Pocket Civ Deconstruction

At first, I was hesitant to do this game for this particular project. Why, you ask? Because... Part of our project is to be prepared to explain the rules and demonstrate gameplay to the entire class. That... is going to be difficult. I accepted the challenge regardless, though! And here it is, my deconstruction of "Pocket Civ".

So I recently figured out through some d'oh moments and a couple of revelations that this game is basically a smaller, "simplified" version of the grandiose franchise "Civilization", which is available for the PC.
The game is incredibly similar in it's mechanics and terminology, but overall there is a different feel, since you are focused more on survival as opposed to expanding.

The goal of the game is simple... To survive. You must survive eight "eras", or rounds, in order to "beat" the game. You can also play off of things called "Region" cards, which have a specific goal and placement for all the regions in the game.

The game does not come with a board. I'd assume you have to kitbash it from another hexagonal-shaped strategy game (the purchasable version of pocket civ comes with one, not the PnP one), so I decided to use a whiteboard to make my life easier. I saw someone on a forum do something similar so I stole his idea. And it worked out great. The map would be the space of this game's play.

The core mechanic of the game is probably, or straight-up sheer luck. At the beginning of each game, after the player has either followed a region card or placed all of their tokens (Mountains, Forests, Tribes, Desert), the player draws three event cards. The number on the event card that represents the Era (for example, if it is the start of the game, it's Era 1. So the player would follow the corresponding number on the card) is the event that occurs in your empire. The events can be read on cards, which are in a deck that you can look through at your own will, or just keep in one giant sheet to check on to see the results of.

An Event card, a hand of advantages and a hand of event explanations. 



Your tribe tokens are the main objects of the game. Their attributes are their relation to the map, or the space, and how each card effects them. For example, a tribe placed near a fishing village is going to be destroyed by a Tsunami event. But a tribe surrounded by land will not be affected. The state of the token effects its attributes.

If your little tribes (and, or cities) survive all three event cards, you have survived an era. You add on an era for each round you win until you've reached eight.

More objects that effect gameplay are things like gold, resources, advantages, and glory. Unfortunately, this is where the game's rules get confusing. There is literally no clarification on these rules. I had to research a bit before I found a somewhat clear guide on how to gain and lose resources, gold and glory, but it still is confusing to me. So... I've tried to play without glory as a factor. This is definitely detrimental to gameplay, as it is a requirement to have a certain amount of glory to accept different advantages.

From what I understand from the rules, after each era you can build three more tribes. You can also combine four tribes to build a city, and after you have a city, you can start purchasing advantages. Advantages can help or hurt you (operative and resultant actions), (this is where luck and strategy plays an important role), based on how you use them. Advantages are bought with gold and resources. Gold is obtained through trading with other cities and expeditions (when you send tribes to search in frontier zones). Resources are obtained from the main empire zone (wherever your city is placed), based on the tokens that inhabit the same area.

So, as I said, the majority of this game is strategy and luck. The player learns how to carefully chose where they build their city in order to receive certain advantages to survive against events the longest. Cities cannot have over two advantages at a time, and in order to have more than one, the player must sacrifice another four tribes. The rules are also... very confusing. They take at least 30 minutes to commit to your mind, and ten minutes to read. It can be frustrating trying to figure it out, but in the end (at least in my opinion), it's worth it.

(Play zone.)

Each scenario has a different goal which spices up the game everytime you play it and encourages replays. I thoroughly enjoyed this game, besides its setbacks.