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If you were to think of a Civ game to scratch your world building itch you’d probably imagine Civilisation, Advanced Civilisation, Sid Meier’s Civilisation or Through The Ages: A Story of Civilisation. What might not cross your mind is the less well-known Clash of Cultures.
Although, how can it be a Civ game when it doesn’t have the word ‘civilisation’ in the title? A good question. I’m going to show you why Clash of Cultures is a worthy go-to cream for your burning Civ itch.
Components
Let’s start with the basics, what’s in the box? If you’re like me (shallow), components are a key part of a game and your enjoyment of it. This game delivers handsomely on that score. Not only are the player boards thick and lavishly coloured, but they have square holes to slot your wooden cubes into. No more accidental knocking of the board to ruin your tracking of advances or ‘accidentally‘ claiming a different technology you meant to take last round, but forgot because you were too busy admiring your new Action cards that round. Curses!
The plastic minis are limited in variety, being only eight unique designs within the 250+ mini count, but they do the job imaginatively and extremely well. Your basic settlement piece is quite flat and uninteresting, but wait, what’s this: you can add on up to four more structures, like a Temple or a Fortress? Incredible! If you manage to research all four possible city improvements you can have a varied and beautifully crafted city ready for your opponents to start absorbing with their own wretched, yet superior, culture (more on that later).
One more thing before we get to the meat of the matter and that’s the map board pieces. These are sturdy slabs crafted into a four hex design; that’s right, hexes. In your face Sid Meier’s Civilisation with your bonkers grid map, where ancient man couldn’t work out how to move diagonally. Anyway, these show your world in full colour variety with Fertile and Barren lands, Mountains, Seas and Forests. So five colours. Nicely drawn though, like everything in this game.
Gameplay
Let’s take a look at the empires you can choose to run. We have the Green empire, famous for their work on environmental issues. Then we have the Blue empire, whose ship pieces camouflage well on the sea hexes. And who can forget the Red empire!?
Erm… okay, so they don’t have names or stories, they’re just colours. You have to work that backstory out for yourself. I think this was an oversight by Z-Man Games. In fact, I can say with some confidence that it was because two years later they released an expansion called Civilizations (they had to get that word in somewhere) and this contained 14 historical civilisations to choose from.
DISCLAIMER: Now to review this game I played through it again to remind myself of its inner workings. However, I had to do it solo as my friends were all busy being non-existent. I don’t mind that though; I can easily play any game against myself. And don’t think I was easy on myself, no sir! I hate myself as much as my imaginary friends do.
For this venture I took on the brave, stout Green empire - green because of their forward thinking Turtling strategy. To counteract that I pitted the dirty, rotten Blue empire against me. The aggressively minded Blue-barians.
I should mention, however, that playing two-handed against yourself is far quicker than when you have a full complement of four people. And if you’re the fourth player waiting to take your turn, you have to sit through nine actions of the other players before you can have your go. Fine if they’re just making quick Civic improvements, but most likely they’ll be moving units around the board, pondering which advance will gain them the most advantage, god forbid they attack anyone and combat breaks out. It all adds to the downtime. This isn’t Puerto Rico or Twilight Imperium, where you actually get to do stuff during other people’s turns. So watch out for that. Or have fewer friends, like I do.
Combat
No matter how Gandhi-like your intentions, at some point you’re going to have to stick your spear into some fool who thinks he can just walk all over your land interrupting the flow of ore to your sword factories. Combat in Clash of Cultures is handled with the use of six-sided dice.
Those of you who just switched off and decided a luck based Civ game isn’t for you, just bear with me. Yes, you have to roll dice, but like any good game, there are ways to mitigate any possible bad results. Want to guarantee a hit? Research Steel Weapons. Want to negate a hit? Build a Fortress where you’re defending.
This doesn’t even factor in the cool Action card mechanic (last seen in War of the Ring). Each Action card is split into two halves. The top half has something you can do during the game like giving you an extra action or gaining a free advance, whereas the bottom half is always a combat option. Thereby allowing you to catapult your useful action cards into the faces of the enemy for the hope of a better combat result.
Advances
This is a major part of Clash of Cultures and will even score you some victory points. Mainly though it’s a way of propelling your civilisation into the lead culturally while trampling on your opponents. It takes up about 80% of your player board and is split into 12 categories, like Construction, Maritime and Economics, while also including three distinct Government categories. So you’re shaping your culture into what you want it to be. It’s a tech tree with certain linear paths, but generally, you can progress where you like.
It’s very thematic to build your culture up and follow it’s birth via the various technologies you research. To help speed the build along, the game allows you to pick one advancement for free at the end of each turn. So even my knuckle-dragging Blue opponents were figuring out Roads, Fishing and Totalitarianism as they threw themselves at my peace-loving Greenians.
An interesting offshoot of the advances is the ability to gain a Culture or Mood token. Depending on the background colour of the advance you choose (blue or yellow), will gain you a blue Culture token or a happy smiling yellow face. Both of these are very powerful and not to be underestimated.
For example, inflicting a spate of ‘happiness’ on your cities causes them to perform their menial tasks better, so you can build more troops and collect more resources. You can also push them for ever greater results like a true dictator, but their mood will plummet as will their productivity. But it’s an option open to you. I like games with options. It gives you a greater sense of control.
Culture though is the dream of turtlers everywhere. Want to hole up on your starting hex, reinforce your one city to the gills and never step foot into that cruel outside world? Then do it. Simply launch your Culture tokens like intercontinental ballistic missiles at any nearby opposing cities.
You see, Clash of Cultures does a cracking job at mimicking actual historical events, where cultural influence followed trade routes, but does it simply. If you can reach an opponent's city, you have a chance of replacing one of his special city buildings pieces with one of your own! As each city piece gives you one victory point, you are in effect giving yourself a two-point lead over them (-1pt for them and +1pt for you).
Yes, you have to roll a dice for success, but again, you can stack up the Culture tokens to help sway the result in your favour. It’s a wonderful alternative to simply carving your way across the map Genghis Khan style.
Final Thoughts on Clash of Cultures
So what does Clash of Cultures have to offer you? First up, you get to play a Civ game in an evening and feel you’ve played an empire. That’s no easy feat. By the end of any game you’ll either have crushed or assimilated your opponents or be fiercely defending the last city you own in one corner of the board, but you’ll have had chance to expand and explore, subjugate the locals and all while building up your fledgling empire. You’ll have a story to tell.
Clash of Cultures is a tightly designed game and you can see where Christian Marcussen (the creator) has pulled everything together to make it flow smoothly. He’s tried to compact the game so it can be played quickly with the minimum of rules fluff clogging up the engine. This has its downsides also.
For one, the stripped down engine of the game means you have one combat piece. Yes, you can have an army of spearmen, but they’re only ever spearmen. No catapults, archers or M1A1 Abram tanks. While the Action cards may dress up some of your combat results with ‘Archers fire a volley’, you’re still only moving spearmen around.
And in a game about the history of empires, would it be too much to ask for some real meat on the player boards: The Romans, The Greeks, The Celts, hell, I’d even take The Americans at this point. Why just Green or Blue? What does Sanitation do? Oh, easy, it prevents the ‘Epidemic’ Event card from… NO! What does it mean? What did it do historically? Where’s my Leonard Nimoy voice-over telling me interesting facts about that particular development in human history!? It’s on Google, that’s where. Certainly not in this game.
Lastly, in an attempt to retain that balance of aggression vs progression, if you have turtling players, sitting on opposite ends of the board, player interaction will be at a minimum. The Action cards go some way to mitigate this as you can use them to influence barbarian warriors that show up at random on some of the map tiles, but even so, it’s mainly combat that will bring you together, as it were.
These are minor niggles. In the end, keeping things simple helps move the game forward, so it’s not wallowing in complicated rules with constant referrals to the rule book. While the rule book is quite full, it’s nicely laid out with plenty of graphics and examples.
Turns are simple, combat is simple, doing actions are simple. Clash of Cultures does all of this and is still fun. Send out your Roman legions or sit behind your Hadrian’s Wall, you can win either way. It’s your choice.
