Before Inheritors, before Eila and Something Shiny, Jeffrey CCH designed a civilization game. The white rabbit of “civ but in half an hour” has humbled many a talented creator. Does Age of Civilization bend the long arc of history away from failure?

Nope. But it’s an interesting failure. That’s more than I can say for many of its peers.

The action selection system is clever, if strictly limited by the format.

Age of Civilization isn’t the first civ game to mask its deficiencies with an entire storage unit of individual civs. There are scads of the things, forty-eight in all, each with their own perks, and there’s no small amount of delight to be found in examining how those traits reflect the designer’s understanding of the people in question. It’s an effect not unlike skimming the national bonuses in Sid Meier’s take on the genre. Italy, with its extra victory point from the culture action. Mongolia, forever known for its blaze of militaristic glory. Khitan, perplexing western audiences with its absence from their textbooks.

Right away, though, Age of Civilization makes one crucial misstep: it limits access to its civilizations. I’m reminded of two other titles that boasted an entire globe’s worth of tribes and kingdoms, the Ragnar Brothers’ History of the World and Philippe Keyaerts’ Small World. In those, players were constantly on the move, or at least permitted to swap out nations as rapidly as they liked. Here, CCH limits everybody to three civilizations per game. A full session lasts six rounds. Since you’ll only pick three civilizations, easily the highlight of the whole affair, a full half of the game misses out on its biggest moments.

Meanwhile, the paucity of these upgrades tends to reduce the civilizations to one factor above all others: population. When taking a new civ card, you immediately reset your meeple count to the number on the card. If you’re under that number, taking a new civ is a boon. Otherwise, it’s a step down. Which is an odd statement in its own right, a prioritization of raw numerical advantage over everything else. More than that, though, it reduces the entire game to a singular puzzle.

Because Age of Civilization isn’t only about picking up cards; it’s an ultra-light worker placement gig as well. There are only six actions open at a time, selected from a trio that are always available and a conveyor belt that gradually swaps out the others. Along the way, wars and a plague will wreak their own havoc. It’s a clever but deeply odd system, one that permits construction and conquest one moment only for those options to give way to fishing and trade. Or vice versa, depending on the setup. Either way, it generates a civ game that does indeed last thirty minutes, but at the cost of feeling painfully artificial in every way that matters.

You get a civilization! You get a civilization!

There are means of mitigating the caprice of that conveyor belt. The answer, again, lies in the civilization cards. Some grant access to actions even if they aren’t currently available to the general public, like Korea and fishing, the Celts and hunting, or Vietnam and a whole bunch of stuff. These can offer a lifeline, especially since their actions tend to remain available even after they’ve fallen into decline. That’s because there are at least two perks per civ, one that’s only available as long as they’re dominant, plus another that pokes out from under whichever card replaced them.

Of course, such mitigations are contingent on the card market, which, while ample, doesn’t wholly conceal the game’s awkward stagger. The whole thing is closer to a combo-building puzzle than a civ game proper. Everything is about picking civilizations that match the current (and future) action offer, round out your dwindling population of meeples, and hopefully build a wonder or three at some point. Getting those planets to achieve syzygy is a royal pain the butt. There’s room for some clever combos, but not much, and those that do manifest are often the result of chance more than skill. Meanwhile, good luck keeping your population around long enough to make a civilization feel worthwhile longer than a single turn.

That constrained playspace makes it hard not to contrast with the other games I mentioned earlier. Both Small World and History of the World tinker with similar ideas, letting players cover a whole range of civilizations in a single sitting. But they understood that there needs to be a reason to keep a civ around. They did this by offering players ongoing points from their previous civilizations, letting a now-declined kingdom or empire contribute as the player changed into a new toga. This favored players who effectively fielded two teams at once, both a robust declined civilization for generating points and an upstart chewing into rival territory. Age of Civilization, by contrast, offers no in-game reason behind the three-civ limitation. It exists “above the table,” so to speak. Half of your turns feel puny and that’s that.

Three civilizations piled together.

Without more to bind the experience together, the game feels too chore-like, a minor exercise in pulling the right cards. It’s still interesting, to be sure, especially thanks to the wide territory it tries to cover. But that territory is only glimpsed in low resolution, like taking a cross-country train with fogged glass windows. There’s a reason this game is thirty minutes long, and it isn’t by dint of cramming the civgame experience into a suitcase. Any longer and its diminutive conundrums would overstay their welcome.

But here’s the good news. Although Age of Civilization doesn’t make much of an impression, CCH followed it up a couple of years later with a sequel of sorts. Age of Galaxy it’s called. And tomorrow we’ll take a look at why it succeeds where its predecessor is best relegated to the sands of time.

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi.)