Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition

I ignored the release of Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition when it came out. I thought the original edition was a phenomenal Ameritrash-style civ game, and I’d already decked my copy out with 3D models of the wonders and with custom wooden tokens for resource tracking.

I was wrong to ignore it. Earlier this year, I re-played the original a few times and realized that certain advances (e.g., technologies) were overpowered and that the beginning of the game was pretty scripted. So I downloaded the revised rules [PDF] and compared them to the original. To my delight, I discovered that the changes are well considered and add significant polish to the game.

Advances 

For instance, while the advances have almost all the same names, their powers have been refined, made more fun, and in some cases streamlined—based on the experiences of players. (The one exception: Medicine replaces Chemistry.) It’s a much better tech tree.

For instance, Writing used to unlock drawing an Action card and an Objective card, but only after you unlocked a government, something that people would always forget to do when that moment came. Now you draw the cards immediately upon taking the advance.

The old version had four unique pre-reqs (Roads required Engineering, Navigation required Cartography, etc.) but those have all been removed. Now it’s basically a tech tree with nine branches. You can discover any advance further down a branch once you discover the root advance. For instance, on the Education branch, once you discover Writing, you can then discover either Public Education, Free Education, or Philosophy. Two of the branches start unlocked, with you already knowing the first advance (Farming in Agriculture and Mining in Construction).

Governments, however, require you to discover the last tech on the branch. So to discover Democracy you would need to research Philosophy (which itself requires Writing). You can only know one Government at a time (Democracy, Autocracy, or Theocracy) but now can shift governments more easily.

The first advance you take can come from the Farming or Construction branches (three choices each) or the first advance of the other seven branches, for 13 choices in total.

As in the original game, one advance we’re constantly forgetting: you’re not even allowed to move troops until you discover Tactics (the first advance in Warfare). You can build infantry and use them as garrisons, but they can’t move. We’re constantly forgetting this and having to remind people. Nor can you use the attack/defense bonuses on the bottom half of Action cards, which completely upset a new player upon discovering this limitation, and nearly cost him the game. (I had explained this at the start, but there’s a lot to remember when learning this for the first time.)

Each advance is worth a half a victory point at the end of the game. So the most points possible from the 40 of 48 achievable advances is 20 points. In our games, the average player has discovered 20 of the advances, for 10 VPs.

City Pieces

Another change in this edition is that more tech paths unlock buildings. The first edition had only four building types: academy (unlocked by Writing), fortress (unlocked by Tactics), port (unlocked by Fishing), and temple (unlocked by Myths). Since ports have to be built on the water, this meant that you couldn’t build cities with four buildings in landlocked regions.

The expansion Clash of Cultures: Civilizations, now integrated into the Monumental Edition, provides three new buildings. Seven of the advances that start a branch unlock a building, giving cities much more variety.

It’s hard to remember the effect of each, though—

• Take the bonus now:
  • Academy – take 2 IdeasObservatory – draw an Action card
  • Temple – draw a culture or happiness token
• Change what you can recruit and get as resources:
  • Market – can recruit cavalry and elephants, can get 1 gold when another player trades with this city
  • Port – can recruit ships, can collect gold or happiness from sea space instead of food
• Miscellaneous
  • Fortress – no bonus at time of building, only during first round of combat 
  • Obelisk – can’t be culturally converted; no other benefits

Cultural conversion and the city piece mechanic were why I fell in love with the game after seeing it in play at a convention. The city center is a round piece, around which you put the buildings as you buy them. However, other cultures can influence your city; for instance, one of my cities’ temples converted to an opponent’s religion (through an Action card), becoming their color. 

In this edition, Wonder pieces are now plastic pieces that integrate into the city rather than cardboard standees. They look great.

Alas, the cultural influence action is rarely used; it’s expensive, taking an action and an average of 1.5 influence markers to succeed for its point swing of net 2 VPs (+1 VP to the winner, -1 VP to the loser). Typically you’ll want to use culture tokens for wonders instead.

Warfare

Warfare is meaner. In the first edition, if you captured an opponent’s city, only the center piece became your color, reflecting the fact the other pieces were under the influence of others. Since each city piece is worth a VP, the main goal of combat was to capture wonders, which were not then city pieces and which have no color. 

If you kill an opponent’s leader in battle, you get 2 VP for that as well.

With two players, war is zero sum, while with three players the third player can be a counterbalance. We’ve had many two-player games devolve into war games, settled by player elimination.

In one game, I got the card “Mercenaries” and sent the barbarians into my son Connor’s second city, setting up a cascading collapse as I eliminated him from the game. Ironically, I came in second. We played the whole game in an hour, so played again! (Glenn, as Egypt, 17; Jeffrey, as Phoenicians, 14.5; Connor, as Romans, 5.)

Instead of using standard dice, the game now uses custom d12s with values from 1 to 6, with each die face having a number and an icon. If you have that type of unit in the game, you get its “Clash” benefit. For instance, if you have a leader and you roll a 1 (which has a leader icon) you get to reroll that die! If you have an elephant and you roll a 4, that value of the die doesn’t add to your attack but you get to cancel a hit.

Civilizations

Here are the 15 civilizations:

1. Aztecs
2. Babylonia
3. Carthage
4. Celts
5. China
6. Egypt
7. Greece
8. Huns
9. India
10. Japan
11. Maya
12. Persia
13. Phoenicia
14. Rome
15. Vikings

Each of the civilizations include four unique advances (unlocked by regular advances) and three leaders.

Replayability

The addition of civilizations provides a wonderful amount of replayability. I often change what building advance I go for first, based on my civilization. You’d have to play 15 times just to play each civilization once, but once isn’t enough – you’re probably not going to use all its special advances, nor use all three of its leaders. We’ve often had players want to play the civ they’d played the last game.

The random Objectives—each worth 2 VP—have two parts: a peaceful and military-oriented one, though not always an attack (for instance, I earned an objective for having 3 cavalry in different armies). These cards force you to think differently from game to game, as you try to achieve your objectives. In our games, the average player scores 4 Objectives, but in our two most recent games two of us scored 7 Objectives for the first time.

Part of replayability is to leave ’em wanting more. The variant ending is much stronger and what we always use. In the standard ending, you know this is the last turn, and you’ll do some unthematic things when it comes to troop movements, such as emptying your cities of soldiers to conquer your neighbor, who has just taken their last turn. With the variant ending the game ends on a die roll, so 5 out of 6 times you never know if it will be the last turn.

While some might decry the amount of luck in the game, given the Objective and Action card decks, I think the games can be very balanced. My son and I played three games in the row that went like this: tied score, broken by tiebreaker (who had more city pieces); victory by 0.5 points; victory by 1 point.

Out of 20 players’ scores I recorded, here were the average VPs by category:

• City-pieces, 9.2
• Advances, 10.0
• Objectives, 8.4
• Wonders, 2.9
• Events, 1.3
• Defeated Leaders, 0.4
• Total = 32.1

Here are the rules [PDF] and a how-to-play video. I love civilization games, and Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition is now my favorite civ boardgame.

Photo credits: Unless otherwise noted, these are promotional images from WizKids.