Civilization: A New Dawn – Terra Incognita

03/03/2021

FANTASTIC! Fixes the base game in key ways. Dramatically improves it. This expansion is mandatory and I will only play the game with it. SO WONDERFUL! Pick it up and don't look back. The game is now AWESOME!

P.S. The asymmetry is SO COOL! I feel like the civ-specific tech card is very hit or miss. But the power is nice and I appreciate that each player now has a historical identity.

This is an expansion to Civilization: A New Dawn, and is clearly the best expansion I tried this year. It really pushes CAND to another level, while maintaining complexity under check, which is crucial for a Civ game that tries to stay in the medium range. I wrote a first impressions report, but the TLDR is that I have finally found my Civ game that I can get played on a workday game-night. And with the web-published solo mode, it's a perfect addition to my confinement arsenal

I wrote a [url=https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2518979/terra-incognita-first-impressions-and-solo-suitabi]first impressions report[/url] on it.

No. Ignore the hype and think carefully. This expansion hurts the base game. Exploration is a joke, since you are incentivized to explore away from other people. Armies are plain silly, since it is now more difficult to deal with barbarians, plus it is now near impossible to be a threat to other players. The abstract nature of military presence in the base game was much better. Governments and districts may sound cool, but they make an already fast game behave like it is on speed. Run-away leader problems are magnified, and if you play against new people you will actively have to sandbag.

If you really want a "true to Civ" board game, track down Clash of Cultures (whichever version). That has proper exploration, military and tech trees.

If you want a "nice and quick" light Civ game, stick with the base game.