with foreign units or cities leads to combat.  Each combatant rolls a number of D6’s equal to the number of army units in the hex.  You can generate bonuses with some dice icons if you have the matching unit type in your fighting force.  Your leader can also be an army unit (and roll dice); they also get to re-roll on a 1.

The sum of the dice is divided by 5, rounded down, to get the number of enemy units eliminated (combat is simultaneous).  Cards can be played by either player to affect the results.  Combat continues during multiple rounds until the attacker chooses to stop.  Cities can be captured and resources gained as a result of combat.

5. Civic Improvement

This action allows you to improve the mood of your cities by paying mood tokens.  Cities can be “happy”, “neutral”, or “angry”.  A number of things in the game can decrease the mood of a city (including being activated multiple times or being conquered) and this action reverses that effect.  Mood affects many city activities; for example, happy cities can produce an extra resource or an extra unit, while angry cities act as if they’re size 1, no matter how big they are.

6. Cultural Influence

Enemy cities which are close to your cities (a city’s size equals its range) can be targeted.  If a successful D6 die roll is made (5 or more), then you can exchange one of the targeted city’s city-pieces with an identical one of your color, which increases your VP total (and reduces his).  There is yet another kind of token (called, logically enough, Culture tokens) which can help you with this process.

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There’s a number of other elements in the game, including Events (which come up periodically and usually only affect one player), Action cards (which give you extra options or special actions when you play them), Objective cards (personal objectives that give you nice VPs when their conditions are met), and Wonders (which also are revealed periodically and give significant VPs to the first player to meet their conditions).  At the end of the sixth Round, each player scores VPs for each city-piece on the board, each Advance purchased, and each Objective and Wonder achieved.  The player with the highest VP total has led the world’s most culturally significant civilization and wins the game.

My thoughts on the game

I remember being pretty excited about the original version of this, back at SPIEL 2012…  Back in the day, I had entire weekend days set aside for gaming, and epic games such as this were a regular.  I loved the idea of Civilization games, and would always be happy to try out the newest offering.  I remember playing this enough to get a hang of the strategies, but never enough to claim any sort of mastery – even though I kept playing with the same faction over and over.  

This new version has a number of changes (as well as a difficult to find expansion) included in a single humongous box.  The game is admittedly a bit outside of my current wheelhouse, and all my comments should be taken with a grain of salt as I’ve only been able to play it twice.  This new version includes sculpted minis and new artwork.   The new version looks great, and while some have complained that each civilization doesn’t have its own unique sculpted pieces representing historical monuments; this feels like too much work to do for a game with 15 civs already included!  I am perfectly fine with every temple looking the same other than changes in player color…

The game comes with 15 different civilizations which gives players plenty of opportunity to pick a culture that suits you.  Each game will most likely play out differently due to the different factions in a particular game, the leaders that are in play, the strategies of the humans controlling the cardboard/plastic bits, the changes to the map, the cards that come out, etc.  You also start the game with a random Objective card, and I have found that this might actually shape your initial strategy more than anything else because it gives you something to focus on.  If you don’t like it, don’t worry about it, you’ll have plenty of opportunity to pick up different Objectives – but for lack of anything else to guide you, you get one to start with!

While I’m not overly familiar with the original game, I’ve talked to people who have played the original and the consensus seems to be that the rules have been smoothed out.  I personally love the freedom to develop whatever advances I like.  I also really appreciate the ease and simplicity of the combat rules.  Roll dice, figure out the total, divide by 5, and you’re done.  I mean, how easy can that be?

The game forces interaction between players as the map is really not that big.  You’re going to end up with multiple fronts of conflict (or maybe peaceful co-existence?).  You can’t just make a giant fortress and hide behind it because the game limits the size of a city to the total number of cities that you have. Thus, everyone is trying to expand and build more settlements as this is the only way for you to get that big high rise apartment in the sky.  (Well, you know what I mean).  After my first few games, I wonder if this will be like Twilight Imperium – where the player who manages to get into the least conflict will usually end up winning, mostly because they have the fewest things destroyed and are therefore in the best position when all the dust settles.

Is there too much going on in the game?  Possibly – it all depends on your outlook.   For me, I have found that I never feel like I’m totally in control of what is going on; in the sense, that I’m always forgetting to do something.  I figure that while Julius Caesar was running the Roman Empire – he had generals or advisors to help him remember about all the things like roads, food, trade, alliances, fighting, etc.  In this game, you just have your own brain, and there are a lot of things to consider!  For me, it’s a bit more than I can easily track, and in the attempt to keep my turn length down to a reasonable level, I just end up flying by the seat of my pants, and I almost always end up with a less than perfect turn because I can’t keep up with all the interwoven components of my growing civilization.  This really seems like the sort of game which would be better on a computer… (and that’s probably why the Sid Meier Civ game series is so popular!) but as long as I don’t worry about playing perfectly, this is a challenging game that I enjoy trying to play.   For me, my 2p game was much better than 4p as the time between turns can be significant; especially in the endgame. 

Despite the complexity and length of the game, the rulebook is pretty thin, and is really pretty comprehensive.  We did not find that we had to consult the rulebook much once we got into the first game.  There is a fair amount of text on the Civ board, but in the end, it’s all useful information and helps you try to figure out what all your options are.  

For those looking for an analog civ building experience, this is a good choice.  There is a nice balance between detail and game length.  Not many board games offer you this level of complexity in the span of a single game session.   Advanced Civilization is rated closer to 8 hours; and that’s right out for me.  Heck, the listed time for this game at 4 hrs already pushes it for me….   For now, this is a viable candidate (along with Through the Ages) when I have the time to play such a game, especially if there are just 2 of us.  It’s admittedly not an itch that wants to be scratched often for me, but this does a lot of things well, and though I find I still forget to do things, I really like the way that the actions and turn flow are so simple for such a complex game.  This is never a game that I’m going to suggest as the game length is more than what I usually want; but given the right circumstances (i.e. a week long game convention), I’d be more than happy to invest the time to try this one out again.

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Mark Jackson: I’m a huge fan of the original… and if I didn’t already own it, I’d gladly pick up a copy of the new edition. As Dale noted, a number of things have been smoothed or simplified to allow you focus on the game rather than on getting all of the details right. My single 4-player play of the newer version was wonderful!

Playing an online game of the Tresham version of Civilization a couple of years ago made me like Clash of Cultures even more. The tech tree decisions are more interesting, the random events aren’t earth-shattering, and the gameplay has more variety. I’m pretty much done with classic Civ.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it! Mark Jackson, Alan How
• I like it. Craig Massey
• Neutral. Dale
• Not for me…