Civ 5 Gods & Kings: The future of the past

While he was an undergraduate at Dartmouth, Beach was introduced to the game that would change his life: A Mighty Fortress.

Originally published in 1977, A Mighty Fortress is a board game that attempts to tackle a very small slice of history with the depth and precision of a doctoral thesis. The game covers the years 1532 to 1555, a 24-year period during which the the Ottoman Empire dominated much of Central Asia, the Holy Roman Empire began to crumble, Martin Luther reformed the Catholic Church, England's King Henry VIII went through wives like a pastry chef through butter and much of the world as we know it today began to take shape.

Players can play as England, France, The Catholic Church, The Lutherans, the Ottoman Empire or Charles V and must suss out their nations's unique strengths and weaknesses and alter their style of play accordingly. A massive exercise in asymmetrical gameplay, it is as much about diplomacy as it is about war.

The nuanced approach to history and complicated demands appealed to Beach's sensibilities. A self-professed strategy game enthusiast from the age of 10, Beach likes games where the action is not always straight forward combat, and the players are free to form secret alliances and negotiate their way to victory. Where the sides are uneven, and a player's ability to riser above the challenges can lead him to victory.

At Dartmouth, Beach always got stuck playing The Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, attempting to hold together his Empire against threats from all sides. It is the most powerful nation, militarily, but each of the other nations have objectives that pit them in direct opposition, making it a challenging nation to lead.

Beach's Italian exchange student friend was frequently cast as the Pope, who is tasked with holding the Catholic Church together in the face of Martin Luther's Protestant revolt. Whereas the Ottoman Empire, ceded to Beach's most aggressively playing friend, simply had to try and dominate all of Europe, picking up whatever territories other players left unattended.

While it convincingly captured the flavor of the Reformation era, one thing the Reformation had that A Mighty Fortress did not was an end. Although he played the game all through college, Beach never once finished it.

THE BOARD GAME FROM HIS COLLEGE YEARS HAUNTED HIM

In the middle of the last decade, Ed Beach was introduced to a card-driven strategy game called Napoleonic Wars. In his designer's mind, something clicked. The bulwark fell. The way to fix A Mighty Fortress had finally been revealed.

Here I Stand, Ed Beach's first card-based strategy game was released in 2006. It was A Mighty Fortress reborn. Streamlined. Made more interactive. And, most importantly, it was finish-able.

It was a critical and commercial success.

Here I Stand won multiple awards at online board game purveyor BoardGameGeek.com, Germany's Walter Luc Haas Award for historical simulations and the Charles S. Roberts Award for best pre-WW II board game. It was the board game equivalent of Game of the Year for 2006.

More importantly, it sold. A lot. Here I Stand was the first board game Beach had ever designed that required a second printing. With it, Beach had accomplished his goal of re-creating the epic, but flawed game that had captured his imagination as a young man.

"In doing the work on the expansion," says Beach, "we knew that we wanted to address a few people's concerns where, if you played Civ 4 with all of the expansions and all the corporations and espionage and everything else that was involved with Civ 4, it was a very deep game with lots of intricacies. Some of those diehard Civ 4 players were feeling likeCiv 5 just didn't have the same level of depth and intricacy. So we knew that we wanted to add some layers of complexity for Civ 5.

"So we ... dove off into the deep end of the religion side of things again."

Beach's goal: Make Civilization V play differently depending on the choices you make throughout the game.

Just like in A Mighty Fortress and Here I Stand, the players' choices will tailor their experience and alter the way the game plays out and how they must adapt to win. And unlike the religions in Civilization IV, religions in Gods & Kings will be unique and will allow players to affect the balance of power well into the later stages of the game.

"Historically a lot of religion is just the layering on of beliefs over places," says Beach. "Like when Christianity got to the new world and hit all of the native American cultures, there are weird interesting perversions of Christianity where Aztec gods are sort of reworked and recast into their new Christian equivalent, but a lot of those belief sets were still there at a fundamental level."

In spite of the similarities to world religions, however, Beach says the beliefs themselves have been purposefully homogenized. Civilization V religions are not meant to represent direct approximations of actual world religions. The game is not making a judgement call as to which world religions make for a better civilization. You will be allowed to create your own religion from scratch, whether it's Sid Meierism or Pastafarianism.