Civilization VI

Gather around children as holographic great, great granddaddy TJ Hafer describes how all this here rocketport used to be fields.

C ivilization VI is the ultimate digital board game. More than ever in the series, the board – the world – is the soul of every opportunity and challenge. As usual for Civ, we build empires, compete for a set of victory conditions, and fend off warmongering leaders like that scoundrel Peter the Great. But we’re also playing for, with, and against the board. Forests and deserts and resource-rich tundras each influence the flow of our civilisation, granting us boons and burdening us with lasting weaknesses. Bands of barbarians put our farms in crisis, but also open up opportunities to speed the development of our military techs. The glorious, challenging dynamics that emerge from Civ VI’s redesigned maps left us with no question that the storied series has crowned a new king.

While Civ VI is probably the most transformative step forward for the series, its changes shouldn’t trip up longtime players too much. You still settle cities, develop tiles, train military units, wage turn-based warfare, and conduct diplomacy. It mirrored our memories of past Civs closely enough that hints from the in-game adviser were all we needed to course-correct when something we hadn’t seen before came our way.

But there are so many of these new features that it could feel overwhelming at times. The depth and variety of systems resembles a Civ game that’s already had two or three expansions added on top – from the new Districts that perform specific tasks and spread cities out into an often messy but somehow pleasing sprawl, to a whole separate ‘tech’ tree for civic and cultural progress that ties into a sort of collectible card game for mixing policy bonuses to build a unique government.