History Of The World Game

A Practical Guide to Playing History Of The World

I bought the board the day it came out. Played it three times and then forgot about it for a decade. Came back last year because someone at the table needed a filler game that wasn't another round of Settlers. It sat there and actually held up. The game is a strategy board game where players guide civilizations through different historical eras — the Ancient Era, the Dark Ages, the Medieval Period, and so on — gaining dominance points along the way. It's not complicated, but it has enough moving parts that a fresh player will fumble through the first session without really understanding why they keep losing. The core loop runs like this. Each era has a set of objectives that give you dominance points when you meet them. Those objectives change as the eras progress. The early ones are simple — control a certain number of territories, have a minimum number of armies on the board. The later objectives get nastier, and the ones that actually matter are hidden from you until the end of each era. That hidden objective system is the thing most people miss when they start playing. You're not just playing for what's in front of you. You're bluffing about what's behind it. Area control is the main engine. You place and move armies across a world map. Combat is resolved by rolling dice, and the dice favor the attacker up to a point, then the defender gains the advantage past that threshold. It's not as swingy as Risk, which is the comparison most people make, but it's close enough that if you play it like Risk you will lose consistently. The difference is that History Of The World has cards — you draft a hand each era, and those cards give you abilities that can shift the board state dramatically. Some cards let you reinforce, some let you attack with bonuses, and a few can ruin someone else's entire turn if you time them right.

Here's the thing nobody tells you about card management. Most players hold onto their best cards until they see an opening. That's a mistake. In my experience, playing a strong card early in the era to secure an objective is usually more valuable than saving it for a combat situation that may never come. I learned that the hard way in a three-player game back in 2019 when I was hoarding a "General" card for four straight turns. Ended up winning the era with zero cards in hand and twelve points fewer than I would have had if I'd just used it on turn two to push into a undefended region. The card didn't create the opportunity. It recognized one. The drafting phase is where the game separates itself from simple area control games. You don't get to pick whatever card you want. You draft from a shared pool in a snake draft pattern, which means the first picker gets the best card but also sets the tone for what everyone else has available. Snake drafting feels fair on paper. In practice it creates a lot of interesting pressure because you can sometimes pass on a good card knowing the next person will take it and you'll get a second bite later in the round. Era transitions are where most games are won or lost. At the end of each era, you score the visible objectives and collect dominance points. The player with the most points at the end of the final era wins. That sounds straightforward until you realize that each era gives you a different number of objectives and a different point distribution. The Ancient Era might hand out points for controlling territory. The Industrial Era might reward you for having trade routes and industrial capacity. You need to be reading the board across multiple eras simultaneously, not just playing each one in isolation.

I ran into a specific problem once that took me a while to solve. We were playing with four people, and the game dragged on forever because every era took about forty-five minutes. The bottleneck was card drafting. With four players and a twelve-card deck, each round of the snake draft involved a lot of decision paralysis. People would stare at three decent cards and agonize over which one to take. My workaround was simple — we agreed that during drafting, you get thirty seconds per pick. Not a rule from the game, just a house rule we made, but it changed the whole pacing. The game went from a three-hour slog to about two hours, and the decisions got sharper instead of worse because you were forced to go with your gut. Another common pitfall is ignoring the diplomacy angle. This isn't a game where you can just steamroll everyone. The object cards and the hidden objectives create natural alliances and tensions. If someone is ahead on the board, the other players will naturally coordinate against them without any formal agreement. The smart move is often to stay just behind the leader, let them absorb the aggression, and then sweep in during the next era when the board resets somewhat. I've seen good players win by deliberately losing an era to conserve resources for the next one. It feels counterintuitive but it's mathematically sound if you're tracking the point totals correctly. The game does have weaknesses. With two players it becomes much more volatile because there's no third party to distract your opponent. The hidden objective system, which is supposed to add tension, can actually reduce it because players tend to play optimally anyway and the hidden cards don't change much about how you approach the board. And the component quality from the original Days of Wonder print is adequate but not outstanding — the cards wear out faster than you'd expect if you play this regularly.

If you're looking to get it, it's available through most major board game retailers and on secondary markets like eBay where older copies sometimes go for less than retail. The 2005 edition is the standard one, though there have been reprints and possibly a deluxe version in later years. Check the component list before buying secondhand because the era cards and object cards are the parts most likely to get separated or lost over time. For people who want something more thematic, Twilight Struggle covers a similar ground with more narrative depth but a steeper learning curve. For something lighter and faster, just play the base game of Risk and call it a day. History Of The World sits in that middle ground — not deep enough to be a serious wargame, not light enough to be pure filler. That's also why it works as a gateway into heavier Euro games. You learn area control, resource management, and indirect competition without needing a manual thick enough to strap to your arm. The real lesson from years of playing this is that you don't need to be the strongest military power to win. You need to be the most efficient point collector, and efficiency means using your cards when they matter, not when they feel good. The board will punish anyone who treats it like a combat simulator. Play the objectives, not the armies.