Stats:
No. of players: 2-4
Amount of time to play: 180-240 min
Age requirements: 14+
Set-up time: 5-10 min

Clash of Cultures Monumental Edition is a reissue of a 2012 board game. You must advance and expand your ancient civilization in order to score more victory points than your opponents. This 4X civ-building board game is epic and includes an expansion that adds a lot of replay value.

Clash of Cultures Monumental Edition Rules Description:

Clash of Cultures is a 4x civilization building game. This Monumental Edition includes the Civilizations expansion. To win you must learn new technologies, expand your empire, and meet your objectives to score VPs. You start the game with one settlement, one settler, one action card and one objective card.

The game takes place over six ages made up of three rounds. Each round players get one turn that consists of taking three actions. Then there is a status phase and the next round begins.

The actions you can take are:

Advance – You must spend two ideas or food (in any combination) to learn new technologies. Some advances have prerequisites that are noted on your player board. Every three advancements by a player triggers events to occur. These events might be good or bad and might spawn or move barbarians on the board.

Found City – You remove your settler from its land hex and replace it with a city. You cannot do this on a hex that has enemy units, barren, or already contains a city. You cannot have more cities than the size of your largest city.

Activate a City – When you activate a city you can collect resources, construct a building in that city, or recruit units there. You collect resources based on the terrain of the hexes around the city. There are several different buildings you may construct, they have advancement requirements, and require one food, one, stone, and one wood. Certain advancements also allow you to draw and later use this action to build a Wonder. You recruit units based on the city’s size. They cost different resources based on which units you recruit. Cities have an attitude, good, neutral or angry. These three sub-actions are adjusted based on your cities attitude. If you activate the same city more than once on your turn its attitude declines one step and angry cities can only be activated once per turn.

Move Units – You may move up to three of your units (or groups of units) one hex. This movement might result in exploring new tiles or battles. Ships move to any hex in their current sea or around the outside of the board clockwise or counter-clockwise to the next sea with the Navigation advancement. Ships may carry two ground units.

Increase Happiness – You can spend happiness tokens to increase the attitude of any cities, It costs one token per size of the city to increase it by one step.

Influence Culture – This action allows you to take over buildings in other player’s cities. You must have a city with a range that gets to the opponent’s city’s hex. Your city’s range is based on its size. Then you must roll a five or six which may be augmented by spending culture tokens after you roll. If successful, you replace the building with one of your color in the target city. Nothing changes regarding the building’s status in relation to its owner, except that you will get the point for owning it at the end of the game.

Combat is resolved with a mix of cards and dice. Moving into space that contains an enemy immediately initiates combat. Both players may select an action card to play, first the attacker then the defender. The cards will grant you a bonus in combat. You roll 12-sided dice with two results for one through six and each face also shows an icon. The number of dice you roll is based on your number of units in the fight and any bonus dice granted by action cards. The result plus any clash or other bonuses is divided by five which equals the number of hits you inflict. Clash bonuses are gained by rolling an icon that matches one of your units in the battle. After hit units are removed the attacker may choose to retreat or stay and fight until one side’s army units are eliminated.

Between each round in the status phase, you get to complete objectives, gain a free advancement, draw an objective and action card, change your system of government and determine the first player for the next round.

The game ends after six rounds or if a player is eliminated. You score a point for each settlement and building you own, a half point for each advancement, two points for each objective card completed plus points for your Wonders and from events. The player with the highest total wins.

Quick Review of Clash of Cultures Monumental Edition:

Clash of Cultures came out in 2012 and later a Civilizations expansion was released. This Monumental Edition contains the expansion and some refinements of the original board game. It is not just monumental. It is epic. This intricate civilization building game is long, but fun and unique with each play.

This game looks great on the table. I have heard some people say the map tiles are bland but I think they are functional and the game has really nice components. This includes the miniatures cards and overall design. Some of the miniatures might need some hot water to get their weapons aligned, but that is not too hard. The rulebook is easy to read through and provides examples for specific rules. A couple times I had to search for particular items and this took time, but the rules are solid.

The included expansion really elevates the value of this edition. The leaders and civilization specific advances really add some depth and replay value to the game. The expansion also adds unique army units and their clash abilities help to add more interest and options to combat. In fact, unless you are playing for the first time and have not played similar board games, I would always play with the expansion.

This game has all the things you’d expect from a 4X civ-building board game. The random barbarians showing up, the tech tree that you can use to hone your strategy, diplomacy and combat with friends and more… All these items are present in relatively simple mechanics and the game flows well. Clash of Cultures does an excellent job imitating Sid Meir’s Civilization video games.

While not an overly complicated board game, some rules are easy to forget. Especially as it pertains to movement and we spent a lot of time referencing the movement rules during our first game. You can also miss advancement interactions as you learn combinations. You are less likely to miss these things the more you play, but early on you are likely to miss a thing or two.

If you own the original and its expansion, I am not sure it is worth picking up the Monumental Edition. But if you just own the base game I think the expansion and refinements are worth it. If you are interested in the changes from the original edition read this BGG thread.

Clash of Cultures Monumental Edition is definitely one of my favorite civilization building board games. Be aware it is long, but it has great replay value, and engaging mechanics. If you are looking for a fun 4X game, pick this up.

Score and synopsis: (Click here for an explanation of these review categories.)
Strategy 5 out of 6
Luck 4 out of 6
Player Interaction 5 of 6
Replay Value 5 out of 6
Complexity 4 out of 6
Fun 5 out of 6
Overall 5 out of 6