Path of Civilization Components Overview and First Impressions

Civilization Games can be a lot of fun, and when you think of a few popular ones you might be thinking of card heavy games like 7 Wonders or miniatures heavy games like Tapestry. Path of Civilization gives me 7 Wonders vibes in ways I’m not sure I can really describe, but does it match that game’s components (which are quite good!)? Let’s take a look.

One of my pet peeves for playing a brand new board game is when it takes too long to prepare the game before it can even be played. I’m fine punching some stuff out of punchboards, and sorting cards, but once I’m required to do much more than that, my desire to play the game severely diminishes.

If this wasn’t a review copy sent over by Asmodee Canada, I might have tossed in the towel and added this to the shelf for another day. It takes a long time to prepare this game to play, including sorting cards, adding stickers to trays and meeples, and a ton of punchboards. Without a great insert, even sorting everything – either the first time or after playing – is also a chore.

So let’s get going with the bad. The game comes with trays that will hold decks of cards that can be purchased during the game, and I actually love these trays. They will all stack together and have an included lid to keep everything neat and compact, but there is one downside.

You need to apply stickers to the trays – 5 of them in total – and lots of them. Each tray requires 10 stickers, times 5 trays, 50 stickers. And putting them on isn’t easy. These are long and narrow, so making sure they are centred on the tray and not too crooked took some work, and it was down right annoying.

Be prepared for this, because unless you are purchasing this second hand, this is something you’ll need to do (the game does depend on the stickers)!

After the annoyance of stickering so much stuff, everything else in Path of Civilization is very good. Lots of great wooden components are included, although I think the resource tracker cylinders are a bit tall and become a bit clumsy during play. The small wooden cubes aren’t anything interesting, but are serviceable for what they are. They sure beat cardboard tokens, so while they aren’t outstanding, they are good!

The card quality is also pretty good. It’s not the best I’ve ever seen, but since you aren’t shuffling these cards, I’m not sure the best possible quality is necessary in this situation. It helps keep the cost of the game down, which is important for something like this I think.

The little trays you will be tossing cubes into throughout the game are ‘dual layered’ so there is a nice indent for the cubes to lay in. That means if someone needs to shift one of the trays for whatever reason, the cubes on the tray will stay within the confines of the edges. It’s just nice to see this as opposed ot a flat cardboard tile, which would have been more than acceptable.

Overall, the component quality in Path of Civilization is pretty good. While it would have been nice to see some deluxe version of this game offered, I’m sure someone will eventually release deluxe components for this. Everything here is wood, however, and very few cardboard tokens are used. This is a bit deal for many players, and helps set Path of Civilization apart from other civilization building games.