March 29, 2024

#UnboxingDay! Civilization, The Board Game from Fantasy Flight Games

Brant Guillory, 17 February 2022 ~ #UnboxingDay

It’s not really a secret that The Armchair Dragoons are big fans of the Civ series games.  What’s surprising is that we haven’t talked about the board game(s) much.  This one is the base game from FFG, released a few years ago and only recently opened up.

The box is a standard square FFG box that stacks right up with Descent, Runebound, and Warrior Knights.

click images to enlarge

unbox-CivBoard-Contents

The contents include a rulebook, a few decks of small cards, some player boards, and – because this is published by FFG – approximately 9384572034985721 different counters, tokens, and markers.

The base game comes with 6 civs, and plays up to 4 at a time.

 

There are a bunch of different smaller decks in the box, including some that are color-coded to individual players.  Note that any of the civs can play any color.

 

The minis for the map.  The black knobs are to hold the progress dials onto the player cards.

 

unbox-CivBoard-RulesFront

Full-size, full-color, fully-illustrated typical FFG rulebook

 

unbox-CivBoard-RulesBack

Every other publisher, please take note: even if it’s a small one, there’s still an index with this rulebook.

 

The rulebook does not lack for color or imagery.

 

unbox-CivBoard-MapTilesAll

The large map tiles are quite sturdy. They are also very well-cut. 3 of them fell out of the sprue just trying to set up this photo.  Note the gold/column tokens around the edges of the boards, too.

 

The map boards have a 4×4 grid on each, and each civ has its on start board that they will always use.

 

unbox-CivBoard-Tokens1

One thing FFG never skimps on: tokens.  So.  Many. Tokens!  (OK, not quite as bad as Warrior Knights, but still)

 

Lots and lots of tokens

 

unbox-CivBoard-TrackingBoard

There’s a master tracking board where many of these cards & tokens live during the game

 

unbox-CivBoard-CivRefCards

Large reference cards help the players get through turn by turn.

 

Military unit cards, which are not that granular.  You’ve got the basic infantry, cavalry, artillery types that progress thru the ages, and in later years you can add aircraft.

 

So there it is, the rather stuffed box for the base Civilization board game from FFG.  Note that this is not a reimplementation of the old AH Civ board game, but rather an attempt to tabletopize2 the computer game, somewhere between Civ 5 and 6, but obviously stripped-down for what you can practically address in a tabletop game.  Several expansions exist, adding additional civilizations and some new gameplay twists.


Thanks for joining this month’s #UnboxingDay with the Armchair Dragoons and we hope you enjoyed our recon of our recent acquisitions.  You can always leave us your feedback in our #UnboxingDay thread, or in the comment area on this article, below.
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Footnotes

  1. +/- a few
  2. is that a word? feels like it should be a word.

Brant G

Editor-in-chief at Armchair Dragoons

View all posts by Brant G →

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