Steven K. Mariner

Last Updated: 02-Jul-2012

Advanced Civilization

Index:

• What is Advanced Civilization?
• Game Write-Ups
• Maps
• Links

Advanced Civilization is a game which was published by Avalon Hill (R.I.P.) which was a variant of Civilization, also published by Avalon Hill (R.I.P.).

Starting each as a small band of nomads in the Stone Age, the players attempt to carve out their niche in the world, expanding their population, technology and culture and engaging in trade, and even war, if necessary, with their neighbors.

This is not a wargame; victory goes to the most advanced culture at the end of the game.

See the Links section for online copies of the rules.
Check out my summary of How the Game Begins.

The Quarterly Tradition

My wife and I host a game of Advanced Civilization four times per year; in this traditional quarterly Civ game event we pick a Saturday to play, starting at 11:00am, and play until it's done. Our quarterly Civ games used to run 12 hours, 13 if we were lax on keeping the folks moving. Lately, however, the game has run 14-16 hours and that's just too long for the folks who come to play.

The quarterly game used to be completely untimed, originally by request and then by tradition, but reality has settled in -- this group needs a little prodding. So we've established a new process where we run a timer during Movement, during Trading, and during Purchase.

This group doesn't tend to go to war very much until the last two ages of the game, so there isn't any real reason not to do simultaneous movement most of the time. Hence, boat-building and movement are combined and the whole group has 8 minutes to get it all done. We are flexible if there are actual conflicts going on, permitting the low-Census agressor to move after the agressed-upon, even if it happens to exceed the 8 minute timer. But in the first 2/3 of the game, that almost never happens.

Timing the trades has always been a great way to shave a few hours off the game. You can set 5-minute trade limitations and the trading floor sounds an awful lot like Wall Street -- and you also see some intersting last-second trades that noone in their right mind would do in an untimed game. But recreating the stress of Wall Street isn't our goal in the quarterly event. We just want to get to bed before 7am. 8 minutes, as a rule, is sufficient to permit fairly normal trading but put the squash on the laggards at the end.

Timing the purchase of Civilization Cards also helps, because it forces people to concentrate on their purchases and discounts.
 

The guests are friends who have expressed an interest in the game, and we send out invitations about a month in advance, requesting a response within two weeks. We've got just over 25 people on the invitation list, but we've not yet ever had more than 8 affirmative RSVPs. Most of the players at each session are the ones who really like the game and tend to make every event; from the remaining 20 or so folks we get a few extras here and there which help to round out the game.

We used to invite people to begin showing up at 10:00am, with the training session for new players beginning at 11:00am. The game itself started at noon in those days, and so we urged people to arrange for their own lunch before arriving. Annie and I cook up some kind of dinner thing; sometimes it's tacos, sometimes it's a huge pot of soup (which, to date, has been the most useful and popular, as it can be snacked upon throughout the day's gaming session), and so on. We provide a huge variety of canned soft drinks, and if someone has particular tastes they are encouraged to bring their own stock of whatever they need.

However, due to the difficulty of having the game go past midnight (and folks really start to show fatigue by 2:00am), we've moved the start time up to 11:00am. The training session, if required, now consists of about 5-10 minutes discussing the game pieces and then we teach the rest of the game by playing it (which, as any experienced Civ player will tell you, is quite sufficient, given the simplicity of the opening rounds of the game). We're considering moving the start time to 10:00am, but we have people traveling from over an hour away, so we're trying to be sensitive to their needs.

Game Write-Ups

In recent times, the event has become more regular, and I've started writing up the results of the games. And so, without further adieu, here they are, in reverse chronological order:

	July 1st, 2012
	(Several games with lost write-ups, but about a three year gap with only one game in it)
	May 28th, 2005
	April 9th, 2005
	February 28th, 2004
	November 22nd, 2003 (no write-up yet)
	August 23rd, 2003
	April 19th, 2003
	December 28th, 2002
	September 21st, 2002

Maps

These are all copies I downloaded from the web, which include both an East and a West expansion, and I've whacked off the Eastern and drawn a line to show where the original board ends and the Western Expansion begins.

	civmap30.jpg		951,462 bytes - Large map (probably to scale, not sure yet)
	civmap31.jpg		366,920 bytes - Quarter-Scale from original
	civmap32.jpg		125,926 bytes - Quarter-Scale from civmap31.jpg
	civmap44.jpg		97,347 bytes - Same as civmap32.jpg but all the Western Expansion is whacked off and I've started to fix the numbers up.

I'll have more later; right now I'm adding this subpage mostly to ensure I don't lose track of the following links and information:

Links

© 1997-2008, Steven K. Mariner