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Who's the more foolish? The fool or fool that plays after the fool?
United States
DURHAM
North Carolina
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Of all the print and play games around on BGG, Pocket Civ is arguably the best and certainly one of the most well-known. It is also very unforgiving and it takes a certain amount of masochism to persist with it, as it seems that just when you are getting somewhere, along comes an Epidemic or a marauding bunch of Atalanteans and suddenly you are struggling to survive, never mind advance.
As far as putting it together to play, the options range from the very basic to the deluxe. All you really need are the cards, the rules and pen and paper. There is a deluxe version to download that you can produce with tiles and chits to make - just before writing this I saw an offer to produce just such a set from the resident Print and Play maker Andrew Tullsen.
The deluxe set is very nice of course, but couldn't you get by as a lazy PnPer with just pen and paper? Well you could. But the nature of the game is such that a lot of things change and keeping track of that with multiple erasings/crossing out is a pain.
So I took a slightly different approach. The cards are easy enough, as I have discussed before. You can just print directly on card and cut them out carefully. You don't need to be perfect; this is a solo game. But reasonably neat will do. Or what I do is to print on paper, cut out roughly and slip that paper into a card sleeve reinforced with a spare CCG card.
The map is easy, as you can just draw the map you want on a sheet of letter paper, marking each numbered region and where the Frontier and Sea begin and end. The basic map doesn't change, though you can change it for each game. So if you liked that one, use it again and if not, you can just draw a new one.
There are a number of resources to keep track of in the game though: mountains, volcanoes, forests, farms, deserts, etc. Plus your tribes. Most of these can change with horrifying suddenness so it is far better for game play if you ise a token of some kind. The deluxe version uses chits that you print out but that really isn't necessary. My way is to use meeples for the tribes and colored cubes for almost everything else. Actually I found that the game Glen More had a perfect set of items: gray for stone, green for wood, yellow for desert, brown for farm - not to mention a good supply of meeples. But depending on what you have, you can raid your copy of Agricola and grab wood and stone from there, plus sheep or wheat for the farms. Just pick a system and use it.
A mid-game position from a game I played using the SE US as the basis for my map, showing most of the various components I used
For the more major occurences such as volcanoes and earthquakes, if I am using the map only once then I will add the fault line directly on the map - it is a permanent change. For the volcano I usually just use something like a 4-sided die. A red cube would work too.
For the Cities (a vital component) a simple 6-sided die works very well, with its current AV as the number on the die.
All of these factors combine to make playing Pocket Civ very simple, which means you can get on with trying to master it. Or at least get a better score than last time.
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