Post: Day One (for me)
Monday the 10th of March, 2025, at the dinner hour.

My physical copy of Civilization VII showed up via a postman who made me sign for it and everything. Woah! Haven’t done that in a while. How apropos for a history game huh?

I did what I always do with new games. I have been avoiding too many spoilers or videos about “things you should know before you play” and just trying to sink into it as the devs intended. Raw and unfiltered.

If it seems as though I’m making too big of a deal, recall that I’ve played every edition of this series and another new one kinda is a big deal.

So there it is. Take seven? The game as I understand it so far has broken away from some of the expected conventions of the predecessors, which is not necessarily a bad thing. I enjoyed six but there was a simultaneously a complexity in the game play and a lack of nuance in the world building that could be a little jarring at times. I found myself frequently customizing games to ignore certain mechanics or aspects. For example, the whole religions thing—which seems to be absent in seven from what I’ve played so far?—is something that I would ignore or turn off as a win condition in six. I just wasn’t jiving the whole religious imperialism thing.

One thing I really like so far in seven is the new city settlement aspect. It always struck me as kind of unrealistic that settlers would just go off and found a whole new city with loyalty to the whole central leader thing—and of course it could be easily gamed to spam the world with little colonies. In seven it seems like your settlers spin off more of a kind of satellite town that needs to reach a certain potential before it can self govern. So you build these little future-cities that need resources and protection from the actual cities and it makes it a little more strategic in the way that you do the expansion of empire thing.

Also, I should note, that I’ve so far only played the first age. The game is now parcelled out into Ages with different goals for each. Some folks have been complaining that this breaks the continuity of a spanning empire, but from what I’ve seen having merely but dipped my toe into the Exploration Age is that it is probably more nuanced than that. Hopefully in a good way.

All that said, I am open to a new experience. I know some folks like to grumble when a beloved franchise tries something new. But the reality is that I still have Civ VI installed on a couple devices if I really don’t like VII. Designing new games is about taking risks, after all, and when evolving a series like Civilization it seems like there is vast opportunity to try new ideas in this vast and complex simulator.

Plus, you can’t please everyone.