This game was recommended as a version of Civ Lite, while certainly fits the bill, I think it misses on one aspect...the epicness. You have the feel of building a civilization especially as you get the hero and wonder cards but it doesn't have the epicness that building a civillizaiton should have.

Anyways, the game is pretty simple. You are representing one of the major powers of the Ancient Age - Rome, Carthage, Egypt, Babylon or Greece. Rome has an advantage in that it can build legions cheaply. Carthage has the advantage of getting bonuses to its legions. Greece can build ships cheaply and have an advantage on the seas. Babylon can annex a territory for free. Egypt can turn a resource card into any other resource card.

The turns have three actions - gather and trade resources, build and military stuff.

First you gather your resources based on your caravans, markets, cities and temples. Caravans let you get resources that they are place on. Markets double resources in that territory. Cities allow you to gather taxes, temples double that in that territory. For trading, there is a market director (he's the person with the most caravans and markets). He states a number of cards to be traded and then everyone puts that number face down in front of them. The cards are flipped and the marketing director picks a card. That person then gets to pick another card and so on. You can only trade twice in a row with a person. The object is to either get sets of resources or groups of taxes.

After trading, there is building. The commerce director determines the order. To build you need a certain number of resources to build stuff. You can also build wonders or heroes if you have enough resources. There is a limited number of things that you can build. You must use all your resources or you discard them (except for two taxes).

The last phase is the military. You can go to war. This isn't too bad as long as you don't go after the capital province because you can't actually take that over. Also, I'm not sure if we misunderstood the rules, but it sounds like if you have an army occupying an entity but don't actually control the territory, both players get resources for that territory.

The winner is the first player that gets 4 wonders or heros (or combination?) or builds the Pyramids. This is probably my biggest complaint about the game. It seems that just as everything is rolling, someone is about to win and there's no much you can do about it.

There is enough here to call it Civ Lite but it doesn't have that epic feel to it. The Wonders are nice but there's not enough variation to give different feelings to the civilizations. Some of the civilizations seem unbalancing, but not overly so. While this game can be played with 3 players, it seems that there is the problem of two players going to war and the third ends up winning.