Advanced Civilization Variant - Culture cards
Basically, at the beginning of each game make a small hand of 'culture cards' equal to 1 fewer than the number of people playing. Then, starting from the person who picked second, give a card to each player, not including the first one.
The culture cards basically detail a particular 'culture' type, with simple pro's and con's. Other than that, the game proceeds the same.
The reason why we did this were that our mid-to-end games always ended up the same. Any sane player agriculture, coinage, engineering, etc., all the good management stuff. Since they're no card limits everyone would take mysticism, etc. Eventually we had 8 (yes we play routinely with that many!) carbon-copy civilizations running around, and the end game had no style.
For example, culture cards:
NOMAD: Nomads settle rarely, and big cities are against their culture. However, they can live off the land and tend to travel faster and leaner than other cultures. *RULES*: Nomads require 10 people to build a city site, and 15 to build a wilderness city. Nomads also can't built a city adjacent to another city. However, Nomads can move twice without the Roadbuilding advantage, and only require 1 token to support a city. Crete cannot be Nomads.
WARRIOR CLASS: This culture has a strong warrior class. In conflicts, the enemy removes 2 tokens for each draw while the warrior only removes one. However, a large part of the labor of the people goes into supporting the warrior class. Because of this, you need 4 people to support each city.
SEAFARERS: This culture has strong ties and roots to the sea. The seafarers automatically get the Astronomy advantage (same as the card, but no points toward victory) and can fit 6 tokens on a ship. However, they can't build a city unless it's on a coastal territory.
The idea, as you might see, is to 'shake' up things a little and force players to play with a different strategy. For example, I played Egypt as nomads, and the typical "please leave me alone, I'm all the way down here in the nile and not hurting anyone" idea didn't work too well. I was forced to spread out and, well, wander.
Meanwhile, Crete got the warrior class card and ended up trying to support a massive empire of an obviously aggressive people that although a terror constantly toppled under it's own weight, as well as being forced to fight wars on all it's borders.
Happy Gaming!
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