Game setup

Greatly reduced initial luck to avoid excessive differences among players.

Civilizations

It is now possibile to choose a civilization type and obtain relative bonuses during the whole play session. There are 7 civilization types available: militaristic, expansionist, seafarer, religious, industrial, commercial and scientific.

Governments

Every player can choose to adopt a government type for his civilization at any time accepting pros and cons. This variant makes the boardgame more closer to the original PC game.

Governments include: despotism, monarchy, republic, democracy, fascism, fundamentalism and communism.

Strategy cards

These cards are mini objectives that, if completed, reward players with a lot of different prizes like gold, units, special bonuses and more.

War and rewards

You can land and bombard with fleets and retreat with any unit. War is now more complex and strategically more interesting. If you win or just join a battle you get experience points that can be used later to get interesting prizes: a good reason to go to war.
Even settlers can be captured!

Roads, railroads, docks and airports

It is now possible to build roads and upgrade it to railroads. Roads and railroads are used to speed up movements and commerce. A road represent also a dock and a railroad represent also an airport used to build fleets and airplanes.

Resources

Gems and Wine are not the only worth having resources. Others resources have also special bonuses, depending on the Era.

Prospection & Terraforming

You can now prospect empty regions to have a second chance to discover something.
With terraforming you can even improve deserts, forests and mountains.

Barbarians & Civil war

When you discover a Minor Civilization you can encounter hostile barbarians: they will act as a thinking player by using artificial intelligence rules.
During the early eras you can experience a civil war in your unhappy settlements.

Revolts

In unhappy cities you can experience revolts if you have a certain type of government, civilization, or military absence.

Revolutions

With some governments if you have more unhappy cities than happy ones your civilization will automatically engage a revolution.

Events

At each turn it can happen a good or bad event for any region or player. Among bad events there are natural disasters like volcanoes, hurricanes, plagues, etc. Depending on the intensity roll the natural event can be light or devastating. Certain type of events can subvert the game flow.

Intelligence

Spies are now part of the game set. You can try to accomplish tricky missions to damage your opponents or as a support for war.

Obsolescence

City improvements do not cease to be useful after changing Era. Previous Era improvements have half value; you need two of them to make a city happy or productive. Improvements older that 2 Eras have to be considered obsolete and therefore eliminated.

Military units will never get obsolete.

Capital

Every player owns a Capital. This city is important for commerce, intelligence activity and other aspects.

Cultural influence

It is now possible to assimilate cities. If you are culturally advanced you can assimilate a city just being close to it and bigger. No military units are strictly necessary to get the job done.

Commerce

Commerce phase has been deeply revised to make trading more realistic and not feasible at every time and place.

Unit upgrades

In addition to sell old units you can upgrade it, saving gold: restrictions apply.
Timed phases
Slow phases may be shortened using an hourglass: push on players who think about doing their moves just in their turn while in the rest of the game they are thinking to something else.

Fast startup

Some rules have been slightly modified to make the Ancient and Medieval Era shorter to play.
Spend most your playing time in last two Eras that are strategically more interesting.

Luxury and waste

Who earns a lot of gold is proportionally penalized with waste and luxury. This limitation helps other players to have a chance to gain some "positions" compared to rich civilizations that are earning more and more and are theoretically unreachable.

Nuclear weapons

After Fission discover who owns Rare Metals can build nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons can't miss a target having devastating effects.

Players can left the game

A player can quit the game session at every time leaving the others the decision to stop the entire game or not. This rule avoids boring game saving or to stop the entire game session.

Game save

In the v3.x ABaKUS there is a sheet to save the boardgame if you have to stop it prematurely or you have just expired your playing time. You can continue to play the same game session in a different day.

Player replacement

Instead of leaving the game session and let others cannibalize every city/resource you have, a new player can replace the leaving one.