“It’s a cruel, cruel world!” is all my friend Max told his 22 year old son, Bennett, in preparation for his first game of Ancient Civilizations of the Inner Sea. Bennett soon discovered and showed us just how cruel it could be, as in just one short evening all manner of calamities befell our empires, from multiple and repeated barbarian invasions to cataclysmic earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and floods of Biblical proportions – not to mention the Bronze Age version of The Black Death.
Yet we three survived these travails and more – including wars and the game’s card enabled catastrophes which we vengefully inflicted upon each other (“see, it really IS a cruel world!” was the oft repeated refrain) – with Bennett’s Phoenicians vying with his father’s Mycenaeans and my Egyptians for primacy in Ancient Civilizations of the Inner Sea.
