PocketCiv

Single player Civ-lite board game with no AI or other factions to compete against. It’s just you against a deck of event cards that can spell disaster on every turn. The game is broken into 8 eras, divided into turns. One of the phases has you turn over the top card in the event deck, which will have 6 events corresponding to one of the eras. If the card you flipped has an event that takes place in the current era, it activates. Events happen in a particular province (there are only 8 of them on the map) but can spread to others if certain conditions are met. All of the events are nasty, ranging from fire, flood, and earthquakes to bandit attacks or civil war. There may even be locusts in there somewhere. The goal is to survive through the 8 eras (make it through the deck 8 times). In my best game so far I almost made it through 3. There is a tech tree, with most mitigating one or more event somewhat, as well as reducing the cost of improvements, leveling cities, etc. Some actually make things worse. Researching Roads, for example, allow your tribes to travel farther in a single turn, but also allows something like an Epidemic to spread to multiple provinces. Two other elements …

If you like solitaire and board games, this is a great addition to your library. Not gunna lie, I spent about 5 min in the tutorial and my squirrel brain said screw it. I'll revisit it eventually.. I played Standard mode maybe 10 times or so before anything made any sense but I started to piece it together. Yeah I lost on Era 1 a bunch because of that but the more I understood the more fun this game became. Soon I figured out how to last until Era 2, then 4, and so on. Beating Standard poorly for the first time felt like an achievement and I like how even though I've beat it once, I know based on that upgrade tree I have just begun to play the core game. I really enjoy the tabletop feel provided by the graphics and the replayability so far is fantastic. Highly recommend for people who enjoy that Civ-lite, Risk, Catan, Solitaire feel. For people who want an enjoyable and quick single-player replayable campaign to break up the day.

Such a disappointing experience. The UI is so bad that the game isn't really playable, the Tutorial was super slow and annoying, the event system feels random and frustrating.

For a long time it was my favourite solo civ board game so I am very happy to be able to play digital.