Civolution in about 3 minutes

This video is brought to you by the three minute board game patrons. Keep us independent by supporting us on Patreon. [Music] Kia ora koutou and welcome to Civolution in about 3 minutes. Borrowed copy used. It has a solo mode. It's a game for one to four players. Playing time is long and it's a really complex game.

You are a student in the far future studying history. Can you pass your final exam and create a civilization that stands the test of time? The game lasts for four eras with each era having a bunch of phases tracked using this disc. The winner is the player with the most points at the end of the game and you get points from tons of sources.

Just look for this symbol. Dice: Actions are taken using sets of matching dice. Card management: You'll have a bunch of different tech cards to  manage. Upgrades: As the game progresses, you will upgrade your actions. Play a turn. Each turn will start with the players drawing an event, gaining a new goal chip, and a resource.

Then it's the meat of the game, the action phase. Here you will either reclaim all of your dice you've used and advance this marker one space or you would take a pair of dice and take the matching action. Planning lets you complete a goal chip or place two markers to take any dice action. Doubles can be used to increase one of your traits in the bottom row.

Traits are used for completing lots of cards. Migration lets you move meeples from one region to an adjacent one, while procreation lets you create a new meeple. Production lets you place markers to represent resources in regions you are in. and transport takes those markers off the board and into your personal reserve.

Exploration flips over the hexagonal exploration tokens, which can give bonuses, penalties, and places to build. Each of your meeples will need food, and you can get some from hunting, and you can also build a farm in a region to help feed your people. The build action can also be used to place cities and monuments in adjacent building grounds, no more than two per player per building ground.

All of the rightmost skills have one ability, such as getting an extra die, more ideas to adjust dice rolls, moving traits around, or activating income tiles, but they can also put into play a matching tech card if you meet its requirements. Pay the cost and place the card above your board. They can only stack on top of matching types, but completing rows of cards and chips give you bonuses, and every item here is worth victory points.

Tech cards can advance you on these scoring tracks, each of which gives you tech upgrades and other bonuses. Tech upgrades have you flip over a token to its better side or go to level three, removing the token from the tray. The action phase ends after this marker moves off, and then you resolve the event, feed your meeples, score points, and collect income.

Why would you like this game? I barely scraped the surface of the rules here, but the long and the short of it is you need to optimize your dice actions to get the absolute most out of them in order to get points to win. And the points each game there will be different values for most of the scoring.

But in general, you want people on the board, all over the place and well fed, as well as being deep on technology tracks and having tons of resources. More is almost always better in Civolution. What will make and break civolution for you is if you look at the dashboard and think, "Wow, this is amazing." Or if it's entirely too much for you, because evolution is drowning in decisions.

The modular board is interesting, though I'm not sure it really changes the game too dramatically. It is kind of novel. All Up Evolution is a game for people who find its dice system and all its options captivating and entrancing, but I'd not recommend it to casual gamers at all. The Best thing about this game is the variety of actions and  it's core dice system.

However, I found myself playing through evolution, and while I respect the optimization puzzle in front of me, it wasn't epic or fun. For something so involved, it completely failed to produce any kind of memorable moments. The tech cards were also a thematic miss to me. And overall, I felt like I was adjusting an abacus, not playing a civilization game.

I wanted to love this game, but it's a lot of busy work and allocation of dice and resources without any teeth or sharp edges. It's just too civilized to be a civilization game. This dice system is so much more fun in Castles of Burgundy. And for a faster pace civilization game, try Mosaic Civolution: The Castles of Microsoft Excel.

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