Advanced Civilization is one of those classic hardcore board games that a lot of people I know sometimes talk about but no one ever plays. The game takes many hours to play, requires many people, and has some pretty punishing mechanics to it. Personally I believe I've only played once, back in University, and I was actually playing on a team with Snuggles. One of us (I forget who) had to leave after a couple hours so we teamed up to start with the plan of cutting down to one person when they had to leave. 10 hours later we were both still playing. I don't remember if we won or not but I know we did very good despite neither of us having played before. Two heads may be better than one! It was long, but very fun.
Robb mentioned earlier this week that he was considering playing Advanced Civ at WBC this year. Now, I find WBC time is way too valuable to spend 8 consecutive hours playing something. Especially since all the Advanced Civ games start at 9 in the morning! I have to think I'd be better off sleeping in until 11 and playing three other games instead. That said, I would like to play the game again since I did like it. WBC may be the only chance I have since the odds of finding 7 other people who want to play a 10 hour game at the same time seem pretty darn slim...
Or they did until I read the WBC recap from this year's Advanced Civ event today. It turns out there's a website up that handles running games of Advanced Civ similar to Diplomacy judges. You get 2 or 3 days per move and the game takes about 4 months to resolve. It feels like it should be easier to get people willing to check a website for 10 minutes a couple times a week for a few months than it is to get someone to spend a whole day doing something. Especially with how many of my old gamer friends have children now. Mistakes are made, but we can work around that.
So, the question is, is anyone interested in giving this site a spin? I figure I'll probably join a public game later this week if there isn't enough interest to get a game going from people I know. Or maybe I'll do both...
In!
ReplyDeleteAlsi, for the record, i am also unlikely to ever devote 8hrs to adv civ at wbc. I believe I said it was more likely than whatever other terrible game we were discussing. Because adv civ is awesome.
I remember that, it was awesome (and I believe we did win).
ReplyDeleteI'm in too, I wonder how trading / negotiations will work out... that's always the part that makes Diplo weird to play online, and it's a key component here.
Snuggles
I'm in.
ReplyDeleteI'll probably need to break for 2-3 days over Christmas. Trading may be tough but it should be fun regardless.
The game allows arbitrarily long pauses so that wouldn't be a problem at all.
ReplyDeleteI believe how trading works is there's a public area where you can post what you have and what you're looking for and then people email back and forth. When a trade is completely everyone gets told the 'known' cards in the trade.