We Built a Civilization Board Game Around Technology, Not Territory

When we first started thinking about building a civilization board game, sometime around 2018-19, one of the first questions we asked ourselves was this.

There were already so many civilization board games out there. Did we really need to make another one?

Civilization board games had been around for decades, and some great games had already explored the theme in many different ways. Building cities, developing economies, discovering technologies, constructing Wonders, expanding across maps and, of course, going to war.

So rather than starting with what we wanted to put into our game, we went back and thought about what we had enjoyed most in the civilization games we had played.

For me, a lot of it came down to the feeling of progress.

I have certainly enjoyed the conquest side of civilization games too. There is a particular satisfaction in reaching a point where you have a technologically superior army and can overwhelm an opponent who hasn’t kept up. But when I thought about the parts I enjoyed most, I kept coming back to building and advancing.

I played a lot of Civilization III, a turn-based game where you grow a civilization from a small settlement into an empire, one research and one building at a time. I used to scout a lot, more than most players would bother to, sending scouts out constantly looking for villages. Every village you found had a real chance of teaching you a technology on the spot. So the more I scouted, the faster I’d progress, often well ahead of everyone else on the map, human or AI. By the midgame I was usually the most scientifically advanced civilization on the map. Once you’re there, everything moves faster, buildings, production, Wonders, whatever you’re chasing next. And it kept feeding on itself, better cities meant more gold, more gold meant faster research, so the lead just kept growing. Looking back, that’s more or less what board games call engine building, each turn leaving you a little more capable than the last.

The more I thought about it, the more I realised that this engine-building part was what we wanted to spend more time on.

If engine building is the core, what should the main board be?

That led us to an idea that eventually became one of the foundations of INCEPTUM.

In many civilization games, the shared board is a map. Players expand across it, compete for territory and resources, and manage the position of their workers and armies.

We started wondering what would happen if the shared board in our game wasn’t a map at all.

What if it was the technology tree itself?

The technologies wouldn’t be a deck of cards waiting to be drawn. They wouldn’t appear randomly during the game or rotate through a market. The research possibilities would already be there in front of you, laid out with all their dependencies visible. You could see where your civilization was now, what was further ahead, and exactly what you would need to research to get there.

That changes the question. In a lot of other games, you don’t choose what’s next, it’s dealt to you or revealed as you play. So every turn just becomes ‘What did I get?’ However, in this game, since everything’s already laid out, the question isn’t about the next card anymore. Now it’s more of where do I want to end up, and why? And, perhaps more importantly: when should I pursue it?. In most cases, it’s because something is sitting there which is critical to my strategy, and I need to get that before anyone else does.

Those became very different questions once we started building the rest of the game around them.

A small example from the Technology Board

In the finished game, six advancements are open to you at the very start. Two of them look perfectly reasonable on your first turn.

‘Cutting Tools’ increases your per-turn production of Food and Wood, and it unlocks Stone. Until you research it, your civilization cannot produce or use Stone at all, which quietly closes off a large part of what you will eventually want to build.

‘Writing’ does something completely different. It grants you a Population Token. Every building in your city needs one assigned to it, and your two starting buildings, a Small Crop Field and a Lumberjack Hut, already have theirs. So until you research something that grants a new one, a third building is not something you can build, however many resources you have sitting in front of you.

Neither is the wrong choice. But whichever you take first shapes what your next few turns can look like.

And this is before you start thinking further ahead. ‘Mathematics’ needs ‘Writing’ first. ‘Currency’ needs both ‘Trade Routes’ and ‘Mathematics’. So if Currency is where you eventually want to be, that decision is already shaping what you research on turn one, several turns before you’ll actually use it.

You might want an advancement because of the production it gives you. Or because it unlocks a Building or a Wonder. Or simply because it is the route to something else that you really want. But it takes resources and time, so perhaps you don’t research it yet. Perhaps you build your economy first. Perhaps you take a longer route because the technologies along the way are more useful to the civilization you are building.

Or perhaps you intended to wait, and then another player starts moving towards the same opportunity, and you are no longer sure you can afford to.

That was the shift. The Technology Board stopped being a place where players just marked what they’d researched, and became the place where these decisions actually got made.

The path you take through the Technology Board will shape the city you are building in front of you, and this path will be unique to you.

That became the basic structure of INCEPTUM.

If the Technology Board is fully visible, where does the uncertainty come from?

There was an interesting consequence to putting the whole Technology Board in front of everyone.

We weren’t hiding what technologies may show up next. There was no deck, no random draw of cards. Everything was out there, all the time, for everyone to see.

But it isn’t just the board that’s visible. Your moves are too.

Every Research Action you take, every Building you put up, tells the rest of the table something about the strategy you’re pursuing. That reveals the key pieces you’re chasing to pull it off, a Wonder, a specific Government Extra Benefit. Anyone paying attention can see it coming.

And once they can see it, they can go after the same thing. Wonders are exclusive, only one civilization ever builds each one. Government Extra Benefits work the same way, once someone claims one, it’s gone for everybody else. So being predictable has a real cost. The clearer your plan, the easier you are to race, or to block outright.

That’s where the uncertainty actually comes from. Not from the board hiding anything, it hides nothing, but from whether the plan you can see all the way through is still there by the time you reach it.

A good part of why no two games feel the same also comes from what you start with, not just what you decide mid-game. There are different Civilizational Traits, different Humble Beginnings cards which ensure every game starts differently. That’s a big enough topic on its own, worth its own post. For now, the Technology Board is what we wanted to focus on.

That’s the game we wanted to build. You should be able to plan ahead and have it actually mean something, not just draw up a plan on turn one and watch it happen exactly like you drew it up. The other civilizations had to be able to mess with that.

Building the civilization became the game

Once the Technology Board became central, several other parts of INCEPTUM began falling into place.

Each player would have their own City Board. Research would give you access to Buildings, and constructing and upgrading those Buildings would increase what your civilization could produce in future rounds.

Population would grow and allow the city itself to expand. Wonders would be major achievements, but as exclusive ones. If another civilization built the Wonder you were working towards, you would have to rethink your plans.

Different starting conditions and Civilizational Traits could push players towards different approaches, so even though everyone was looking at the same Technology Board, they would not necessarily value the same technologies at the same time.

And gradually, the thing we had been looking for when we first asked whether the world needed another civilization game started becoming clearer to us.

We weren’t trying to recreate every part of running a civilization. We wanted to focus on the decisions involved in developing one.

What do I invest in now?

What am I building towards?

What am I willing to delay?

Which path through the Technology Board makes sense for the civilization I am building? And when another player threatens something I was planning for, do I stay the course or change direction?

Those questions eventually became much of what INCEPTUM is about today.

The game begins with civilizations that can do relatively little. Through research, construction and increasing production, they gradually become capable of much more. The decisions made early in that process continue to affect what becomes possible later.

There were still plenty of things we hadn’t worked out at this stage of the design. In fact, one of them would turn into a much bigger question than we expected.

Our early versions still had armies.

They still had Barracks.

And civilizations could still attack each other.

None of that made it into the final game. INCEPTUM has no combat. What happened in between came out of playtesting, and it’s probably a story for another post.