Hobbies And Interests
Instructions
Determine the Game's Features
Decide upon Era and Geographic Area covered to plan the elements of the game.
Select competing Peoples, from 3 to 16. Allow for scenarios in which the minimum number of players is three and where no single People's presence is required in the game. Two-player games should be discouraged, as this leads to a war game that drags on forever.
Prepare an Archeological Succession Table, which will determinmine who goes first for a given activity, how many "ages" a People must go through to complete their historic progression, tiebreaks, minimum "civilization points" required for a progression, Census Data and Commodity Cards.
Design a Game Map, including natural city sites, natural boundaries, volcanos or other natural disaster sites.
Make Trading Cards, based on the commodities produced in a given era, grading them in order of ease of production, and place them in commodity categories. Each category can contain one or more goods.
Associate a calamity with each category of Trading Cards. For example, the original game associates Gold and Ivory with Piracy and Grain to produce Civil War. It is preferred to have a cause and effect relationship between a set of goods and a calamity; for instance, the connection between Grain and Civil War is that monarchs have imposed hard working conditions to increase production, thereby alienating the people into a Civil War.
Determine Civilization Cards, representing the skill sets a Civilization can have. Each Civilization Card has an impact in that it influences production of goods, mitigation of Calamities, advantages in conflict or lessens the cost of buying other Civilization Cards.
Determining the Game's Mechanics
Determine the Sequence of Play, i.e., what activity comes first and who does what first. The instructions of this section are permutable (within reason) and are given in the order of the original Civilization Game. Since the design of the game is open ended, there are no rules other than the Sequence of Play, which must be coherent.
Determine Taxation Rules. The original game bases the Taxation Rules upon the number of Cities owned.
Determine Revolt Rules. The original game assumed that Revolts occured when taxes could not be paid.
Determine Population Growth Rules.
Determine Boat (or other mode of mass transportation, such as Train) Building Rules.
Determine Population Migration Rules.
Determine Population Conflict/Overpopulation Rules.
Determine City Building Rules.
Determine Trading Card Acquisition Rules. Here would be a good place to determine the number of trading cards of each good and category, as well as of the related Calamity Card.
Determine Civilization Card Costs, based upon Trading Cards turned In, levy upon the population and credits from other Civilization Cards. Here would be a good place to determine how many Civilization Cards of each type will be in the game.
Determine Trade Rules, as to how to trade and the value of the Trading Cards when collected in sets.
Determine Calamity Resolution Rules. Calamities such as an Epidemic can be mitigated by a Medicine Civilization Skill Card, or Famine can be mitigated with the Pottery Skill accompanied with Grain Trading Cards.
Advance or Regress Players along the Archeological Succession Table based upon promotion and demotion criteria.
Determine Victory Conditions.
Fine Tuning the Game
Determine the various Counters unique to each People.
Determine additional Archaelogical Succession Table Rules. Rules can be made different for each People. The original game has different point values to complete the Table progression and different eras for each People to enter the Iron and Bronze Ages. Also, there are rules to exit each Age to go to a new one.
Determe Population Conversion Rules from People to Cities and back to permit City Building and Reduction, taking natural City Sites into consideration.
Add Rules to prevent violation of Natural Laws. For example, Tsunamis cannot occur in Sicily, but Volcanoes can.
Determine the Game Setup, especially People's homelands.