Like Civ, except for that whole all-weekend thing

[dr_tectonic]

Tom had a gaming Thursday last night, so we played Antike, which I quite enjoyed.

It's a Civ-style empire-building game, but really stripped down so you can actually play it in only a couple hours. (Well, 3.5 hours, but we had six players and we stopped after two rounds and started over when our sixth player showed up, plus it was the first time for three of us -- still pretty quick, considering!)

I think it really distills the essence of the 4X-style game very effectively. It does the whole strategy-balancing thing with only 3 resources, and has a very clever innovation (the rondel) that lets you decide what to do each turn, but also restricts your options.

I was still 5 turns away from victory when Bill won, but I felt like my strategy was functional and that I had something that was working, so I felt quite satisfied regardless. I definitely want to play it again sometime.

Comments

[toosuto.livejournal.com]

I really liked Antike when we played it here. It felt a little long and I won by default (it was the last game of the evening and we had just gone too long) but I'd definitely play again.

[dcseain.livejournal.com]

Civ usually takes 5-6 of us ~10 hours to play, with two meal breaks. Our longest game went 12 hours with meal breaks. I do think i shall have to check out Antike, though.

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

Huh. Sounds definitely worth looking for.

I keep wondering what Titan would be like if I didn't play it as Colossus. I don't know how much of the slowness of games like Civ is because people don't have a nice computerized source of all of the information they're always needing.

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

With Civ in particular, I think a hefty chunk of slowness comes from all the trading, which is hard to speed up.

But yeah, one of the indicators that Risk, despite its popularity, is a pretty lousy game is the fact that it only takes about 5 minutes to play a complete game of it on the computer, because almost all your time is spent rolling dice and fiddling with the army pieces...

[nehrlich.livejournal.com]

"Civ, except for that whole all-weekend thing" is clearly a great advertisement to a certain segment of the population, because I was like "oooh!!" Many a high school weekend was spent playing Civilization. I too will have to check out Antike at some point.

What's a "4X-style game"?

4X

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

Civ (on the computer), Colonization, Alpha Centauri, Master of Orion, Master of Magic, etc. That particular style of empire-building game.

4X = eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate.

Re: 4X

[nehrlich.livejournal.com]

Ah. So basically all the games I like. Good to know the term for them.

[drdeleto.livejournal.com]

I've also heard good things about Mare Nostrum in this regard. Might be a little bit longer than Antike, though. Still, it's gotta be shorter than Civilization.