Players controlled different real-life civilisations around the Mediterranean Sea, each with a unique starting position. Unlike Meier’s later namesake, which would span from before the Bronze Age to the planet colonisation of the future, Tresham’s game opened with the emergence of early farmers in 8,000 BC (approximately the start of recorded human history) and closed as Rome rose to prominence in 250 BC. The result was Civilization, a board game that retold eight millennia of human development in culture, technology, politics and economics in half-a-dozen hours - if you were playing relatively quickly, that is.Ĭivilization was first released in 1980, 11 years before Sid Meier's computer game. Tresham combined his fascination with human history as the theme for a board game with his drive to offer players a unique gameplay experience. (By coincidence, Avalon Hill developer Bruce Campbell Shelly would create 1829 successor 1830: The Game of Railroads and Robber Barons for the board game company, before joining Meier to co-design computer games including the 18xx-inspired Railroad Tycoon and Meier’s Civilization.) 1829 would go on to spawn an entire genre of tabletop games combining management of railroad companies with stock trading, known as 18xx in recognition of Tresham’s seminal design. The designer was no stranger to innovative tabletop experiences, having previously created the hardcore train game 1829 in the early 1970s. Players exchange resources - and calamities - during a hectic timed trading round. Calhamer’s infamous friendship-breaking simulation of European conflict, Tresham opted to create a game where players strove to achieve victory through cultural and technological progression, rather than direct warfare. Tresham was also inspired by his time playing strategy classic Risk and 1950s wargame Diplomacy - the game of alliance, betrayal and domination advertised as being the favourite board game of US politicians John F. While Meier has become synonymous with Civilization and the mixture of dense gameplay and historical theming it represents, his original Civilization and its predecessors owe a significant debt to a lesser-known board game of the same name released by a largely overlooked British inventor over a decade earlier.Ĭivilization was designed by former RAF radio instructor Francis Tresham, who first mused over the idea of a board game that would trace the length and breadth of human history while browsing a historical atlas in his Welsh station’s library. Over 40 million copies of the six numbered mainline entries and their spin-offs have been shipped as of 2017, with countless other video and board games taking inspiration from Civ’s combination of time-vanishing turn-based strategy, remixing of historical events and pioneering of the ‘4X’ genre - in which players explore, expand, exploit and exterminate.
Since Sid Meier’s Civilization was first released 30 years ago, the titular series of computer games bearing their creator’s name has become one of the most widely recognisable and influential strategy franchises of all time. What Madden is to (American) football, Tolkien is to fantasy or Hoover is to vacuum cleaners, Meier has become to playable recreations of humanity’s progression from inventing the wheel to venturing into the stars. For gamers of both the paper and pixel variety, it’s hard to think of Civilization without the name Sid Meier attached.