War may build up to a constant and never ending bore, but there’s something about city planning in Civilization VI that is oddly fascinating, and keeps me coming back time and time again.

Civilization VI came out during the October of 2016 and it was a really good game, at least I thought it was a really good game. The rest of the Civilization fanbase condemned it for being different to Civilization V, a game they’d dumped literally thousands of yours and years of their life into. Even now it’s still stuck on the lofty score of “Mixed” on Steam, although some of this may come from a recent scandal to do with some form of Spyware being implemented, I’m not sure. But I think it’s safe to say that every now and then everyone always gets that particular itch to play a game of Civilization and keep playing it until you’re late to work the following morning and you’ve managed to not sleep at all, did you even eat? No, probably not. Moving units is your food. Talking to Cleopatra is your water.

So despite all the negative feedback for Civilization VI, I find myself returning to it when that particular urge begins to creep into the back of your skull. Why not Civilization V? It’s a game that I’ve played a lot more of and have better understanding of its systems, as well as more Civs to play as. Or how about Civilization IV? It’s just better than all the others and it’s a hill I’ll happily die on. It’s all quite simple, really, and it’s because the district system in Civilization VI turns city building from a queue of builds to make into a board game like puzzle. Space inside your borders rapidly becomes a premium and on top of that, you need everything all at once and there’s just not enough time to build it, when you need it.

The district system in Civilization VI is relatively simple; in order to build science buildings you first need to build a campus (the science district) which takes up an entire hexagon within your borders, the same goes for cultural buildings, religious buildings, entertainment, army buildings and so on. One doesn’t simply decide to build a temple in their capital city, you’ll need an entire hexagon dedicated to religion, your “Holy Site”, to even begin thinking about constructing those pillars. So already the limited space your city takes up begins to make you think about what you need, when and where. Sure you could just place them all over the shop and wherever there’s a free spot, easy. But not quite.

Alongside just trying to find somewhere to place these things, there’s also the adjacency bonuses to take into account. Each type of district gets an inherent +1 in its output dependent on what surrounds it. Campuses get an extra science for each jungle tile that surrounds it, among others, holy sites enjoy mountains on its borders and commercial districts like being next to river tiles. Suddenly the placement of your districts demands your attention as you look at the adjacent bonuses you could be getting for specific areas you’re working on. Not to mention on how you may upgrade in the future as all those hill tiles may not have anything on them at the moment, but if you place your industrial district right in the middle of them all then any mines you build on them will turn it into a veritable gold mine of production (I don’t think gold mines actually exist in Civilization VI yet) and you’ll feel like a genius for working it out.

Although, all of this suggests that you even have the freedom of space to make these optimal placements. As previously mentioned there’s the difficulties of your limited border so when you get around to building your campus you may not have spread far enough to make ultimate benefit from those adjacency bonuses, or be too poor to buy the tiles you need. As I said in my review, building your city is all about compromise and trying to be as efficient as possible while the game constantly tries to limit your efficiency. As well as there being a limitation on how many districts you can build depending on your cities population. This can lead to instances where you’d really like to build a campus district to help go towards science, but you’re either on the verge of war and need to build that encampment, about to run out of money so need that commercial district or everyone’s having a terrible time so you should probably build that entertainment zone. All of it just screams of a tile placement board game and it’s brilliantly enrapturing as you have to plan for the future, but entirely react to the now, normally ruining all of your plans for the future.

Although, there are now two Civilization board games, Civilization and Civilization: A New Dawn ,but despite using this tile system of buildings, also manage to not quite work in every other area of the game.

If you thought that simply placing districts in good locations for adjacency bonuses was going to be a challenge, the inclusion of the wonders you can build adds a whole nother layer to this building puzzle. Much like districts, World Wonders take up a hexagon entirely unto themselves, except this time with no adjacency bonuses. However, they also tend to have a lot more conditions to building them, such as having to be built next to a campus district and also a mountain tile, or on flat lands next to a river. So now if you plan on building that wonder that appears much later in the game, you’ve got some thorough planning to deal with as now not only do you want that adjacency bonus you also need to make sure you’ve got the appropriate tiles around you to go and build those wonders you want. You no longer have a single city crammed full of every World Wonder you can get your clams on, like in Civilization V, and instead you have to decide if a particular wonder is actually useful for you and if you even have the space for it.

All of this builds up even more with the use of your builders who have a limited number of uses and are used for converting your limited number of hexes into farms, mines and wine plantations, so alongside building all of these districts and buildings, you’ve also got to find the time to get some builders on the go and decide on where there best place is to use their limited builds. Also probably build an army. Could you imagine the woe you’d experience if you were aiming for a science victory but didn’t have a free flat lands space to build the space center? So much woe.

The Civilization series is synonymous with the idea of “Just one more turn” and for some it’s the simple, but personally boring, act of moving your hoards of units across the map slowly taking over the world, one city at a time, but for me it comes from working out the puzzle of working out how to build my city. One moment having a fool proof plan, the next becoming the fool as that’s thrown out the window. In previous Civilization games the city building was a simple act of working out what to build next and adding it to the long build queue and forgetting about it. In Civilization VI it requires thought beyond build order and that of placement and the future and it’s honestly brilliant and the challenge of that puzzle is what brings me back to Civilization VI at least once a year before I get overwhelmed with the tedious repetitive nature of war and unit management.