TL,DR: Using civilization 5 complex city management in a single city game, it increases the amount of possible status changer abilities allowing spell with immediate effects instead of being restricted to rule changing abilities which are more convenient for technologies or enchantments.

Historical background and theoretical explanations

Many many years ago (since 2005) I wanted to make a master of magic (MOM) board game. I tried many ideas and very little of them were actually playable. The main issue was that board games requires abstraction while master of magic requires details so that spells could affect those details. So you end up with abstracting and detailing at the same time which are 2 opposite process. There are options with "detail on demand", but it is not very convenient and have limited uses. So my conclusion was that this game idea cannot be implemented as a board game.

What was frustrating is that there were tons of civilization board games that actually worked. So that keep me wondering why CIV but not MOM. After some analysis, it seems that most technologies use rule changing abilities. Which means they change some rules or by pass some restrictions imposed by some rules. Since technology have permanent effects once unlocked, rule changing abilities works perfectly. The only alternative I found for MOM is to use only enchantments that works like tech, but you can change which one is active at the same time. It works well for self enchantments but bad for enemy negative enchantments.

Another issue was the management of the empire size. For example, if you have a game with 3 actions per turn, a large empire will require more action to manage. Therefore giving you less actions per city as your empire grow. There was also issues with resources: which are centralized, which resource are local. Collecting resources on large empire can be complex. Managing enchantments globally on a whole empire was problematic to the cost of the enchantment. If the cost is fixed, but the number of enchanted cities is variable, it's unfair. Else the cost must change according to the number of cities. There are many other scaling issues that are less problematic with a computer, but when you want to abstract the game as a board game, everything breaks apart.

Lately I played Unciv which is a civ 5 clone for android and PC. I always found civilization to be very complex and overwhelming, this is why I preferred the simplified Civ revolution or simply MOM. Now in civ 5, one of the feature is that you can play the game as a single city civilization. The way the upgrades are made, the game can be played and win with a single city and have a chance to win. I think culture upgrade cost more when you have more cities and national buildings requires a certain building in all cities are requirement.

The fact that you handle only 1 city eliminate the scaling issues explained above and the fact that city management is very complex as a single tile can have worker, upgrades, resources, military units, etc. It creates a lot of elements that can be manipulated and changed. Which open more possibility of status changing abilities. Those abilities are generally instant effects that changes the status of a game. In board game, status is generally recorded with a resource track, a pawn position, a token flip, etc. In other word, if something physically moves on the board, the status has changed. Status changing abilities also rely more on math than text abilities which are easier to design for me (less subtle text variation).

All this reasoning gave me some ideas for possible board game implementations:

Game Ideas description

My source of inspirations will be:

Board game: Pocket civ, Fantasy Flight Civilization (with square tiles), 18XX

Video game: Civilization 5, Master of magic, Warlock 1&2

So my first idea was that the player could be only playing a city state, like if he is playing a single city civ game. It will have most of the features civ 5 have, and will be surrounded by 3 civilization that are willing to cooperate or eat up some territories. You could develop certain technologies to gain an edge over adjacent civ, but since you are not a large civilization, you would inherit from the other civ technologies and advance with them when the age progress. Victory would be more like a score from technological, cultural and economical contribution to the world.

It would of course be a solitaire game, as all the other ideas I will be listing in this thread. A 2 player rival civ could be possible where one of the 3 opposing civ is actually a real player you could interact with. But due to the length of the game, I am not sure it will be convenient to play at 2 player.

The I got another interesting idea where you play a historical nation with a predefined map like in 18XX (this is where 18XX is plugged). For example, one of the game could be a map of France with various resources and terrain of France, with England, Spain and Germany as opposing nations. Units, buildings, Wonders, Great People would all be selected according to the history of France. It requires more historical research, but could make each game similar yet unique like in 18XX.

Then I pushed further and I wondered if I could use mechanism from ideas above and actually make a MOM game. I think now I have enough details to make the game playable. I can have various races and enchantment. I can have heroes, wilderness to explore, etc. I wanted 1 on 1 unit battles for combat synergy for ability and stats Rock-Paper-Scissor, I can do it since CIV 5 is 1 unit per tile.

Now the big questions is can I have a large variety of spell. What I like to look at is the possibility space, in our case the status changing abilities. What can possibly be affected by a spell. If we just look at an hex tile, we could have:

• Terrain than can be replaced (if loose hex tile)
• Special resources (if not printed on the hex) that can be added, removed or upgraded.
• Various tile improvement that can be added, removed, changed, powered up, etc
• Population placement that can be moved, killed, captured, etc.
• Units that can be moved, killed, upgraded, and maybe a status ability token (ex: stun, weak, etc)
• Wilderness: Locations to explore, wilderness to push back

The hex tile can easily be crowded with a lot of tokens, but there will be never twice the same category of token (1 unit, 1 pop, 1 resource, 1 improvement per tile, etc).

So that gives me a lot of elements to play with for designing spells that will target hexes. I still have other things I can manipulate like city buildings and resources, and diplomatic relationship.

One thing that could be problematic is for spells that have negative effect. I will not be able to cast a Famine spell on an opposing civilization (unless it's a 2 player rival game) because that civ is not on the map. I can only make negative spells that could target for example enemies in my territory but I cannot zap units in opposing territories. So offensive behavior with spell will be more restrained.

That is something the the city state game idea does not have because you know you will not be the dominant civilization in the world. You are just there to contribute. Technologies are also self improvement of stuff you own rather than downgrade of stuff other have. Maybe I could twist my story around and be a kind of city state that will not conquer the world, but try to keep the world in balance, and if you get attacked, you need to self defend. You could be the guardian of something important and that is your main vocation (a council/guild of wizard, a powerful location, etc).

It should probably be wiser to first make the city state civilization game to get the system working. Then once I have a playable game, try to make a fantasy themed game.

So this is roughly the idea so far. If there is something that is unclear, just ask. If you see some complications let me know.

Do you think that could make MOM implementable, or I will still hit a wall somewhere else?