#oneaday Day 717: Just One More Turn

I’ve been playing Civilization V. It’s now 3AM. The two facts may be somewhat related.

I’ve only been playing the Civ series since its fourth instalment, and while I’ve found it entertaining and fun, like many heavily strategic board games, I find it difficult to actually succeed at it. It’s a challenging series of games, for sure, and there are lots of things for you to focus on all at once — thankfully with the infinite time offered by turn-based games.

Civilization Revolution on consoles provided a different experience which I liked a whole lot. What we had in that game was a simplified (but not dumbed-down) Civ experience which could be played in relatively short sessions, and which was set up to encourage players to be at each others’ throats almost constantly.

And now we have Civ V. I know we’ve had Civ V for a while now, but I’ve only just started playing it thanks to a generous Christmas gift. (Thanks, Paul!) Civ V, for me, is resonating nicely, offering a pleasing middle ground somewhere between the simplicity of CivRev and the depth of Civ IV. It’s certainly a different beast from Civ IV, and those who have grown accustomed to the functions of the various buildings in IV will have to relearn everything for V. Thankfully, the game does a pretty good job of explaining what each building does, and offering enough suggestions to help you out without feeling like you’re being shunted down a specific path or letting the game “play itself”.

There seems to be a nice balance between number of players and game time, too. In Civ IV, I often found that playing a game with any more than two or three players total often meant it would stretch on into the “days long” territory, making it all the more disheartening when something went disastrously wrong in 850BC and you then spent the rest of the game playing catch-up, with no hope of winning. The game of Civ V I played tonight, however, went on for about three and a half hours. That’s not short by any means, but it’s certainly doable. A tabletop game of Arkham Horror takes three hours. And, of course, with Civ you can always save and come back to it later.

Except you can’t. Because there’s something in that game that means you can’t just leave it alone. Something deep within the coding that taps into the pleasure centres of your brain and wants you to keep playing — yes, for “just one more turn”. It’s difficult to pin down what it is — certainly it doesn’t resort to Skinner Box tricks like social games, but there’s definitely something in there giving it a particularly addictive quality. Perhaps it’s the fact that you have to come up with a long-term strategy and aim for a specific type of victory. (Cultural in the case of the game I just played, meaning my empire focused almost entirely on developing culture, and I spent the entire game hoping my neighbour to the North wouldn’t feel the need to attack me. Fortunately, he was more interested in subjugating the city-state of Singapore to pay too much attention to me.) Perhaps it’s the little countdowns showing how many turns until you complete that piece of research or build that cool building. Perhaps it’s the little mini-rewards — famous quotes when you research a tech, short movies when you build a Wonder. Or perhaps it’s just the satisfaction of seeing your empire grow and grow and grow and thinking “I made that.”

Whatever it is, I say simply DAMN YOU, SID MEIER.