Civolution

Civolution is one of those heavy games that divides people, and I understand why. Mechanically, it feels like a successor to Burgundy, but on an entirely different weight scale: here, you are not merely lifting a game off the table, you are lifting a whole civilization simulation. And yet, beneath the god-game veneer, what I felt most was panic and disappointment management—in the good sense.

At its core is a sandbox of mechanisms that lock together and make sense. This is not a game where I simply unlock options and execute them all in sequence. Civolution is extremely tight: I constantly have to separate what I want from what I can actually do, because very often not everything fits into my plan. That inability to do everything, unlike in quite a few current games, is precisely where the tension comes from.

Interaction, then, comes chiefly through that pressure from the system and through the decisions I am forced to leave behind, rather than through any promise that I will get to build everything undisturbed. The one awkward point is scoring: the first round is tremendously important in practice, while also being the point at which I have the most limited decisions and possibilities, depending on the cards I happened to receive. I might have preferred the x5 to be x4 in the first round and the final one to be x3, but that is more likely to cause a bit of disappointment during scoring than to spoil the journey.

And the journey is good enough that the game came straight back out for a second play. I do not find it bad or uninteresting; I find it demanding, strange, and stubbornly compelling. If the scoring does not rub you the wrong way, Civolution can comfortably claim a place among the games of the year. Journey before destination, radiant.