Brain Dewitt showed up with The History Of The World (HW), a boxed game published, I think, by Avalon Hill. The first game was quite interesting, and the second game remained interesting, but the second game was one too many. I sat it out, an observer of the three and a half hour epic, not even desiring to participate. Nor do I want to even observe a third presentation. This in itself is interesting, because HW is "my kind of game"... a "game game", an area game, a map of the world, lots of army tokens, and lots of combat. The publisher's staff did an extraordinary amount of historical research in terms of the ebb and flow of word cultures. Each of the seven turns concerns an "epoch", during which certain cultures, i.e., civilizations, rise to the fore, and occupy as many territories as possible. Each of the seven turns lists seven civilizations, and each player, each turn, is given, at random, a civilization encompassing so many strength points, i.e., armies, which he can set down to conquer territory. The entire time span of the game covers, in these seven epochs, the period between about 750 BC to 1914 AD. For each turn - 'epoch' - each player receives a card on which is annotated seven civilizations pertinent to that time period, their strengths, the area in which they'll start out, and the order in which they'll make their appearance that turn. The process of dealing the cards seems to be the most exciting event of the turn... no one knows who's going to get the Romans, with their 25 points during one of the early epochs, or the dreaded Inca-Aztec civilization, replete with a total of 4 points, sometime later, or in the last epoch, the British with a total of 20 points to build their colonial empire. There are procedures for passing out the cards, rejecting them so as to give a really rotten card - in terms of strength points - to the winning player with the intent of slowing him down... and this, as I say, is the highlight of each turn. The rest, one might say, is history. Six players (there are provisions for seven) took about 3h hours to finish a game, a slightly faster game than indicated in the rule book. For each player, the book states, add 45 minutes to the game. I think the book cautions you that the game can't be played with less than 3 or 4 players, hence the minimum game should take around 2 1/2 hours. I'm still not sure why the game took on such a negative cast for me, but part of it, I think, is the 'waiting time'. Since the turns are sequential, with each player going through his routines before the next player commences, there's a lot of waiting going on during each epoch. Using the 3h hour figure (210 minutes) I gave above for six players, we come up with the following: a. There are a total of 7 turns (epochs) in the game, so each turn takes up 210/7, or 30 minutes. b. There were six players in the game so each player, during each of the 30 minute turns, has 30/6, or 5 minutes of activity. The remaining 25 minutes is 'twiddle your fingers' time. c. During the entire game, all 7 turns, all 210 minutes worth, each player thus has 5x7, or 35 total minutes of activity out of 210 minutes. It's really not as bad as I've pictured above... for the active player, in setting out his tokens on the field, may have to do combat with tokens already in place, so there's a wee bit of combat die rolling which may engage one or more of the other waiting players. But, in the main, be prepared to wait... No Strategy There seemed to be no strategy to the game, except that of grabbing as many territories as possible with your assigned points when your turn came. There was no planning for the future, for you could be certain that, later in the game, other civilizations would overrun anything you'd previously set up. On the field there were, perhaps, 2 or 3 sites which, once occupied, could last for several turns. All the rest were transient. On your part of the turn, in placing your tokens, you could build a fort (giving you a +1 defensive factor), or build a monument to your civilization (which later civilizations would surely capture). Or you could play an "event card", which would bring temporary grief to a selected player's set-up... you could inflict plague on him, or rebellion, or get an extra combat die. etc. The map seemed to be the usual 17-inch by 22-inch size... it wasn't that crowded, but it could be bigger. Usually, when presented with what seems to be an interesting board game plagued with a too-small board, I'm willing to expand the field to ping-pong table size, redrawing the entire map. Not so in this case. If pressed, I'd give HW a 6 in the scale of 10. If pressed further, it might go down to 5. Don't ask why, it's just the beast within me. Back to PW Review September 1994 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1994 Wally Simon This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com