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Had a day of Advanced Civ again this Saturday. Slightly different group, and the beginning of a problem (at least it’s one that’s generally good to have). I could have had seven people over. Advanced Civ can take seven people. My dining room table, however, cannot. I really need to start checking the local options for meeting spaces.

Anyway, we ended up with me, Dave, Mark, Jason, Patch and Bruce. Bruce is the new person, and I’m still working out his ‘fit’ with the group. I will say I have some worries. He’s a good guy, and while he picked up CC:A pretty fast a week ago, he definitely struggled all day with Civilization, which is no more complicated. Bruce has said he’s generally just interested in tactical games, but I wasn’t expecting anything that extreme. Also, at the moment the group game days are one big multiplayer game, which means higher level games.

At any rate, I managed to grab Babylon, despite being 4th in the order for picking which nation to play. This turned out to be a big blessing, as it put me on the opposite side of the board from Bruce’s Italy, which kept up a very aggressive territorial campaign all game. Jason had Egypt again, and built one city a bit early, giving him slowish start, but otherwise it was managed fine, and was slowly pushing me back in the Levant.

Jason was slow in going west into the rest of Africa there was no Africa player, and Italy was slow in getting there, so much of North Africa was empty for the first half of the game as Italy, Thrace (Dave) and Crete (Patch) got tangled up in a protracted struggle for space in the Balkans. Patch debated at one point, and went for Metalworking, but afterwards wished he’d taken Astronomy instead, to colonize Africa with.

Meanwhile, my major problem was Assyria (Mark), who I had a constant set border squabbles with. He had come after a border with me before moving towards Asia Minor. This kept me from being entirely comfortable, but I was generally keeping even with him, city-wise, or possibly one ahead. This meant we tended to be primary trading partners, since we were the only ones with matching high-level cards.

I was about the second one to break through to the Late Bronze Age, but did not make it to the Early Iron Age by the end of a slow day. Mark did make it into the EIA on the last turn, and I still had two advances to go, so he was in good shape. In general, I had been in great shape, and with two fewer advances, I still had a higher total value. I had gotten Architecture, and it was allowing me to be stable at a full nine cities, something I’ve never achieved before.

Of course, a lack of disasters all game did not hurt. I drew about three and traded them all away. I got hit by Superstition early, but recovered fairly well. I got an Earthquake pretty early. But I avoided the really harmful events, and was the one who last traded away Epidemic neatly avoiding taking that hit.

However, on the last turn of the day, I drew three calamities, two of which were non-tradable. I traded away Superstition, but thinking on it, I should have held it. You can only be the Primary Victim of two calamities per turn, and the two I had to swallow were Flood (which is especially bad for Babylon) and Civil War (which is especially bad for a large civilization). Getting two cities reduced by Superstition instead would have been a bargain, but I didn’t think about just how bad the other two were in the press of events. In the end, I dropped from nine cities to four, with minimal population, and therefore few possibilities for rebuilding on the next turn.

We had to call it there, and had a wide spread of scores:

So, after my win last time, I’m right back to my normal second place. At least this is the first time that Mark has won.

Another note for the day is that Dave’s father is getting rid of part of game collection, and during lunch we looked over the list, and gave votes on what we’d like to get a hold of, if possible. Family members will get first pick of course (and Dave is requesting a fair number for himself), but a few of us may get some out-of-print classics.