Yours portly had a massive burst of productivity on a lazy, rainy Saturday early in November.  I buckled down and finished my lesson plans, quizzes, tests, study guides, exams, exam review guides, etc., for the rest of the semester.  I spent the following Sunday afternoon churning out blog posts, as I’m trying to get back ahead so I don’t have to worry about writing over Thanksgiving.

One upshot to all of that hustle is that I have a rare thing now:  free time in the evenings.  I’m always working a bit on something, and I have plenty of grading to keep me warm over Thanksgiving Break, but I’ve been slamming that stuff out, too.

That’s all to say that I’ve had way more time to play video games in the evenings, usually while watching horror movies.  The game that has dominated my time the past few weeks—and which has kept me up far too late on a number of occasions—is Civilization VI.

Longtime readers know how much I love Civ VI, and the Civilization series of games in general.  The first Civ game to hook me was Civilization II, one of the best installments in the series.  I remember playing it on my cousins’ computer at their home in Montmorenci, South Carolina, one summer day.  I think everyone else was outside in the pool, but I was navigating my ancient trireme around a map and dreaming of settling far-flung islands and continents.

It must have been that year that I received Civilization II for Christmas, from my Aunt Allison, my mom’s younger sister.  I still remember the elation at opening that gift, and holding the game aloft, shouting, “YES!” in the way that a pudgy tween would.  The game came with a veritable encyclopedia of a manual, and I spent the rest of Christmas Day just reading it.  I remember relatives remarking with astonishment that a video game had a manual that big.

I’ve been a Civaholic ever since.  Some installments have been great (Civs IV, V, and VI have all been awesome), others not so much (Civ III, but even it holds a special place in my heart), and there have been some mediocre spin-offs, but I’ve played them all (I even purchased CivNet, the version of the original Civilization that supported multiplayer functionality, on a band trip in high school)—for dozens of hours on end.

I can safely say, though, that I’ve dropped the most hours into Civilization VI, and especially over the last few weeks.

My routine has been as follows:  get home, have dinner, walk Murphy, knock out any chores around the house, then fire up Civ VI around 7 or 8 PM.  If I’m responsible I’ll knock off around 9:30 or 10 PM; if not, I’ll wrap up around 11 PM (for reference, I wake up around 6:30 AM, and I like to be in bed by 10 PM, sometimes 9:30 PM).  In the early game, which is probably the most fun section of any Civilization game, I can play 100 turns in a couple of hours, and settle in for a good night’s sleep.  In the later game, which has always been where Civilization games drag a bit, it can take five or even ten minutes for a turn (including processing time between turns, as the CPU is crunching massive amounts of calculations at that point in the game), so a two-hour session might only work out to twenty-five turns.

I recently completed a game as Tomyris of Scythia on the Huge Earth True Start Location map.  That plopped me into the middle of Central Asia, with plenty of room for expansion, as my nearest neighbors were Georgia (the country) and Mongolia.  I wanted the challenge of playing landlocked, as I typically favor island-based or maritime nations, or at least like to play close to the coast.

Tomyris is designed to be an early game expansionist, with boosts in the Ancient Era to light cavalry and horse archers.  But I find that I tend to play similarly every time I play Civ (strong economy, religious expansion, weak military in the early game; catch up on science and military growth in the mid-to-late game), and I ended up not making too many unique choices with Scythia.

What was different is that I won a Diplomatic Victory as one of the civilizations and leaders who is supposed to be played in a Domination style (conquer neighbors and their capitals).  Had I not pulled out the Diplomatic Victory, I was on track to convert the entire world to my nation’s religion (Catholicism this time; Sweden snagged Protestantism).

I was thankful for the Diplomatic Victory, though, because China was on-track to win a Scientific Victory, and I had a long religious war ahead of me to convert the Sikhist Incan Empire to The One True Faith.  I had a chance at a Cultural Victory—how I usually win—but that was dicey, too.  My score was certainly the highest, so I could have won by score when the turns expired, but, again, China or another civilization were likely to win a Scientific Victory first.

Part of the fun is all of the strange ways a civilization can evolve and expand.  While the core of my empire spanned roughly from Eastern Europe and Russia through to the Himalayan Mountains and the Gobi Desert, I also controlled the British Isles, Iceland, Greenland, and parts of North America.  I essentially had two empires:  the core Central Asian empire, and the peripheral “Atlantic Rim” empire.  Imagine Scythians lounging along the Potomac and the Thames, and you’ll get the idea.

I reached the point with that game, though, where I was just grinding to the finish line.  The game bogs down heavily in the late game, both because of the aforementioned CPU crunching and due to the sheer number of units, production orders, and other decisions the player has to make each turn.  I had a massive, sprawling empire, spanning three continents, some with conflicts taking place on them, so I had quite a few decisions to make each turn.  That makes it fun, but it also slows down the game considerably.

The question I now face is thus:  do I fire up another game tonight?

I’m thinking yes.