Description

Civilisations is a card game about building competing ancient civilisations over three Ages
Each Age has a different deck of cards. At the start of the game the first Age is divided into a number of hands equal to the number of players plus an extra hand which is set aside.
The set aside hand means that the card mix if different for each game, creating a strong replay value.
Each player then chooses a card from their hand and these cards are played simultaneously, paid for with Gold from your civilisations treasury.
Most cards have Military and/or Culture values and all cards have a special effect. When the card is played the special effect is resolved. These effects do things like enhancing other cards already in play, scoring extra points for certain cards, making certain types of cards cheaper to buy, removing or stealing cards from opponents and a host of other things to.
Some special effects are triggered by circumstances and if not triggered when played will wait until a later turn when their trigger condition is met.
Cards which target other players usually target a random card and/or a random player to prevent players ganging up one someone and ruining their fun.
After playing a card, hands are passed round the table clockwise, giving you new options and choices to make.
Once each player has played 6 cards the Age ends and the player with the card with the highest single Military score gains a Colonisation culture bonus and then players may choose to declare War on each other. Winning a war gets you a small amount of gold but, more importantly, destroys a random card from your opponent.
At the end of the third Age Culture scores are added up to find out who won.
The game was written with the following in mind:

• A game should take 1-2 hours (my attention span now is about 2 hours.. age is great :)
• The game can be played on a card or kitchen table
• Set-up and take down time for a game is less than 5 minutes
• You don't need to refer to the rulebook in play, everything you need to know is on the cards (e.g. card abilities are clearly explained in plain english)
• There is a degree of randomness which stops players ganging up on other players
• The game allows direct (war and espionage) and indirect competition (choosing cards which you know your opponent would like)
• No one gets "knocked out" or falls so far behind as not to be able to win. Games are nearly always very close.
• Every decision is interesting and important, you will nearly always want to play more than one of the cards in your hand and have to choose which very carefully
• Choosing cards which interact with each other in positive ways is critical to victory, but the swapping of hands requires some careful forethought on what cards to play and when and also allows you to mess with your opponents by playing cards they want!
• Each game is unique and you have to adapt to the cards you are given

The core game focuses on the region around the Mediterranean sea and Carthage, the Celts, Greece, Rome, Persia and Egypt as playable civilisations.

—description from the designer