Civilization is an addictive, strategy baord game.  Originally produced by Avalon Hill, the game is set around the Mediterranean Sea and the cradle of civilization.  It usually takes at least 10 hours for us to finish a game.  The game consists of turns, each with many phases.  Here's a summary of a turn in 3 major sections:

1. You move cardboard tokens around a board to attack your neighbors, defend your territory, and most importantly build cities. (The military conflict is more like seasoning, and not the real meat of the game.)

2. You get cards for each city you have, which represent ancient trade commodities like papyrus, salt, and gold. We have a free-for-all trading session where you try to monopolize a trade good. One gold card is worth 9, but two are worth 36, and all five gold cards would be worth 225. The points from the trade goods are used to buy advances, which are the main measure of victory in the game. Advances also enhance your military abilities, give you credits toward other advances later, and protect you from calamities (see phase 3).

3. Lastly we resolve calamities. Trading is fun, but this is the best part in my opinion. Calamity cards are shuffled in with the trade goods, so instead of gold you might occasinoally get PIRACY or TREACHERY. During trading you try to get rid of these calamaties, but whoever is stuck with PIRACY at the end of trading becomes a victim of the pirates (Unfortunately, some calamities like CIVIL WAR are not tradeable so whoever draws them gets stuck with them). Then we start another round and try to rebuild the damage.

     We have been playing Advanced Civilization for over 12 years.  One major problem developed, that in many games, one or more players were able to purchase every existing advance.  This prevented them from continuing to grow after maxing out the advances and worse, forced all players to generally purchase the same advances as each other due to lack of choice.  An expansion was needed and we must give full credit to The Civ Expansion Project, who created such an expansion.  Our personal version, called simply, "CivX," is based on theirs with many modifications.

Maps
Advanced Civ with Western Expansion [50.5 KB GIF]
Advanced Civ, Trade Cities Varient [216 KB GIF]
CivX Full Map [1.41 MB PDF]
CivX Full Map [1.05 MB PNG]

Rules and Stuff
CivX 1.7 Rulebook [457 KB Doc]
CivX AST [38 KB Excel]
CivX Scenarios Handbook [88 KB Doc]
CivX 1.7 Advance Quick Charts [544 KB Excel]
CivX 1.7 Advance Credit Table [54 KB Excel]
CivX 1.7 Release Notes [24 KB Doc]

Tools
CivX Tracker Tool, which we use during the game (Updated 2/8/2010).
CivTracker CSV file (version CivX 1.7).  Put in same directory as CivTracker.exe.
Complete install package for CivX Tracker.

Game Summaries
March 20th, 2011
January 31st 2010
October 4th 2009
December 28th 2008
June 29th 2008
March 30th 2008

Player Ratings