A Brief History Of The World

Customer Reviews

What Risk Could Wish It Was Review by Chris

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Many gamers out there know of the old version of this game, “History of the World” by Avalon Hill/Hasbro. This reincarnation essentially updates the game a bit to bring it into line with what most gamers like to play these days. Gone are the epic scale games that can six to eight hours to play. Most gamers are looking for something more accessible and can be played within 90 to 180 minutes tops. Enter the Ragnar Brothers edition of “A Brief History of the World”.

How the game plays is that in each epoch, every player will control a different historical civilization by drafting cards. Each player will also get a different even card each epoch which can represent anything from a minor civilization to things like famines and civil wars. Players can use their event cards during the current epoch or keep them for use later (unless it is a minor civilization, in which case it must be used that epoch or forfeited). Whoever is in last place drafts a civilization then it goes in order up to the first place player who gets the leftover, but the first place player gets to choose their event card first and goes in reverse order back down to whoever choose their civ first. These happen simultaneously so often you don't know for sure if your cards will mix well with each other or not.

The components of the game start with a beautiful board that unfolds once then has a tri fold board for six squares. The stock it is printed on is very high quality, so I expect this to last a very long time. The playing pieces that represent your armies come in six colours and are basically a bust on a pedestal (as seen on the front of the box illustration) and work very well in terms of marking your territories and determining whether your armies are active or in decline. There is also an assortment of tokens that represent capitols, cities, monuments, fleets and forts. These are all of decent quality and should withstand plenty of use. The cards themselves are fairly thin stock, but I would expect them to stand up to plenty of play since you don't have to handle them all that much throughout a game.

Once all the cards for that epoch have been chosen (in secret) then the actual turn begins with each player expanding and attacking with their empires until they run out of units. I like the fact that you can only ever have one unit in any territory at a time, which prevents the old Risk mechanism of building up these huge armies that no one wants to attack. It speeds up the game significantly and really represents who empires often stretch themselves out as far as they can and then wait for someone else to eat them up. You can also build forts to help defend your units later and depending on which territories you take over, monuments will also get built as the turns progress. Many of the civilizations have special abilities which gives them all more flavour and prevents the game from getting stale.

As for what has been changed from the original History of the World to this new shortened version, I have broken down the basics below. What the Ragnar Brothers have done is essentially scaled back most everything in the game, without reducing (in my mind anyway) the feeling of controlling vast empires flexing their muscles through:

1) The number of territories has been reduced..
2) The number of Epochs (turns) that the game lasts has been reduced by one.
3) The number of armies in play has been reduced.
4) The fiddly nature of having different looking units for each Epoch has been eliminated.

Instead of having a system where each era had different units to differentiate them all, in Brief History, players lay their old civ's units down as if they are in decline. This easily shows who controls which areas, without having to keep searching for the correct mini, which will certainly help shorten the set-up and take-down time of the game.

Also, with having less regions on the board, this allows players to use less armies each turn, thus speeding up the turns for everyone involved. I have rarely felt like I am sitting on the sidelines waiting for my turn in this new version as turns can be quite short (some civ's use only 5-6 armies while the largest has a max of 15), plus you are constantly watching the map as new powers start to take hold. I find this to be a welcome relief and the game easily plays within the 30 minutes per player guideline that the box states.

The Ragnar Brothers also introduced a new bonus mechanism for those of us who get pretty poor dice rolls on a regular basis. Each time you fail to invade a territory, you will get a +1 bonus to your next roll in that same territory. Additionally, for each point that you beat an opponents' roll by, you can overrun into their adjacent territories by using those points (one point for empty lands, two points in difficult terrain). These two additions mean that you tend to roll less dice on your turn and you don't get hammered as much if luck is not on your side that day. Both of these are welcome changes in my mind.
(Posted on 7/9/10)